Second Coming

Twenty years after the last F1 was delivered, McLaren has revealed its successor. It’s called the Speedtail and it’s the most extraordinary car to emerge from modern-era Woking.

- Stuart Gallagher

IF I HAD THE FIRST IDEA ABOUT music I’d shoehorn in a ‘tricky second album’ analogy right about now. But seeing as my audio tastes start and stop at Test Match Special I’m a bit stuck. So here is McLaren’s replacement for the F1. A car McLaren owners and fans have been waiting two decades for and a car that redefines today’s hypercars.

As per the original, this is a money-no-object (within reason), no-compromise automobile that reinvents a genre and, perhaps, will once again make the establishment wake from its slumber and understand that at the higher echelons of the automotive world a ‘that will do’ approach isn’t an option. Neither is an SUV.

Twenty years ago the last F1 was produced, the project cut short due to a financial climate in which spending $1million on a car left an uneasy feeling. Twenty years later McLaren has started the journey that will see the F1’s true successor arrive in less than 18 months’ time with a price starting from £1.75million (plus tax).

The Speedtail is only the second McLaren to get a name rather than a letter-and-number identifier and it comes from the Ultimate Series stable, where at one end sits the Senna and the Senna GTR, in the middle will be the successor to the P1 (due before the end of 2025), and parked at the opposite end to the Senna will be the Speedtail.

What, then, is the Speedtail exactly? It’s a hyper-GT car that will also be the most powerful and fastest McLaren to date. It looks like it’s landed from an episode of The Jetsons.