15 Best McLarens Of All Time

New Zealand-born racing driver Bruce McLaren founded his eponymous company in 1963, having arrived in the U.K. just a few years earlier (via McLaren). A year later, he'd built his first race car, the M1A, which quickly proved itself to be highly competitive in racing series both in Europe and in America. By 1965, McLaren had decided to enter Formula 1, and by 1968, had found himself at the top step of the podium at the Belgian Grand Prix. Throughout the following decades, the automaker would continue to race in Formula 1, remaining a dominant force and breaking records during an exceptionally successful season in 1988.

It was shortly after this that McLaren decided to make a road car, and the resulting F1 proved to be just as dominant on the road as the company's race cars were on the track. After a period of inactivity from McLaren's road car division throughout the early 2000s, the brand returned with the ill-fated Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, the development of which was hampered by disagreements between the two manufacturers. Following this, McLaren decided to launch its road car division as a standalone brand again, unveiling the MP4-12C in 2011. Since then, the company has launched a slew of excellent driver's cars, each one managing to push the boundaries of road-legal performance further than before.

The MP4-12C was the first production car from the freshly-revived McLaren Automotive division after its years of dormancy, and it proved that the brand had lost none of its shine during its years away. Some reviewers claimed the car was a performance-by-numbers kind of supercar, lacking the soul of its Italian rivals, but then there were plenty of reviewers (and evidently, owners) who strongly disagreed (via Jalopnik). The most impressive part of the MP4-12C's character was how quickly it could swap between personalities. In the same afternoon, it could be blasting around a race track, commuting back to the city in heavy traffic, and then be parked up at a swanky bar while its owner enjoyed a cocktail.

It was equally adept at handling all of those situations, something which many supercars at the time struggled to do. Tellingly, this versatility has become commonplace in most modern supercars, with accessibility often as much of a selling point as pure performance, and it's arguable that the success of the MP4-12C might have contributed to that change in industry attitudes. Pioneering nature aside, the MP4-12C was a solid first attempt at making a mainstream supercar from a brand that had very little previous experience in the matter, and its success helped build McLaren into the company it is today.

If a "regular" McLaren seems a little too common, then the company also has an in-house skunkworks that goes by the name MSO, or Mclaren Special Operations. As well as making one-offs and custom commissions, MSO has also made a limited run of its own car, based off of the 570S. Christened the MSO X, the car raided the 570S GT4 race car's parts bin and stripped out as much of the standard 570's interior as MSO could get away with and still keep the car road legal. The biggest exterior changes (apart from the customizable paint schemes) were the addition of a large fixed rear wing, and a roof-mounted air intake.

The rear wing generated an extra 100 kg (220 lbs) of downforce, and worked in tandem with the revised side skirts to keep the car's Pirelli Corsa tires glued firmly to the asphalt. Inside, the car was equally race-focused, with exposed carbon fiber fittings and minimal luxuries in a bid to shave off every last ounce of weight. Only 10 examples were produced, and all were sold through McLaren Newport Beach in California. Unfortunately for wanna-be owners, every unit was sold before the car was even unveiled in 2018.

The McLaren P1 formed part of the "Holy Trinity" of hypercars when it was released, its surgically-precise handling and focus on pure driver enjoyment setting it apart from its rivals from Porsche and Ferrari. It featured a hybrid powertrain with 903 horsepower on tap, yet all that power was sent to the rear wheels only through a seven-speed twin-clutch automatic transmission (via Top Gear). As well as just being face-meltingly fast, the P1 was also designed to be user friendly at lower speeds, with McLaren taking great care to ensure it could be driven to and from the track just as easily as it could be thrashed at full pelt around said track.

As the spiritual successor to the F1, the P1 had huge shoes to fill, but it delivered on all fronts, and even with a starting price of £866,000 (roughly $1.35 million at the time), all units of the car quickly sold out.

Longevity is a tricky thing to achieve in the world of performance cars. Few manufacturers have succeeded in creating cars that don't need tweaking over long production runs –- the Pagani Zonda and Nissan GTR are two of the only recent performance cars that come to mind. The McLaren 720S might not quite boast the same multi-decade production run as those cars, but it's still a veteran: it remained unchanged from its initial unveiling in 2017 until it was retired in 2022.

Arguably, there was simply no need for it to change, as the 720S epitomized everything that's great about McLaren's gas-powered supercars. With a twin-turbo 4.0L V8 engine mated to a seven-speed dual clutch transmission, the car was brutally fast at full pelt, yet our reviewer found that it remained reassuringly predictable on the road. The steering was excellently balanced, and the cabin was comfortable enough that doing a daily commute in the car wouldn't be out of the question. The 720S was retired in preparation for the impending switch to electrification, but it remains an excellent benchmark for the next generation of McLaren cars.

If anyone thought the 720S was a little too tame, McLaren also offered a more extreme longtail version of the car called the 765LT. It packed a 755-horsepower V8 engine and could make the leap from 0-60 mph in just 2.7 seconds, and 0-124 mph in just seven seconds flat. The seven-speed automatic transmission was carried over from the 720S, as was much of the interior, but various weight-saving measures meant that the car weighed 136 pounds less than a "regular" 720S.

McLaren only made 765 examples of the car, and all of those units were quickly accounted for. With a starting price of $358,000, the 765LT was already one of the most expensive cars in the Super Series lineup. The most discerning (and deep-pocketed) buyers could pay an even higher premium to customize the car further through McLaren's Special Operations (MSO) program, with almost every detail able to be tailored to a buyer's exact tastes. The 765LT represented the most uncompromising yet exclusive interpretation of McLaren's series-production cars, and with its race-ready forged alloy wheels and carbon-fiber aero kit, it looked every bit as wild as it drove.

The original iteration of the Mercrdes-Benz SLR McLaren was a unique and impressive supercar, but it stopped short of being the world-beating performance titan that many had expected it to be (via Autocar). It did, however, spawn several special editions, the most memorable of those being the Stirling Moss speedster. Based on the underpinnings of the SLR 722 Edition, the Stirling Moss stripped away the windshield, windows, and roof, to create a design that drew inspiration from the iconic Type W196S 300 SLR race car of the '50s (via Supercar Nostalgia).

As a result of this slimmed-down design, the Stirling Moss weighed around 170 kg (375 lbs) less than a standard SLR coupe, and it was faster, too, with a top speed of 217 mph and a 0-60 mph time of 3.5 seconds according to Supercar Nostalgia. Production was strictly limited to 75 units and commenced in June 2009, shortly after production of the standard SLR variants had ended. The Stirling Moss marked the end of the rocky partnership between McLaren and Mercedes-Benz, as a few months after production of the car finished, the British brand would go on to launch its own road car division, McLaren Automotive.

McLaren calls the M6GT the "genesis for all McLaren road cars," as it was the first of Bruce McLaren's creations to ever receive a license plate. His goal was to build the fastest road car in the world, although only one prototype of the M6GT ended up being built. McLaren says that its eponymous founder used his prototype to commute to work everyday and attend race meetings, yet it featured plenty of odd quirks, like manually operated lights which had to be raised using finger holes in the pods.

The plan was that McLaren would build a limited run of 250 production cars, and shortly before his death, he struck a deal with Elva Cars to begin constructing them. However, after McLaren passed, the deal was abandoned, and it would take until 1992 before Gordon Murray designed the F1 and the first production McLaren car hit the road.