The Best Car I’ve Ever Driven: McLaren W1

Summary

Marques Brownlee gets to be one of the first people outside McLaren to drive the W1 — the successor to the legendary F1 (still the fastest naturally aspirated car ever at 240 mph) and his personal favorite car of all time, the P1. The pitch: from the powertrain to the aerodynamics to the track performance, the W1 is closer than ever to a literal Formula One car with a license plate. It’s a 1275-horsepower hybrid pairing a brand new in-house twin-turbo flat-plane-crank 4-liter V8 (over 900 hp by itself) with a 342-hp electrical system built around a tiny 1.4 kWh battery and a radial flux e-motor straight from Formula E — all in a car whose dry weight is 1399 kg, still under 3200 pounds wet. Against his benchmark Porsche 911 Turbo S, the W1 basically doubles the acceleration numbers: 0 to 186 mph in 12.7 seconds versus about 22.

The design tour is as much aerodynamics lecture as styling review. The active front splitter moves up and down for DRS, air channels through doors that are “basically a bunch of holes,” a fake-looking roof scoop exists purely to keep air attached to the top of the car, and the active rear wing extends nearly a foot backward in race mode — becoming an extension of the rear diffuser and, fun fact, no longer street legal because it protrudes past the rear bumper. The air leaves the back of the car twice as fast as it entered the front. Inside, it’s McLaren’s best interior ever: seats molded into the carbon tub (you adjust the pedals and wheel, not the seat), a CES-concept-style knit material over Bowers & Wilkins speakers, wired Apple CarPlay, two cup holders, and the world’s thinnest sun visors.

On tight Italian mountain roads the W1 rides surprisingly well in comfort mode, with the hydraulic steering — in Marques’s opinion still the best steering in any supercar — communicating constantly. Then McLaren reserves Mugello Circuit, the F1-grade track that hosted the 2020 Tuscan Grand Prix, for the full 1200-horsepower race-mode experience. The car stayed so locked down that the only looseness was a wiggle braking from 190 mph into turn one — and the G-forces literally pulled the glass inside the camera lens, making footage unusable. At the end of the straight he matched the 190+ mph Lewis Hamilton hit there in an actual Formula One car. With 399 being built at $2 million plus, most of us will only ever see it in videos — but Marques leaves with a new poster car for the bedroom wall.

Highlights

”The air leaves the back of the car twice as fast as it entered the front”

“The air leaves the back of the car here twice as fast as it entered the front. And then you got that exhaust and uh, it’s not bad looking.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:41

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”You don’t move the seat, you move the pedals”

“Since the seats are fixed in this car, there’s a little latch right here which you can pull to move these pedals towards you or away from you, which is how you adjust your seating position. You don’t move the seat, you move the pedals away from you and the steering wheel into place where you want it.” — Marques Brownlee, 6:00

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”The best steering in any supercar”

“The other thing I feel every time I turn is the hydraulic steering. I don’t even have to be going that fast to feel that McLaren continues to do, in my opinion, the best steering in any supercar with their hydraulic steering.” — Marques Brownlee, 7:15

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”The G-forces literally pulled the glass inside the lens”

“Fun fact, I got to do a few more laps than this, but the footage is actually unusable because the G-forces from the car literally pulled the glass inside the lens to move me out of focus, which is insane.” — Marques Brownlee, 13:27

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”The same speed Lewis Hamilton hit in that Formula One car”

“By the way, that speed at the end of that straight, over 190 miles an hour. Fun fact, that’s the same speed Lewis Hamilton hit on his way to a victory here during the Tuscan Grand Prix in that Formula One car. That is absolutely insane, and this is a car that can go on the street.” — Marques Brownlee, 13:55

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”I think I have a new poster car for the bedroom now”

“So I hope I was able to do it justice. Again, the three hours I spent behind the wheel were pretty sick. I think I have a new poster car for the bedroom now.” — Marques Brownlee, 16:10

