Are we at the top of the supercar S-curve?

"The McLaren F1 and P1 were ‘holy sh*t!’ cars. The W1 isn’t the same."

So McLaren has launched not simply a new flagship supercar but, in its own words, “the real supercar”. A supercar 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 top-flight 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.

Do we still care about speed in a straight line? Not as much as we used to. Lap times are now more interesting (always have been, in fact), to which end McLaren says the W1 is three seconds quicker than a Senna around the in-field circuit at Nardò, which is about as long as Silverstone.

When you unpack that nugget, the pace of the W1 begins to dawn on you. The Senna – with its mad wing, essentially a GT3-lite – is frighteningly quick at flat chat. Honestly, it’s a bit unhinged.

Gapping one by three seconds over 3.8 miles is wild for a car without lairy fixed aero all over the shop. Look at the pair and you wouldn’t think the ground-effect W1 makes more downforce. But drop it to the deck in Race mode and it does.

The car’s driveline also bears unpacking and in due course we will do so via what I hope will be a full road test. But here’s a taster: the radial flux electric motor in the W1 musters 23bhp per kilogram, where the P1’s managed only seven.

If you translated that ratio to the petrol-slurping bit of the powertrain, the twin-turbo V8 would make around 5000bhp. The thing is the engineering equivalent of Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch.

The e-set-up is inspired by that of the current Indycars but the motorsport cues don’t end there. Tiny McLaren, which makes fewer than 3000 road cars a year, is simultaneously involved in Formula E, Indy and Formula 1 (where it appears to have kiboshed the Red Bull supremacy).

No other manufacturer can currently marshal such enviable racing resources for the task of developing a supercar as complex as the W1. It follows that arguably nobody is better placed to execute such a car, including Ferrari.

I eagerly await the day the W1 gets to blow our minds from behind its squared-off wheel, because the truth is that so far it… sort of hasn’t. Blue-blood hypercar drops are a curious event. They’re occasional but amazingly dependable. Every 10 years, a fresh one.

Once a decade, our jaws are dropped by a revised brand manifesto made physical, with a vom-tastic asking price. I can remember seeing the P1 concept at the 2012 Geneva motor show.

With its biomimicry and that stunning backside, nobody could stop talking about it for weeks. It had star power.

These days, there isn’t quite the same buzz. One reason for this is that cars such as the W1 now find themselves sandwiched.

From below they are harried by the latest Porsche Turbos, 765 LTs and 296 GTBs – cars that on the road are practically as quick, if not a little quicker in less than ideal conditions, and cost just a tenth of the price.

Downward pressure then comes in the form of cars such as the Aston Martin Valkyrie and the Red Bull RB17 Newey Special, which are way more spectacular on track and offer owners an experience that is tangibly different.

Meanwhile, the Michelangelo angle is being covered off by the likes of GMA’s T50 (has an atmo V12, is 400kg lighter, features cabin details to die for) and, to some extent, Singer, with its art-on-wheels DLS, co-developed with Williams.

Which leaves a trad totem supercar like the W1 where? Sold out, of course. If each of the 399 gets a bit of personalisation, that’s a tidy £1 billion revenue. But what about the W1 from the viewpoint not of collectors or MTC accountants but the enthusiast observer?

The F1 and P1 were ‘holy sh*t!’ cars. The W1 isn’t the same. Not sure why. Are we at the top of the supercar S-curve?