McLaren Speedtail is the fastest, most technically advanced model ever – 1,050 PS, 1,150 Nm, 403 km/h!

The McLaren Speedtail, which was unveiled in October 2018, went on a series of tests as part of a year-long developmental programme to further hone the hyper GT. After all, it is supposed to be the greatest McLaren road car ever.

Now, the final high-speed tests saw the Speedtail reach the claimed maximum speed of 403 km/h over 30 times on a space shuttle landing runway at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. This cements the three-seater Speedtail as the fastest McLaren ever made, and it’s also the most technically advanced car the company has built to date.

McLaren CEO Mike Flewitt said: “It’s fitting that the Speedtail’s high-speed test programme concluded with multiple maximum-speed runs at a location strongly associated with pushing the boundaries of extreme performance and engineering excellence. The Speedtail is a truly extraordinary car that epitomises McLaren’s pioneering spirit and perfectly illustrates our determination to continue to set new benchmarks for supercar and hypercar performance.”

To recap, the Speedtail is nearly 5.2 metres long, a deliberate move which McLaren claims to “smoothen out air flow over and under the car, reducing turbulence.” The automaker has yet to offer the car’s full technical breakdown, so our educated guess puts the firm’s 4.0 litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine at heart.

The engine gets augmented with electric motors that bump output to a whopping 1,050 PS and 1,150 Nm of torque, and keep in mind that the Speedtail weighs 1,430 kg dry. McLaren has yet to publish the official 0-100 km/h time, but it only takes the car 12.8 seconds to reach 300 km/h, which is 3.7 seconds faster than its predecessor, the P1. To reach 403 km/h, the Speedtail comes with a Velocity drive mode which lowers the car by 35 mm, retracts the outside cameras, and optimises the hybrid powertrain and rear ailerons.

Additionally, there is also a a McLaren-developed battery pack with a power density of 5.2kW/kg, which it claims is the best power-to-weight ratio of any automotive high voltage battery system. There’s no plug-in element here, so the battery self-charges when the Speedtail is driven, and it will be shipped with a wireless charging pad that trickle-charges and maintains the battery’s status when the car is not in use.

If you’re planning on buying one, well, we hate to break it to you but all 106 units of the Speedtail have been allocated. Production is now underway (hand built, too) at McLaren Production Centre in Woking, UK, with first deliveries scheduled for February 2020. Prices start from £1.75 million (RM9.4 million) a pop.

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