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Key Points

• The W1 succeeds the F1 and P1 (0:33) - Big shoes to fill: the F1 is still the fastest naturally aspirated car ever (240 mph), and the P1 is Marques’s favorite car of all time
• Closer than ever to an F1 car with a license plate (1:21) - Powertrain, aerodynamics, and track performance all borrow from Formula One
• The Rimac Nevera is still faster in a straight line (2:04) - The all-electric, all-wheel-drive Rimac beats everything in a drag race, but that’s not the whole story
• McLaren’s purist formula (2:32) - Extreme lightweight, rear-wheel drive, hydraulic steering, 3D-printed double wishbone suspension — things others simply don’t do anymore
• Active aero everywhere (3:00) - The front splitter physically moves up and down, opening for DRS; the doors are “basically a bunch of holes” channeling air down the side (3:17)
• The fake roof scoop (3:25) - It looks like the P1’s roof scoop but is purely there to keep air moving over the top of the car
• McLaren’s best interior ever (4:04) - Seats built into the carbon fiber structure, CES-concept-style knit material, and Bowers & Wilkins speakers hidden behind acoustically transparent fabric (4:56)
• Wired Apple CarPlay in a $2M hypercar (4:28) - A floating display with CarPlay, plus the Artura-style binnacle with suspension controls on the left and powertrain on the right (4:36)
• Rear visibility is a camera (5:38) - No rear window at all; the camera mirror works, though the rear wing takes up the bottom quarter of the view
• Comfort mode is actually comfortable (6:49) - Absorbs potholes well on tight Italian mountain roads, with a split window where only the bottom half opens for paying tolls
• A tiny battery with Formula E tech (7:31) - Just 1.4 kWh, but the radial flux e-motor is straight from Formula E; it torque-fills at low RPM and allows one to two miles of electric-only driving
• Doubling the Porsche 911 Turbo S (8:15) - 1275 hp vs 710, over double the torque, ~450 lbs lighter, and roughly half the 0-62/0-124/0-186 times
• The in-house V8 (9:00) - A brand new twin-turbo flat-plane-crank 4-liter V8 making over 900 hp alone, plus 342 hp from the electrical system (9:14)
• A featherweight at 1399 kg dry (9:26) - Call it 1450 kg with fluids — still under 3200 pounds, putting its power-to-weight ratio in a different league (9:44)
• 0 to 186 mph in 12.7 seconds (9:53) - The 911 Turbo S “Autobahn missile” takes about 22 seconds to do the same
• Eight gears, no reverse gear (11:02) - Reversing is handled entirely by the electric motors
• Race mode isn’t street legal (12:33) - The rear wing extends back almost a foot, becoming an extension of the diffuser and protruding past the rear bumper (12:41)
• Mugello Circuit, reserved for the day (12:10) - 15 turns, 50 feet of elevation change, a 1 km straight, and host of the 2020 Tuscan Grand Prix (12:24)
• Nearly unshakeable on track (13:42) - The only looseness was a rear-end wiggle while stomping the carbon ceramic brakes from 190 mph into turn one on Trofeo RS tires
• Prototype caveats (15:12) - The car threw a fault and had door latch quirks, but it’s technically an unfinished prototype and McLaren’s build quality has improved (15:27)
• 399 built, $2 million plus (16:00) - Like the P1, most people will never see one on the road; videos are the best chance

Mentions

Companies

• McLaren (0:33) - Maker of the W1; Marques is one of the first outside the company to drive it
• Rimac (2:04) - The Nevera is still the straight-line king: all-electric, all-wheel drive, instant torque
• Porsche (7:58) - The 911 Turbo S serves as the “really, really fast car” benchmark the W1 doubles
• Apple (4:28) - The W1’s floating display has wired Apple CarPlay
• Bowers & Wilkins (4:56) - Speakers throughout the cabin, hidden behind acoustically transparent knit material

Products & Technologies

• McLaren W1 (0:33) - The subject: 1275 hp hybrid hypercar, 399 units, $2M+
• McLaren F1 (0:52) - Still the fastest naturally aspirated car ever made at 240 mph
• McLaren P1 (0:52) - Marques’s favorite car of all time; the W1 sounds like it and shares its lag-free character (15:35)
• Rimac Nevera (2:04) - The world’s fastest production car, from an earlier MKBHD video
• Porsche 911 Turbo S (7:58) - 630 hp engine plus 80 hp electric; the W1 roughly halves its acceleration times
• McLaren Artura (4:36) - The W1’s binnacle control layout mirrors it
• McLaren 750S (10:43) - Comparison point for gearing; the W1’s gears are longer with more torque build
• Hydraulic steering (7:15) - In Marques’s opinion, still the best steering in any supercar
• 3D-printed double wishbone suspension (7:31) - Part of the lightweight purist engineering
• Radial flux e-motor (Formula E) (7:31) - Super power-dense motor paired with a 1.4 kWh battery
• Twin-turbo flat-plane-crank 4-liter V8 (9:00) - Brand new in-house engine making over 900 hp by itself
• DRS active front splitter (3:00) - Moves up and down, opening for the drag reduction system
• Pirelli Trofeo RS tires (13:34) - Kept the car absolutely locked to the ground at Mugello
• Carbon ceramic brakes (13:42) - Hauled the car down from 190 mph with only a small rear wiggle
• Mugello Circuit (12:10) - F1-grade track McLaren reserved for the day; hosted the 2020 Tuscan Grand Prix

People

• Lewis Hamilton (13:55) - Hit the same 190+ mph on Mugello’s straight in a Formula One car on his way to winning the Tuscan Grand Prix

Surprising Quotes

“It is actually a pretty tiny battery, it’s just 1.4 kilowatt hours, but it’s a radial flux e-motor straight from Formula E, so it is super power dense and you can even go up to one to two miles on electric-only before the engine actually has to turn on.” — Marques Brownlee, 7:31

“That’s still under 3200 pounds, which is insane. So the power-to-weight ratio of these cars, I mean they’re in completely different leagues.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:44

“There’s eight gears to this gearbox. No reverse gear by the way, that’s just with the electric motors.” — Marques Brownlee, 11:02

“Which, fun fact, is actually no longer street legal because it extends past the rear bumper of the car. That will not be a concern here though.” — Marques Brownlee, 12:41

“Nice big carbon fiber paddle shifters, a little bit of glass on the roof, and the world’s thinnest sun visors, I think I’m comfortable saying that.” — Marques Brownlee, 6:00

Transcript

Marques Brownlee: 0:00 Cars have changed. Everything is smoother now, aerodynamically efficient, kind of blobs. Whatever happened to the super inspiring crazy supercar designs that we used to hang up on the bedroom wall as a poster as a kid?

Marques Brownlee: 0:13 Well, we still have those. So I did a video a couple years ago on hybrids and I’m not a prophet or anything but like the end point of that video was talking about how electrification is here. Hybrid supercars are here. The Holy Trinity from back in 2013 was just the beginning.

Marques Brownlee: 0:33 Now it’s 2024 and we’ve got this. The W1. The successor to the F1 and the P1. And those are some big shoes to fill. All of the groundbreaking driving performance and technology and experience that comes with every one-car is here. And I get to be one of the first people outside McLaren to drive it. Today’s gonna be a fun day.

Marques Brownlee: 0:52 A lot of people say the greatest supercar of all time is the McLaren F1. Still the fastest naturally aspirated car ever made: 240 miles per hour. And then its successor is my favorite car of all time, the McLaren P1. Member of the Holy Trinity of the first three hybrid supercars. I was lucky enough to get to drive one. Unreal car. The type of car where most owners that have 20 or 30 other cars still say that that’s their favorite one to drive.

Marques Brownlee: 1:21 Now the W1 is next up. From the powertrain to the aerodynamics to the track performance, it is closer than ever to a literal Formula One car with a license plate on it and I cannot wait to experience it.

Marques Brownlee: 1:36 Alright. Time to drive it. Now I just gotta get into this thing, which I think is right under… Yeah. This is gonna be a squeeze.

