LONDON: McLaren Automotive Ltd has Formula One on the brain, and not just because the company is leading the current constructor standings.
The British brand introduced a new supercar, the W1, on Oct 6, the 50th anniversary of its first F1 constructor’s championship with driver Emerson Fittipaldi, who also won the driver’s championship in 1974.
(McLaren last won the team championship in 1998.)
Pricing on the car, the successor to the McLaren F1 of the 1990s and the McLaren P1 of the mid-2010s, starts at US$2.1 million (RM8.9mil).
The 1,399kg W1 is the fastest road-legal McLaren ever, with a 0-100kph sprint time in 2.7s, 0-200kph in 5.8 seconds and 0-300kph in 12.7 seconds. That’s quicker than the Speedtail. Top speed of W1 is 349kph.
Production of the W1 is limited to 399 vehicles; all of them have been allocated to specific customers. Deliveries will start in 2026.
"It’s the ultimate expression of a McLaren supercar,” McLaren Automotive chief executive officer Michael Leiters said of the rear-wheel-drive, eight-speed hybrid vehicle.
The W1 joins a spate of new cars including the Bentley Continental GT and Lamborghini Revuelto that use electricity to achieve whopping power while still retaining internal combustion, as consumers’ appetite for pure EVs remains uncertain.
The W1 gets 1,258bhp and 1,340Nm of torque from an all-new hybrid powertrain that combines a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V-8 internal combustion engine and an electric motor. The combination makes it the most powerful McLaren to date.
Such mixed powertrains are well suited to the type of vehicles the company wants to produce, since they deliver power and speed along with the all-important visceral connection between driver and machine that can be lost with a pure EV, said McLaren’s director of product planning, Jamie Corstorphine.
"We believe (these) are the first principles of a real supercar,” he said.
Hybrid technology is not new at McLaren: It started developing it more than 10 years ago with the 903-horsepower P1, which launched in 2013; Porsche’s 918 Spyder and Ferrari’s LaFerrari hybrids also arrived the same year.
The US$2.3 million (RM9.7mil) McLaren Speedtail hybrid made its debut in 2018. A less expensive hybrid, the US$233,000 (RM983,000) McLaren Artura, came out in 2021. A hybrid SUV is in the works.
In contrast to the 671-horsepower Artura, which offers 30km of electric-only driving, the W1 can drive on electric power alone for less than 3.2km.
An onboard charger will recharge the electric motor in 22 minutes. But despite past public comments from executives hinting that the company is developing electric powertrains, a fully electric vehicle remains far off for the brand.
"We do not think that the technology will be sufficiently mature until the end of the decade to deliver a BEV (battery electric vehicle) supercar,” a spokesman said, citing weight as a core concern.
The unveiling of the W1 was accompanied by the introduction of a Richard Mille watch.
