McLaren P1 The Elegant Sport Car
McLaren sport car sport car concept
As a car enthusiast, the McLaren P1 — the first vehicle in the automaker’s Ultimate Series — was nothing short of jaw-dropping spectacular. The Brits had engineered a lightweight supercar powered by a hybrid gasoline-electric, 903-horsepower, powertrain. With a low power-to-weight ratio and trick aerodynamics, its projected performance numbers, including a 0-186 mph sprint in just 16.5 seconds, were unfathomable for a street-legal vehicle. I was determined to drive it, someday.
It took nearly half-a-decade of waiting patiently by the phone, but that moment recently arrived when McLaren invited me to Scotland to drive its flagship. But it wasn’t a standard P1 — this was the world’s most famous variant, the third pre-production model that is known around the globe as “P100V.”
Turn back the clock five years to find an unofficial three-way competition going on between McLaren, Ferrari, and Porsche. Each of the celebrated European automakers were engineering supercars with integrated hybrid technology. While the British, Italians, and Germans each took a slightly different path, McLaren chose to use its existing 12C tub as a building block — this meant the final product, which would be called the P1 (it refers to ‘position one’ in racing) would be a mid-engine, rear-wheel drive, configuration.
Some of the P1’s technology goes beyond that of a race car. Those beautifully sculpted body panels, which simultaneously channel cooling air to the powerplant while maintaining low drag, are supplemented by an active rear wing that raises nearly 12 inches to maximize downforce on the track. In race mode, the rear wing complements the rest of the vehicle’s aerodynamics to help generate an amazing 1,322 pounds of downforce at 150 mph. Downforce is synonymous with drag, but the P1 can also tuck everything clean, hunker down low, and slice through the air with a .34 drag coefficient like that of a family sedan.
Here below are the McLaren P1's Photos:
