It’s hard to believe that it’s already been five years since McLaren unveiled its latest hypercar, the P1. While the car is still amazingly impressive, McLaren has changed its focus to a car that’s even more, um, hyper.
The next entry in McLaren’s top-tier Ultimate Series doesn’t yet have a name, but it does have a code name — BP23. Like McLaren’s first road car, the F1, it will have a three-seat layout, where the driver sits front and center, ahead of two passengers.
That center seat alone is a pretty good reason to assume this isn’t your average 720S, not that any 720S could be considered average.
In order to test the ergonomics of such a design, McLaren is currently using a test mule based on its latest supercar, the 720S. Not only does it serve to test ingress and egress, McLaren is also using it to test “technologies” that will be used in the BP23. McLaren didn’t say what those technologies are, but given McLaren’s high-tech attitude toward car development, I’m sure they’ll be interesting.
McLaren promises that BP23 will be “the fastest ever McLaren,” although it declined to say how that measurement will come about. “We can say that it won’t be a lap time,” McLaren told me over email, which means you probably won’t hear about it lapping the Nürburgring Nordschleife any time soon.
If you want to pick one up, you’re already out of luck. McLaren will build just 106 examples of the BP23, and they’ve all been sold ahead of time. If all you want to do is see the thing, then you’ll only have to wait until 2019, which is when deliveries are expected to begin.
Things don’t look cramped at all, but it does look rather… complicated.
McLaren