Marques Brownlee: 1:54 So a hypercar like this is built around being the most track capable machine possible. But on the street, it still has to be a car. Still a really fast car obviously.

Marques Brownlee: 2:04 Now you might be wondering how it compares to the Rimac Nevera that I got to make a video with. That was the world’s fastest production car: all-electric, all-wheel drive, instant torque. And well, the Rimac is still faster in a straight line. That still beats everything.

Marques Brownlee: 2:22 But that’s not the whole story. It may seem like McLaren is chasing everyone else by doing the trendy thing because this is yet another brand new thousand-plus horsepower hybrid.

Marques Brownlee: 2:32 But this is still a McLaren and they still do a lot of things that others simply don’t these days. The extreme lightweight, the rear-wheel drive, hydraulic steering, 3D printed aerodynamic double wishbone suspension. Like, it’s such a lightweight purist driver’s machine.

Marques Brownlee: 2:47 On the outside, this car is a masterpiece. Not just because it looks really good, but because it’s an aerodynamic masterpiece. From the very, very front of this car all the way to the back, it’s designed basically entirely to move air as efficiently and quickly from the front to the back.

Marques Brownlee: 3:00 So there’s this active element right at the very front here, this front splitter actually moves up and down, it opens up for DRS and closes when you don’t need that.

Marques Brownlee: 3:08 And the air starts by moving over the hood really quickly. The air that goes in that front piece here comes out the radiator and goes over that hood piece and keeps it glued to the top of the car.

Marques Brownlee: 3:17 You move air down the side, it gets sucked down in here and the air then channels along the side of the car through this massive inlet. I mean, the door is basically a bunch of holes.

Marques Brownlee: 3:25 And this top piece right here kind of looks like a roof scoop because the P1 had a roof scoop up there, but it’s not. It’s actually just a piece to keep the air continually moving over the top of the car.

Marques Brownlee: 3:34 And then you get to the back with this active rear wing which does a lot of moving as we now know, and this huge rear diffuser which completes the ground force effects.

Marques Brownlee: 3:41 The air leaves the back of the car here twice as fast as it entered the front. And then you got that exhaust and uh, it’s not bad looking.

Marques Brownlee: 3:51 So then this is the key to the McLaren W1.

Marques Brownlee: 3:54 So the thing about these McLaren interiors is they’ve been improving them a lot over the years and I think the biggest knock on McLaren in the past decade has probably been both reliability and build quality.

Marques Brownlee: 4:04 This is easily their best looking and most interesting interior of all time. It’s crazy.

Marques Brownlee: 4:09 First of all, these seats are built into the carbon fiber structure of the car.

Marques Brownlee: 4:14 And then I love this, this knit material is so interesting, it looks really cool, kind of like those concept cars I’ve seen at CES.

Marques Brownlee: 4:21 So I’ll pull this handle down and this is what it’s like in the driver’s seat.

Marques Brownlee: 4:28 So there’s a floating display over here which, believe it or not, has wired Apple Carplay. Not that you’re going to be doing a whole bunch with the tech in this car.

Marques Brownlee: 4:36 But then there’s a display in the back here and this whole binnacle is basically just like the way it is in some other modern McLarens like the Artura. You have your suspension controls on the left which can go up or down, and then your powertrain controls on the right which can also go up or down.

Marques Brownlee: 4:48 And then this whole thing moves with the steering wheel. So if you move the whole thing up or down, looks pretty good.

Marques Brownlee: 4:56 And then this material is everywhere, so there’s Bowers and Wilkins speakers through the whole cabin, but like this speaker for example here has the material over it, but it should be acoustically transparent.

Marques Brownlee: 5:07 I think it looks really good. These carbon fiber aero ducts for your air conditioning, all of that looks fantastic.

Marques Brownlee: 5:14 There’s a little hole in the seat here, there’s also a, uh, fire extinguisher.

