McLaren (Auto Review Album 210)

Bruce McLaren was born in New Zealand in 1937. He moved to England in 1958 to pursue a career as a racing driver. In 1964 he set up his own company to make sports-racing cars, and began the M series of designs, which ran from M1 to M30. Bruce McLaren was killed in a testing accident in 1970, but the company continued under the control of team manager Teddy Mayer and Bruce’s friend Denny Hulme, who retired from the firm in 1975, and the company ceased to make sports-racers. Under Mayer the company drifted until 1981, when it merged with Ron Dennis’s Project 4 concern. Chassis were from then on designated MP4 (McLaren Project 4), best-known for the McLaren MP4-00 Formula 1 cars. In 2016 Dennis was forced out of McLaren and the F1 cars were designated MCL from then on. McLaren began the slow climb back to the top echelons of Formula 1, where McLaren was the second longest-surviving team in Formula 1, after Ferrari. McLaren achieved the F1 Constructors Championship in the final race of 2024, their first for 28 years.

In the 1990s McLaren began making supercars for road use with the F1, and later for competition events. In 2015 the road car range was reorganised into a new model structure. Three Series were called Sports, Super and Ultimate, with cars in the first two series denoted by the power output in PS (metric horsepower); 570, 720 etc. PS stands for pferdestärke; German for ‘horsepower’, equivalent to 98.6% of UK hp. The PS value would be followed by a suffix: C club, S sport, GT grand tourer, LT longtail. The 570S, 570GT, 540C and 600LT were thus in the base Sports Series. the 650S, 625C, 675LT and 720S were in the Super Series. The Ultimate Series included the P1, Senna, Speedtail, Elva and Solus.

In the 2020s hybrid McLaren supercars began to appear, and by the 1930s all McLaren road cars are likely to have alternative power sources, including electric. The electric revolution didn’t end there: McLaren already owned the Lavoie folding e-scooter brand when in 2023 they bought Van Moof, the bankrupt Dutch e-bike maker, with plans to invest ‘tens of millions of pounds’ in the venture.