After an exceptionally exciting—and stressful—finish to the 2024 Formula 1 season, McLaren secured its ninth Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The season featured six race wins and 21 podiums throughout the season, and the title came down to the final race, seeing McLaren triumphant after a 26-year hiatus from winning the Constructors’ Championship.
The return to the Championship shows once again McLaren’s World Championship mindset, which dates back over 60 years to the brand’s founder, Bruce McLaren, and now includes12 Formula 1 Drivers’ Championships and nine Constructors’ Championships.
The 60-year record of success has instilled a ferocious sense of competition in every team member across both McLaren Racing and McLaren Automotive, and in the push for performance, many of McLaren Racing’s technical achievements in motorsport have crossed over into Automotive’s supercars.
The most obvious: the brand’s lightweight carbon fibre chassis. After McLaren made carbon fibre’s revolutionary F1 debut in the 1981 MP4/1, the brand pioneered carbon fibre for the road with the 1992 F1 supercar, and to this day it makes up the chassis of all McLaren road cars.
In 1998 McLaren became the first team to develop a hybrid F1 car, much before it became the sport’s default powertrain. That pioneering electrification knowledge was put to good use when the brand unveiled the first hybrid hypercar, the McLaren P1, and more recently in the McLaren Speedtail and the current McLaren Artura.
Now, McLaren has done it again with its newest Ultimate Series car, the McLaren W1. It features F1-inspired ground-effect aerodynamics, front suspension, brake ducts, and steering wheel controls, among other things.
Later this week we’ll have the opportunity to see the McLaren W1 in person for the first time, and dive deeper into the F1 engineering behind it. If McLaren’s F1 success is any indication, it’s going to be one hell of a supercar.