We’ve been covering McLaren’s new hypercar since the firm first started to tease us with images early in 2019. (You can read our most recent story at this link). McLaren Speedtail high-speed testing has just been concluded by the factory earlier this week. Creation of the first of 106 Speedtails, that will be hand-assembled to customer order, has now commenced at McLaren’s facility in Woking, UK. The first unit will be delivered in February 2020.

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Speed-demon

McLaren’s dynamic development was concluded by McLaren’s chief test driver, Kenny Brack (catch the expert wheelman in action at the bottom of this post), at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, USA. The former IndyCar champ and Indy 500 winner took the Speedtail up to its maximum speed of 403 km/h. The final tests in the hypercar’s engineering validation process saw Speedtail prototype ‘XP2’ reach its maximum speed more than 30 times on the space shuttle landing runway. The exercise concluded McLaren Speedtail high-speed testing carried out at multiple test facilities worldwide, including Idiada in Spain and Papenburg in Germany.

Learn more about the open-top McLaren Elva here.

McLaren considers the Speedtail its most technically advanced McLaren ever, it is also the fastest car ever produced by the British company. Fittingly it sits at the pinnacle of the McLaren Ultimate Series. At almost 5,2 metres long, the carbon-fibre-bodied three-seater is the most aerodynamically efficient McLaren ever.

McLaren Speedtail High-speed Testing

The Speedtail is powered by a petrol-electric hybrid powertrain that delivers a combined 788 kW and 1 150 N.m OF torque. McLaren says the Speedtail will sprint from 0-300 km/h in less than 13 seconds. The McLaren-developed battery pack has a power density of 5,2 kW/kg, which is the best power-to-weight ratio of any automotive high voltage battery system. The batteries constantly self-charge when the Speedtail is driven – there is no ‘plug-in’ element – however, a wireless charging pad that trickle-charges and maintains the battery’s status.

Check out McLaren’s hard-core 620R in this post.

In his own words

“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,” commented McLaren Automotive CEO, Mike Flewitt. “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.”

Watch Kenny Brack wrestle, F1 designer, Adrian Newey’s Ford GT40 in the wet in the video below: