What's all this about?
The three little exhausts you can see in this image are extraordinarily special. Because these are the exhausts of the next entrant into McLaren's rarefied Ultimate Series.
Ultimate Series? Wasn't that the P1 and P1 GTR?
Correct. So you can imagine how excited we are about this thing. We don't know anything more about it yet, including its name, but some of the rhetoric McLaren is coming out with has us positively salivating. Statements like it's 'the most extreme, track-concentrated road car McLaren has yet designed', or it will be the 'ultimate track car but it will remain road legal', or the maker admitting that 'daily usability is being sacrificed to give the most intensive driver experience around a circuit' are all strong talk from a company that is already making the breath-taking 720S. The new Ultimate Series car is also supposed to have 'brutal' styling, which we like the sound of. A lot.
So, this is going to be faster than all of McLaren's current cars?
Yes. And when the Sports Series trio of the 540C, 570GT and 570S - purportedly the entry-level models, for want of a much, much better phrase - can all crack 200mph (all right, the 540C does 199mph, but seriously!) and run 0-62mph in less than 3.5 seconds, you kind of get an idea of how mad the newcomer will be. But there's good news and bad news here.
Go on, what have you got to tell me?
The good news is that the 2018 newcomer is only number one of two fresh entrants to the Ultimate Series canon, as the BP23 'Hyper-GT' is already in the pipeline behind it. It's massively exciting stuff and we'll find out the name of the track-focused first model before the end of this year, prior to its public debut in the first quarter of 2018 (that'll be the Geneva Motor Show, then). The bad news is, don't even reach for your chequebook, even if you're mega-rich. Ultimate Series McLarens, like the P1, are built in strictly limited numbers and both the 2018 vehicle and BP23's full production numbers are already accounted for. Booooo!
Matt Robinson - 19 Oct 2017