RICHARD LANE
Testing, testing
P1 is the W1’s forebear and had more ‘wow’ factor on its debut
So McLaren has launched not simply anew flagship supercar but, in its
own words, “the real supercar”. Asupercar created with a “World
Championship mindset”; “multiple patents filed”. It’s a punchy press release, the copywriters at the MTC mothership understandably milking the chance to go as big as they damn well please.
The W1 is the latest product in a dynasty of topflight supercars second only to the lineage that started in 1984 with the Ferrari 288 GTO. From its newly designed Ricardo V8, the W1 (doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it?) develops almost exactly twice the power of an F1. In the age of so-called hyper-EVs and their unslaked appetite for performance, we’ve become blasé about four-figure horsepowers. But still. With 1258bhp, the W1 is twice as powerful as a supercar so fast that it took most of us until about 2010 before the 6.3sec 0-100mph (as tested in these pages, 11 May 1994) started to feel, not ordinary, but at least cognitively graspable. It’s a measure of how much the landscape has shifted that the W1’s claimed 12.7sec time to 186mph is now met with a shrug of the shoulders and a ‘not bad’. I guess that is inevitable when a Rimac has already been timed doing the same thing four seconds faster.