Woking’s product planners are pulling familiar ‘lifecycle management’ levers in order to try to keep sales gently percolating.
They’re not huge levers. Having been introduced as a slightly more bedroomy-looking car than its showroom siblings, with notable stretches of satin chrome trim around and about both the inside and out-, the car now adopts black body trim, and some more aggressively scooped air intakes and jutting aerodynamic addenda (which can be had in gloss carbonfibre, as fitted to our test car, at additional cost).
It gets ever-so-slightly more power (another 15bhp, but no more torque than before); and it also weighs 10kg less than before in standard homologated form. And so it remains a largish mid-engined supercar with a carbon tub, adaptively damped independent suspension, and a 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 mounted longways behind the driver; and now producing up to 626bhp for the rear axle, making this the least powerful modern McLaren – but still one with a power-to-weight ratio high enough to shade its key rivals in the Super GT class, Woking claims.
On top of all that, there’s now the addition of an ‘S’ to the model identity, as a last ditch – and probably vain – effort to convince us all that this really is a different car than it used to be.