The new McLaren Senna

The McLaren Senna has been designed and built with one single goal: to be the most extreme track-concentrated car on the road. The new supercar bears the name of legendary Formula 1 driver, Ayrton Senna, honouring its status as the ultimate McLaren track car. Legalised for road use, but not sanitised to suit it, the new Ultimate series disrupts McLaren’s trademark breadth of supercar daily usability; instead it provides the purest connection between driver and car. With its ultra-lightweight construction, carbon fibre chassis and body panels, the Senna’s aggressive appearance epitomises McLaren’s ‘form-follow’s-function’ design philosophy. The McLaren Senna enjoys a power-to-weight ratio of 668PS per tonne, with its maximum power of 800PS (789bhp). This statistic immediately underlines the performance credentials of the newcomer to the McLaren Ultimate Series, a product family introduced with the McLaren P1™ that is reserved for the rarest and most extreme McLaren cars. “The McLaren Senna is a car like no other: the personification of McLaren’s motorsport DNA, legalised for road use but designed and developed from the outset to excel on a circuit. Every element of this new Ultimate Series McLaren has an uncompromised performance focus, honed to ensure the purest possible connection between driver and machine and deliver the ultimate track driving experience in the way that only a McLaren can,” says Mike Flewitt, Chief Executive Officer, McLaren Automotive. The carbon fibrechassis that forms the core of the McLaren Senna is a further development of the structure that underpins the McLaren 720S and the strongest monocoque ever built by McLaren for a road-legal vehicle. Every body panel is made from carbon fibre, in line with a relentless focus on the weight of every individual component that has resulted in the McLaren Senna being the lightest road-legal McLaren since the iconic F1 road car, at just 1,198kg. The 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged M840TR V8 engine at the heart of the McLaren Senna is the most powerful road car internal combustion engine ever created by McLaren.  Lightweight internal components reduce mass in the powertrain and combine with ultra-low inertia, twin-scroll turbochargers and electronically controlled wastegates to deliver lightning-quick throttle responsiveness. Braking power is delivered by carbon-ceramic disc brakes which McLaren describes as the most advanced ever fitted to any of its road cars. The force delivered through these brakes is prevented from locking the wheels under braking with Pirelli P Zero Trofeo R tires, mounted on motorsport-derived, single-lug alloy wheels. The third model introduced under the McLaren Track22 business plan, the McLaren Senna will be hand-assembled in England at the McLaren Production Centre. Production will be limited to 500 vehicles, each costing from over NZ$1 million.