Marques Brownlee: 5:18 And then a nice spot for the key here which is where I’m going to put it. But you can also move that back to expose another cup holder. So two cup holders, count ‘em, in this car. Very practical, or maybe not.

Marques Brownlee: 5:27 If you pull this little button right here, it gives you access to this back space behind the driver and the passenger which is good enough for maybe one and a half duffel bags. I’ll call that a duffel bag and a backpack.

Marques Brownlee: 5:38 And then of course since there’s no other rear visibility here, you have a camera to have that rear visibility. So if you turn it off, that mirror sees nothing, but you turn it on and that camera is very useful even though the whole bottom quarter of it is taken up by the rear wing.

Marques Brownlee: 5:50 That’s cool, I like seeing the rear wing. It moves a lot when you drive. But yeah, this is a nice place to sit. Look, this, this handle right here, your…

Marques Brownlee: 6:00 Holding carbon fiber but that’s also where you open the door. That, that’s really nice. And then you have the speaker and you’ve got these little LEDs in here which I think you can see, which at night I’m sure is much more dramatic. And then you’re essentially sitting in a carbon fiber tub. But here’s one more crazy element, since the seats are fixed in this car, there’s a little latch right here which you can pull to move these pedals towards you or away from you, which is how you adjust your seating position. You don’t move the seat, you move the pedals away from you and the steering wheel into place where you want it. Nice big carbon fiber paddle shifters, a little bit of glass on the roof, and the world’s thinnest sun visors, I think I’m comfortable saying that. These are like barely compliant thin carbon fiber sun visors, but hey, they get the job done. Then in the roof, you start the engine.

Marques Brownlee: 6:49 Comfort mode to start. The first things you notice obviously are being lower to the ground. It’s pretty awesome actually. It rides really well. So these are not the best or worst roads in the world, these are actually pretty tight Italian mountain roads that they have us out here testing the car on. I’m noticing the car absorbs potholes really well in comfort mode. Not the loudest thing in the world, and the accelerator pedal is not too twitchy. Visibility is also, I think, actually pretty great. So the windshield’s big. It’s got this huge window next to me, and it’s a split window, which means when I put this down, only the bottom half opens. I can pay the tolls and and wave to people.

Marques Brownlee: 7:15 And then behind me, well there’s nothing actually open behind me, but I am relying on this rearview camera, which the bottom fourth of it is basically entirely blocked by the rear wing, which is hilarious. It’s not the worst visibility in the world. It’s like B+ visibility for what this car is. The car is definitely wide and this is a pretty tight road, so I’m feeling that every time I turn. But the other thing I feel every time I turn is the hydraulic steering. I don’t even have to be going that fast to feel that McLaren continues to do, in my opinion, the best steering in any supercar with their hydraulic steering.

Marques Brownlee: 7:31 If you open up this car and explode it into thousand little pieces and look at the suspension parts, the double wishbone suspension that is 3D printed. So right now, it is, it’s soft. Comfort mode is actually comfortable. The battery in comfort mode is just doing the torque fill to give you a responsive gas pedal at these lower RPMs that you cruise around at. And it’s incredibly effective. It is actually a pretty tiny battery, it’s just 1.4 kilowatt hours, but it’s a radial flux e-motor straight from Formula E, so it is super power dense and you can even go up to one to two miles on electric-only before the engine actually has to turn on.

Marques Brownlee: 7:58 I don’t want to bore anyone with too many technical details here, but I do think that these numbers will help you appreciate how ridiculous this car actually is. On the left here is my benchmark for a really, really fast car, that’s the newest Porsche 911 Turbo S, and this is the W1. So on the left, the 630 horsepower is from the engine alone in the Porsche, but it’s a hybrid, as you may know, so that adds 80 horsepower from the electric motor.

Marques Brownlee: 8:15 The W1 has almost twice as much horsepower, 1275, and over double the torque. It also weighs about 450 pounds less than the Porsche. And just looking at top speeds, the W1 is 217 versus the Turbo S at 205. The 0 to 62, 0 to 124, 0 to 186. McLaren’s W1 basically doubles the acceleration numbers for the Porsche. This is really fast. Now we switch it into Sport Mode.

