McLaren: The Drive For Perfection

Collecting a new sports car should be a moment to savour. You should drive away feeling

invincible and without a care in the world. You shouldn’t feel a sense of trepidation.

The problem is, I’m collecting a £267,900 McLaren 750S Spider from in front of the main doors of the luxury automotive manufacturer’s glass-fronted headquarters. It’s lunchtime on an otherwise quiet weekday and I need to drive away in full view of the entire workforce, navigating my way around the artificial lake containing 50,000m of water that skirts the imposing McLaren Technology Centre (MTC).

My anxiety is warranted. I’m fresh from a tour of this incredible facility in Woking (Surrey, UK), which includes getting up close and personal with the original McLaren F1 road car from the 1990s. Only 100 were ever made and not all have survived. Mr Bean star Rowan Atkinson famously crashed his twice, reportedly having to pay the world’s highest insurance premium as a result. I’m told the model at McLaren HQ is insured for eight figures.

Perfection Over Productivity

McLaren is a brand on the rise. Its Formula 1 team, also based in this building, has just won the Constructors’ Championship for the first time since 1998 and McLaren Automotive – solely concerned with road-going cars – recently unveiled a £2m hyper-hybrid supercar called the W1. They won’t let me drive that one.

It hasn’t always been this way. Years in the Formula 1 wilderness, coupled with some well-documented quality issues on its road cars, meant the McLaren name wasn’t exactly in the mud but it certainly had some pain points to address. When the incoming new CEO, Michael Leiters, admitted “quality must be improved”, you know there was work to be done.

Leiters moved to McLaren from Ferrari, where he was Chief Technology Officer, and his arrival in the summer of 2022 came with a remit to make better-quality cars than Ferrari or Lamborghini in five years. Less than three years into his tenure, things are looking positive.

So how have they done it? By building fewer cars, of course. Instead of chasing productivity and profits, McLaren technicians are spending longer hand-building each one to make sure it’s perfect. Robots are used to apply the multiple layers of paintwork; nothing else.

“As CEO, Michael Leiters has sought to create a culture of engineering excellence, prioritising quality and precision while enshrining McLaren’s authentic racing spirit in our product DNA,” Jamie Corstorphine, McLaren’s Global Director of Product Strategy, tells Cloud. “The McLaren W1 is the perfect embodiment of the world championship-winning mindset that fuels our culture, as well as the unique technology and experience transfer between our racing and supercar divisions.

“In short, the W1 is a supercar that only McLaren could produce. We have learned an incredible amount of valuable information through the development process and, of course, some of that will eventually find its way into other models.”

A Space Age Workplace

The MTC is a facility that deserves to be turning out world-class supercars. Designed by renowned architect Sir Norman Foster, if it looks like something out of a sci-fi series, that’s because it is – it recently doubled as a spaceport in Star Wars TV series Andor and scenes for the second series have reportedly been shot there too.

My behind-the-scenes tour takes in McLaren’s illustrious Formula 1 history, from founder Bruce McLaren’s pioneering use of carbon fibre in 1981 to his reason for choosing papaya orange as its signature colour. Apparently, he decided it looked brighter in the black-and-white TV coverage of the 1960s during McLaren’s formative years.

There are parts of the MTC where you can’t take pictures because R&D is a closely guarded secret, but it’s an experience you can enjoy if you’ve recently committed to buying a brand-new McLaren. That includes a tour of the production line, where I’m told one fortuitous American customer arrived to find the car he’d bought about to touch ground for the first time – something that has never happened before. The man in question is said to have described it as the happiest day of his life… much to the chagrin of his wife, who had recently given birth to their child.

Formula 1-Beating Innovation

With apologies to the gentleman’s significant other, his excitement is somewhat warranted. You can go frighteningly fast with a McLaren but, on the other hand, they’re easier to live with now. The 750S Spider can be driven every day in ‘Comfort’ mode and comes with a handy button on the dashboard for raising its nose to navigate speed bumps.

That said, the 750S Spider, which spits out 740bhp from its 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8, does have some way to go to match the 1,258bhp hybrid 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 in the W1 (boosted by an ‘E-module’ that adds another 342bhp). Featuring a Formula 1-style drag reduction system to reduce aerodynamic resistance, it does thankfully feature an airbrake that will bring it to a halt from 124mph in just 100 metres.

“Like all of our cars, a significant number of innovations on the W1 have been derived from Formula 1,” says Corstorphine. “McLaren has over 60 years of history in racing performance, which is something we leverage frequently. From F1-inspired ground effect aerodynamics to the brakes and the front suspension, the famous carbon fibre monocoque and, of course, unparalleled drive control and engagement, all of this has been made possible by extraordinary F1 know-how. 

“There are also fun functionalities such as a Boost, which immediately deploys full E-module power at the push of a button, following the same principle employed in Formula 1. Whether the tech and innovation developed for the W1 will ever be able to be moved over to the sport depends on how the regulations develop.” The W1, then, is more advanced than a Formula 1 car and represents a lot of firsts for the marque. “It’s our fastest accelerating and fastest lapping road-legal car ever, our first-ever ground effect road car, it has a world-first radical road-to-track character transformation, lowering ride height significantly and engaging up to 1,000kg of downforce, and much more,” extols Corstorphine. “It represents the absolute pinnacle of what we can achieve at this moment in time, making it a worthy successor to the McLaren F1 and P1, two of the greatest supercars of all time. So while the W1 is groundbreaking in many ways, it is also the logical next chapter in our famous ‘1’ car lineage.”

As for me, I’m relieved to report the 750S Spider didn’t end up at the bottom of McLaren’s lake and eventually made it back to the MTC in one piece. At the time of going to press, negotiations for my W1 loan are continuing and Cloud has reached out to representatives of Rowan Atkinson for his insurance broker’s details.