New McLaren SUV? Company at crossroads on 60th anniversary

Road Cars

McLaren Automotive's reputation rebuild continues with its mooted SUV plans – but can it find the partner it needs to secure future?

Bruce McLaren statue unveiled at McLaren Technology Centre

McLaren Automotive's rebuild continues on 60th anniversary of race team's founding

McLaren

Author

Andrew Frankel

Expect to hear a lot from McLaren this year, on road and on track. For it was 60 years ago that Bruce founded Bruce McLaren Motor Racing and the brand was officially born. And it would be great to think that the Formula 1 team will elevate itself beyond the midfield, and with talents as young and conspicuous as Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri it has the potential – potential mind – to field one of the best driver line-ups on the grid. But Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes will surely be impossible to beat over the course of the season, so I expect the fight once more to be against Alpine for fourth place, a battle it just lost last season having won it comfortably in 2021.

But the road car side of the business interests me even more. McLaren Automotive only put its first car on the road a dozen years ago, but since then its history has been one of such vertiginous highs and desperate lows it could pass for a soap opera plot. It started terribly, with the botched launch of the MP4-12C before it was ready, then recovered with landmark cars like the P1 and 675LT, rose to even greater heights with the launch of the 570S but then started to wobble as tales of variable quality and questionable reliability took hold.

At the same time, it got greedy, oversupplying the market, self-harming with acts like calling the 600LT a limited edition car, but then refusing to say what that limit might be and too many overpriced ‘Ultimate’ series cars. Its reputation tanked and with it, the residual values of its cars. Then came Covid, leaving McLaren completely exposed. These were the darkest days, with a quarter of the workforce laid off, its Bondian McLaren Technology Centre Headquarters sold leased back and the CEO told his services were no longer required.

McLaren Artura

Artura represented dawn of new era for road car division

McLaren

It emerged a smaller, chastened business with a new business plan based on building a far smaller number of cars with rather greater profit margins. Spearheading the charge was the new Artura, the first McLaren to be built around a carbon tub built in-house, the first to feature an all new 120deg V6 hybrid powertrain and the first to incorporate next-generation electronic architecture. It was an astonishingly ambitious programme for a company as small as McLaren. Aston Martin, under Andy Palmer, decided to design a very similar engine to power its future – when he was replaced by Tobias Moers one of his first moves was to throw it in the mud at the cost of untold millions. “It was a concept engine,” he told me with visible contempt, “no chance of making production.”

From the archive

The Artura, then, was the turnaround car and remained that way despite its launch being pushed back and back due to ongoing issues with its state-of-the-art electronics. But when finally launched, its prospects were done no favours by what was euphemistically described by Autocar as ‘a thermal incident’ at the Ascari race resort. Reports of Arturas bursting into flames were wildly exaggerated but the damage was done.

And yet, despite it all, I am optimistic for the future of the company, and for several reasons. The first is new boss Michael Leiters, who is a very heavy hitter indeed, an engineer responsible for the Porsche Cayenne and most of Ferrari’s world-beating current line-up. When I asked him to name his first priority for the company, he named three: “quality, quality and quality”. He pulls no punches when discussing McLaren’s recent woes – easier when none of them happened on his watch – and has a clear vision for its future, at the front and centre of which lies, wait for it, an SUV.

This is as large a volte face as that performed by Ferrari whose position on this subject flipped from the essentially ‘over my dead body’ stance of Luca di Montezemolo to numero uno priority when he was replaced by the late Sergio Marchionne. I’ll be driving the result, the Purosangue, next month.

Ferrari SUV teaser image

McLaren will follow in Purosangue (above) and DBX footsteps with an SUV

Ferrari

A McLaren SUV? Yours will not be the only lip arching north at the thought. But really it shouldn’t. The point so brilliantly pioneered by Leiters and his team at Porsche all those years ago is that SUVs are golden geese: by defying decades of industry wisdom that said you could sell a lot of cars for a small margin or vice-versa but never both, he helped turn Porsche into the most profitable car company of them all.

But how? I still regard one of the most astonishing engineering accomplishments of the modern motor industry the fact that Aston Martin built the DBX on a brand new bespoke platform in a brand new bespoke factory with, so far as I am aware, no quality control horror stories resulting. When this also amounted to sound financial sense is another question entirely. All I can tell you is that when I asked Leiters if he fancied the same approach, I wouldn’t say he laughed in my face, but he made it as clear as can be that would not be a road he’d be going down.

So he’s going to have to spin it off someone else’s platform. The reason Aston Martin didn’t go down this road, which it could easily have done, was that it would have to operate within the design hard points of the donor platform, which it didn’t much fancy. Leiters is clear this is not a luxury McLaren either could or might choose to afford.

But my understanding is that Leiters is looking for far more than a simple joint venture: he wants a long term partnership with a major global automotive player and if that involved joining a stable, as Bentley joined VW’s in 1998, I think he’d regard that as a good move: like Bentley and like Rolls-Royce, he’d be giving up independence to ensure long-term survival.

Which manufacturer might that be? Well the VW group is already far from short of luxury brands, Mercedes has a technical and financial commitment to Aston Martin which is also still being eyed by Volvo and Lotus owner Geely. My money, then, would be on BMW. There’s historical precedent thanks to the wondrous 6.1-litre V12 engine BMW made for the McLaren F1, but more persuasively, it would sit beautifully within the portfolio, complementing rather than conflicting with its extant BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce brands. Under such patronage, there is little indeed McLaren could not achieve. Let’s hope it happens.

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