r/mclaren

Ho inseguito l'auto poi mi sono fermato per parlare Ho visto questa macchina bellissima ho fatto qualche ricerca su internet dovrebbe essere la Elva?

Some cars tell you what they are before you've even got to the second sentence. The McLaren W1 does exactly that by keeping rear-wheel drive when plenty of rivals would have gone chasing traction with the front axle as well.

That's the thread running through this PH Review. The W1 is McLaren's new halo car, loaded with serious numbers and the kind of engineering detail we all want from something wearing a badge this important. We only have the headline facts here, so for the full picture you'll want the review itself.

Read more: https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-driven/mclaren-w1--ph-review/51364?utm_source=reddit

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Used pencils and markers

'An acquaintance of mine has a collection that includes one of just about every car McLaren has made, and of all of them, the HS is among his absolute favourites.’ I’m standing with James Banks, formerly head of Bespoke Cars at McLaren Special Operations (MSO), and we’re surveying one of the most exclusive projects the division ever worked on – and, by more than one account, one of the best cars ever to wear a McLaren badge, despite few people knowing it even exists.

Should an MSO HS ever pass you in traffic, you certainly wouldn’t miss it, but you probably wouldn’t realise you’d seen anything out of the ordinary; perhaps a well-specified 650S or maybe a 675LT whose owner ticked the box for the carbon pack. There’s little on a quick glance to suggest it’s one of only 25 cars, each built on the same line as the P1 hypercar rather than the standard Super Series production line, and each a little different, tailored to the tastes of 25 hand-picked MSO clients. Never publicised, never wafted under the noses of the press, a real ‘in the know’ kind of car.

The HS (it stands for High Sport) shows a different side to MSO than the one you’re probably familiar with. Search the internet for MSO commissions and you’ll mostly be presented with strikingly coloured versions of McLaren’s mainline cars, or one-off builds like the 12C-based X-1. The HS demonstrates MSO’s capacity for tackling engineering challenges as well as visual ones; many of the parts were designed, tested and manufactured solely for this car, with quality levels equal to or better than those on mainstream McLarens.

While the aim with the HS was to build something spectacular, it was also a necessity. McLaren Automotive has had its fair share of tumult in its relatively short history, much of it a natural side-effect of being a small-volume manufacturer that designs, engineers and builds almost everything in-house. As Banks relates, in 2015 things were going pretty well: ‘We launched the new car business in 2010, and did a pretty damn good job. There was the odd bump in the road, but starting from literally zero – no dealer network, no electrical architecture, no chassis, no nothing – we’d created the 12C, the P1 and the 650S.’

But with those cars making their way to customers and plans for further expansion, the company was rapidly outgrowing its dedicated production system, dubbed MAXIM, inherited from the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and the F1 before it. There was a plan in place for this, thanks to technology partner SAP, but whereas a larger car maker might be able to migrate systems little by little, with multiple model lines to take up the slack, the transition at McLaren meant completely shutting down production for several weeks. As Banks puts it, ‘No cars, no output, no cashflow – for a company where cars spend six to seven weeks on the line and parts are ordered months in advance, the transition was a real threat to survival.’

The company turned to MSO, essentially with the task of creating something to fill that gap. And, as it happened, the timing was just about perfect for something truly special. The MSO team already had an idea rattling around for a special project, combining some elements of the then-new 650S GT3 car with the road car. Not only that, but there were P1 owners knocking on the door asking for a P1 without the hybrid elements, signalling demand for a lighter, more focused and more tactile model.

And while a stripped-down P1 wasn’t possible, a more specialised version of the 650S certainly was. The 675LT was just around the corner, itself inheriting lessons learned from the P1, but as designer Esteban Palazzo explains, a few of his ideas for the LT turned out to be a little too much for then-CEO Mike Flewitt. ‘The briefing for the 675LT was a track car for the road, so we created a proposal. We unveiled it to Mike Flewitt, and he essentially went, “What the hell is this?” because it was too much!

‘It’s quite common that when the idea of doing a new car arrives in the studio, the studio tends to be overly ambitious. The beauty of MSO is that you could green-light these more ambitious ideas, such as combining a GT3 car and a road car. On every project you generate an archive of ideas, dozens of proposals, and at some point this becomes the DNA of the next vehicle. With the HS, that meant incorporating the dive planes, the louvres, the roof scoop, the high-mounted wing…’

Read the story - https://www.evo.co.uk/mclaren/675lt/208804/mclaren-mso-hs-the-secret-205mph-special-born-to-save-the-brand