McLaren is part of an overwhelmingly positive picture for UK car manufacture. Our man Matt Kimberley sits down with a high-ranking company insider to talk Long Tails, naming structures and Formula One.
Life is good for British car-makers at the moment. Rolls-Royce and Bentley have conjured up record sales, Jaguar Land Rover is on a roll and McLaren is quickly selling everything it can build.
McLaren is the really interesting subject for petrolheads. It’s the first properly British sports car brand since Aston Martin, and with the latter’s latest concept designs having raised a few awkward questions, McLaren has emerged as the real enthusiast’s choice on these shores.
We met up with the firm’s Executive Director of Global Sales and Marketing, Jolyon Nash, to catch up on the latest in this home-grown success story.
Conversation turns first to the new 675LT – that’s 675 horsepower ‘Long Tail’, a name inherited from McLaren’s ultra-rare F1 GTR Long Tail of the 1990s.
“We’re very excited. It’s a fantastic car and a very emotional car. It’s created an awful lot of interest, so we’re pretty sure we’re going to be sold out of the 500 cars within weeks,” Nash says.
Long Tail doesn’t actually represent an extended rear end this time. The 675LT’s mere 36mm extension versus the 650S compares to the F1 GTR Long Tail’s 78mm stretch.
“What Long Tail represents is much more aerodynamic downforce, more power, lighter and quicker,” the McLaren man explains.
“So those four characteristics are part of what the LT means. LT for McLaren will be our high-power sub-brand, so in the Sports Series (which has opened with the 570S) at some stage there will be an LT model, and in the next Super Series whenever that comes out there will be an LT derivative.”
What’s in a name?
That naming structure has come about in a difficult birth that, for long periods, seemed less than organised. But it’s sorted out now, Nash assures us.
“We’re pretty clear on it. We have three families of cars: Sports Series is one family, Super Series is the next family and then Ultimate Series. So P1 is in the Ultimate Series.
“I think it’s only when you see the names of the models that maybe the logic becomes very obvious. It’s always going to be alphanumeric, so 650S has a 650-horsepower output, ‘S’ is for Sport, we have 625C, where C is for Club (Asian markets only), and then it’s a Coupé or a Spider. That sort of principle will follow in the new Sports Series.”
Sports Series
We’ve got a pretty robust product plan for the long term
The Sports Series, which will have at least three derivatives in hard, soft and Long Tail guises, is big news for the brand. “We’ll have more than one body style, we’ll have two power outputs both over 500 horsepower, and in terms of what it looks like it’s very obviously a McLaren,” hints the be-suited Nash.
“We’ve got a very clear business plan. Our business will grow; once we have a full year of sales with the Sports Series we expect our volumes to more than double. We’ve got a pretty robust product plan for the long term.”
Bold claims indeed, and great news for the UK economy. The McLaren Group is based in Woking, Surrey, and all its technological expertise is centred there.
Formula One
Nash himself was absorbed into the car world thanks to his father’s business as a car dealer. A couple of old Jaguars stand out in his memory. He also developed a passion for Formula One at that time, and again, the whole family was involved. The interview turns to F1 at this point, and McLaren’s current woes. Does the racing team’s performance have any bearing on how well the road cars sell?
“There’s not really a direct link between how our cars sell and how the F1 team performs,” says Nash after a moment’s pause. “Obviously it’s great if the Formula One team is winning, and we’re confident that they will get back to winning ways, but of course it’s very early days in terms of the partnership they have.
“What you have to bear in mind is that in many of the markets we sell to, Formula One is not necessarily very high on the agenda. Take the US, for example: the percentage of people who follow Formula One is very small, so our F1 heritage isn’t so big a deal. China is another example.”
SUV rumours
And what of the much-rumoured McLaren SUV? We can forget about it, says the man who would know best. “We are an out-and-out sports car company. Our DNA is all about sports cars, we’ve come out of racing and we just can’t imagine a McLaren being anything other than a sports car.”
“That’s definitely not in our plans.” A definitive answer, then – for now.
The future
Turning to the future, the Sports Series is finished. We now know it as the 570S. Nash claims ‘class-leading performance’ for the car code-named P13 during its development, as well as engineering know-how learned in the making of the P1.
“As with all our product development processes, every product that we develop leads into the development of the next one, so what was learned and developed in P1 has fed into P13, which will lead into P14 and so on. It’s a constant evolution and it doesn’t mean exact features being carried over, but learnings are carried through the family.
“We will introduce the full (Sports Series) range over a period of time, but I would guess that by the end of 2017 we will have our full product complement.”
For buyers who can’t quite stretch to the asking price of the 650S and its Super Series siblings, that time can’t come soon enough.