McLaren’s hyper hybrid

It’s still quite a novelty to write about a world-beating British sports car in the present tense. Until the last couple of years, the glory days of the ‘Made in Britain’ sports car was firmly in the past, and the super- and hypercars gathering droll-encrusted reviews on Top Gear all had pronounced German or Italian accents.

The turnaround has been thanks to motorsport (a sector where Britain has been leading the world for some time, mostly under the general public’s radar) and, in particular, to one of the industry’s most charismatic, if not downright intimidating individuals: Ron Dennis of McLaren. For a company that only retails four car models, McLaren Automotive is clearly punching above its weight, with its two main products — the MP4-12C and, this year’s addition, the P1 — gaining favourable comparisons with Ferraris and Porsches.

The man charged with making Ron Dennis’s dreams of sports car domination a reality is Paul Mackenzie, executive director of McLaren Special Operations, whose most recent role was overseeing the design, development and launch of the McLaren P1, the company’s first tilt at the very top end of the performance road-car market.