McLaren had a plan. It would have three model lines, all sports cars, clearly defined: Sports Series, Super Series and Ultimate Series.
Sales volumes would be modest by most supercar maker’s standards but would return a profit, funnelled back into model development. There would be no five-door and certainly no SUV. It would be a pure range of sports cars. Admirable. And that would be enough.
Ten years into McLaren Automotive’s life, it hasn’t been.
Today’s model line-up is defined subtly differently to how it started. There’s now the GT series (comprising solely of the McLaren GT) and then the Supercars, in which sit both the McLaren 720S and, curiously, the upcoming Artura, which I thought was a McLaren 570S (Sports Series) replacement.
If you think that’s blurry, there are already some 16 models from the past decade that McLaren considers as Legacy cars.
There are some great driver’s cars in there, but there has been too little separation between them. They are, to coin a phrase from an anonymous rival CEO, “like a butcher selling different lengths of the same sausage”. All twin-turbo V8s, all with the engine in the same place driving the same wheels through a dual-clutch gearbox, and all with a too-similar carbonfibre tub.
That wouldn’t be a problem in itself but for their combined sales volumes being so modest that McLaren even had to sell its own headquarters.