McLaren had a plan. It would have three model lines, all sports cars, clearly defined: Sports Series, Super Series and Ultimate Series.
Sales volumes would be modest by most supercar maker's standards but would return a profit, funnelled back into model development. There would be no five-door and certainly no SUV. It would be a pure range of sports cars. Admirable. And that would be enough.
Ten years into McLaren Automotive's life, it hasn't been.
Today's model line-up is defined subtly differently to how it started. There's now the GT series (comprising solely of the McLaren GT) and then the Supercars, in which sit both the McLaren 720S and, curiously, the upcoming Artura, which I thought was a McLaren 570S (Sports Series) replacement.
If you think that's blurry, there are already some 16 models from the past decade that McLaren considers as Legacy cars.
There are some great driver's cars in there, but there has been too little separation between them. They are, to coin a phrase from an anonymous rival CEO, "like a butcher selling different lengths of the same sausage". All twin-turbo V8s, all with the engine in the same place driving the same wheels through a dual-clutch gearbox, and all with a too-similar carbonfibre tub.
That wouldn't be a problem in itself but for their combined sales volumes being so modest that McLaren even had to sell its own headquarters.
The hybrid V6 McLaren Artura was finally going to step out of this mould but with its power output could have started to cannibalise 720S sales, given they're both in the Supercars genre even by McLaren's own definition.
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10 years ago, even five years ago, McLaren's approach certainly seemed to make sense. Power, turbos, paddles etc.
More recently it feels like the market has finally gotten over that stuff a little bit and maybe the actual experience is beginning to matter again. Imagine all McLaren's technical prowess channelled into making a great driver's car. Something modern and brilliantly engineered with an NA engine and manual box.
I always thought the 500 series with a manual box and no turbos, perhaps 100kg lighter and knocking out 450-500hp from an NA version of the McLaren V8, would be the makings of an all-time great, one the best driver's cars ever. A while ago, it seemed like that sort of car was irrelevant. But more recently with the popularity of the Porsche 911 GT3 models, the reintroduction of a 4.0 NA engine in the GTS, the Gordon Murray cars (admittedly low volume, but still very visible), the Toyota GR86 selling out in the UK in about an hour, it seems like the experience matters again.
If McLaren announced a car along the lines I described, I think the internet would go wild for it. Obviously that doesn't guarantee sales. But I suspect it would do very well indeed.
I wish the new CEO well, but I think that McLaren's problems go beyond the structure of the model range or the sameness of most of their cars. In hindsight, the creation of McLaren Automotive probably focused too much on R&D and settting up manufacturing facilities and not enough on how you build and maintain an exotic car brand, which extends to how you build a dealer network, create a rational product roadmap, and handle warranty issues and customer complaints.
A lot of the negativity about McLaren Automotive revolves around these broader brand issues. This negativity feeds into residual values and how people evaluate any of its new models. I think that it's fair to say that when McLaren decided to start building cars, it did not first study what other successful exotic car brands have done to stay going and prosper. It's possible that the company just saw a collection of engineering and design challenges that had to be overcome.
It is a mess of a range. I've no idea what is where now, way too many changes and models over a short time period. Feels like special editions on budget cars Corsa Life, etc.
A clear range, perhaps three models in an obvious hierarchy, and all identifiable over the others? Looks like they're going down a name rather than collection of numbers route, so that's a start. For me the McLaren "face" is a McLaren identity, but it's not particularly nice though.