When McLaren unveiled its latest hypercar, it had a surprisingly similar name for Australian car fans.
The W1 follows in the lineage of the F1 and P1 from the British brand, but in doing so manages to share a name with the HSV GTSR W1. The final model from Holden Special Vehicles became an instant classic and earned a place alongside the greatest Australian-made cars.
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The two cars couldn’t be more different (although curiously both were presented in hero colours of similar shades of orange), with the McLaren a clean-sheet hypercar with a hybrid V8 engine and loads of carbon fibre, while the HSV is modified Holden Commodore with a Chevrolet ‘LS9’ supercharged 6.2-litre V8 and no hybrid help in sight.
So how did a British supercar end up with the same name as an Aussie muscle car? Well, McLaren W1 Project Manager, Heather Fitch, was able to explain.
“ So we obviously have, you’ve got the F1 and the P1, and we’ve got this strong lineage of ‘1’ cars,” ,” Fitch told Torquecafe. “The W1, to explain the bit of the name from our perspective, the ‘1’ obviously got the ‘1’ that’s pretty obvious.
“The ‘W’ kind of represents our world championship winning mindset. It’s this sort of, you know, from [company founder] Bruce [McLaren] all the way up till now. This mindset that we have as a business of just innovating and creating. So for us, that’s where the W comes from and what it means to us. So we weren’t trying to copy or take what anyone else has done. For us, it was a really great way of symbolizing the incredible team we have at McLaren.”
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So, there you have it, apparently just a coincidence, but a fortunate one for McLaren because the W1 is obviously one of the better cars Australia ever produced.
The McLaren P76 wouldn’t quite have the same ring to it…