Marques Brownlee: 8:44 Okay, everything tightens up immediately. The car is louder, the suspension is stiffer. The steering is still excellent. This is where the car starts to feel alive. You can feel that torque fill from the electric motor, just filling in those gaps before the turbos really spool up. It’s a seamless transition.

Marques Brownlee: 9:00 …system, totaling about 700 peak horsepower. It’s very powerful. The W1, on the other hand, has a brand new in-house twin-turbo flat-plane-crank 4-liter V8 that makes over 900 horsepower by itself.

Marques Brownlee: 9:14 And then a ridiculously powerful and highly developed electrical system that adds 342 more horsepower. So the totals are crazy, and the torque numbers are also crazy, but that’s not the craziest thing.

Marques Brownlee: 9:26 The craziest thing is this car is also a featherweight. So these are the weights of the cars down here, 1700 kilograms, which is a normal car weight for a hybrid. 1399, that’s the dry weight that McLaren has quoted for us, but let’s add fuels and call it 1450 kilograms or something.

Marques Brownlee: 9:44 That’s still under 3200 pounds, which is insane. So the power-to-weight ratio of these cars, I mean they’re in completely different leagues.

Marques Brownlee: 9:53 All that to say that the 0 to 186 mile-per-hour time for this very fast German Autobahn missile is about 22 seconds. It’s really fast. The W1 will do that in 12.7.

Marques Brownlee: 10:06 But now you know these cars, I’ve talked about them before, they have multiple personalities. This binnacle right above the steering wheel, just like the Artura and the other new McLarens, changes my powertrain and changes my suspension.

Marques Brownlee: 10:21 So I’m going to go to sport for both. So now everything stiffens up a bit. It’s a little bit louder, it’s a little more aggressive with the gear shifts and more responsive from the accelerator pedal.

Marques Brownlee: 10:31 So the sounds of this car really start to come alive more in sport mode. As you heat this thing up, you can hear I think the most prominent sound besides the engine is the turbo flutter.

Marques Brownlee: 10:43 The blow-off sound. I’ve driven McLaren 750S, you can watch some other McLaren review videos on the Auto Focus channel, but you do get these long pulls.

Marques Brownlee: 10:52 The gears are not as short as like the 750S and you get these long pulls with a ton of torque with the build from the hybrid system all the way from the bottom to the top of second gear.

Marques Brownlee: 11:02 There’s eight gears to this gearbox. No reverse gear by the way, that’s just with the electric motors. But man, this is such an interesting car.

Marques Brownlee: 11:12 It is on one hand, it represents a lot of what’s happening in the rest of the hypercar world with what a lot of people actually don’t really like that much to be frank, like of course a ton of horsepower, 1200 horsepower, crazy numbers, ridiculously capable but also a bit less communicative, a bit less emotion than some older cars.

Marques Brownlee: 11:30 But at the same time they’re also doing a lot of what people really like, especially what McLaren’s done well in the past, keeping the lightweight philosophy.

Marques Brownlee: 11:40 This is a 3000 pound car, that’s crazy. Crazy power-to-weight ratio, amazing hydraulic steering, still very communicative in lots of ways.

Marques Brownlee: 11:49 But yeah, it’s both things at once. And you know, you’ll never be able to fully tell…

Marques Brownlee: 12:00 about what this car is capable of on the streets like this,

Marques Brownlee: 12:05 which means we should find that out by taking it to a track. Let’s go to the track.

Marques Brownlee: 12:10 For the track experience, McLaren has reserved Mugello Circuit for the day.

Marques Brownlee: 12:15 And this track has everything: 15 turns, twisting S curves, 50 feet of elevation change, and a long one kilometer straightaway through the start/finish line.

Marques Brownlee: 12:24 The Tuscan Grand Prix was actually hosted here in 2020, so it is literally an F1 grade track, perfectly smooth, which is a great opportunity to finally put the W1 in race mode,

Marques Brownlee: 12:33 which drops the suspension and fully extends the rear wing back by almost a foot. It moves so far back that it essentially becomes an extension of the rear diffuser,

Marques Brownlee: 12:41 which, fun fact, is actually no longer street legal because it extends past the rear bumper of the car. That will not be a concern here though.

Marques Brownlee: 12:51 This was a chance to finally actually open up full throttle, 1200 horsepower, and see what this car is capable of. It’s the dream experience, if you ask me.

Marques Brownlee: 13:02 Tons of aero, super brisk at these high speeds. About the track now.

Marques Brownlee: 13:07 Tons of grip, and wow, a lot of power. Front up to make the curve so big there, make the line straighter.

Marques Brownlee: 13:14 Just put your finger on it. See how you really feel it kick in, don’t you?

Marques Brownlee: 13:24 So how was that? Well, what a car. Yeah, it is.

Marques Brownlee: 13:27 Fun fact, I got to do a few more laps than this, but the footage is actually unusable because the G-forces from the car literally pulled the glass inside the lens

Marques Brownlee: 13:34 to move me out of focus, which is insane. The car stayed absolutely locked to the ground thanks to aerodynamics and those Trofeo RS tires.

Marques Brownlee: 13:42 I could only really get it to feel a little bit loose on the biggest braking zone on the whole track, fully stomping on those carbon ceramic brakes from 190 miles an hour,

Marques Brownlee: 13:52 the back end wiggled a little bit into turn one. That’s about it.

Marques Brownlee: 13:55 By the way, that speed at the end of that straight, over 190 miles an hour. Fun fact, that’s the same speed Lewis Hamilton hit on his way to a victory here

Marques Brownlee: 14:04 during the Tuscan Grand Prix in that Formula One car. That is absolutely insane, and this is a car that can go on the street.

Marques Brownlee: 14:11 It’s clearly nuts, seriously a once in a lifetime opportunity for me.

Marques Brownlee: 14:15 Alright, conclusion time. I wrote down a bunch of my notes actually on my phone during the course of the day. Spent about three hours total in this car all day today between the track and street.

Marques Brownlee: 14:32 My highlights for this car are: One, aesthetics. Because I mean, come on, anhedral doors.

Marques Brownlee: 14:40 I think this interior looks amazing. I think the materials are really nice and the build quality on top of that. This is also a prototype car, technically not finished, but I want to give it credit for that.

Marques Brownlee: 14:50 And two, the drive, the character, the way it can split between…

Marques Brownlee: 15:00 between like a road-trippable car with actually a little bit of storage in it to a track monster, an aero monster, a power monster, is sick. It’s it’s what you should expect for how much you’d pay for this car. We’ll get to that.

Marques Brownlee: 15:12 It is still a hybrid, which means all of the concerns that come with a hybrid. Obviously, this car did not throw zero faults at me today. Uh, it also had some weird door latch stuff, but again, it is a prototype, so I’ll give it the pass for now. But there are concerns for long-term stuff.

Marques Brownlee: 15:27 But I think McLaren in general has gotten way better with build quality and the things we’ve thought about with McLaren in the past. So, I’m optimistic.

Marques Brownlee: 15:35 The car that this reminds me the most of is the McLaren P1, which I was lucky enough to drive. It sounds a lot like the P1. It’s ridiculously powerful and almost lag-free like the P1.

Marques Brownlee: 15:45 Like a lot of these other cars, especially McLarens are very powerful and very light, and they’re not laggy, but the turbos take some time, and this deletes that lag. And you can feel it while you hear the engine spool up, you feel yourself accelerate from the electric motor. It’s awesome.

Marques Brownlee: 16:00 There’s 399 being built. 2 million plus dollars. We’re probably never going to see it on the road, just like P1. So the best chance you and I have of seeing this car is in videos like this.

Marques Brownlee: 16:10 So I hope I was able to do it justice. Again, the three hours I spent behind the wheel were pretty sick. I think I have a new poster car for the bedroom now. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next. Peace.