The new McLaren Senna: what's in a name?
There’s nothing about McLaren’s latest something-more-than-a-supercar that’s not astonishing, so it says something about the potency of the name McLaren has chosen that said moniker is so newsworthy. It’s called Senna, the McLaren Senna.
As in Ayrton Senna, for many the greatest Grand Prix driver of them all, who won all three of his world titles at the wheel of McLaren F1 cars only leaving when the team failed to secure an engine that would make it competitive against the dominant Williams team.
Senna lost his life in May 1994 in only his third race for Williams, which explains why his name and colours remain so attached to McLaren.
More recently, the company’s GT racing cars (the sports cars that is, not the F1 cars) have established a relationship with Bruno Senna, Ayrton’s nephew. And it’s Bruno’s mother Viviane Senna who runs the foundation established in Senna’s name to bring educational opportunities to underprivileged children in his native Brazil.
The foundation has in the past licensed the name to the likes of Ducati and TAG Heuer; McLaren is expected to announce details of an on-going relationship with the family and the foundation early next week. It’s all very logical. But still…. “Senna”?
Maybe it’s a case of this still relatively young company searching for its identity. McLaren Automotive’s first car was delivered only six years ago. That one was called the MP12C, since then there has been the 650S the 675LT, the P1, 540C, 570C, 570GT and 720S…There may be others, I lost track a while ago.
Given that each also started life under a codename - the Senna’s was P15 - maybe someone just thought a name might be easier to remember; there is a lot going on at McLaren Automotive right now.
Given that the name Senna is synonymous with a preternatural ability, could it prove a cross to bear for the new McLaren model? Not as far as pure speed is concerned. McLaren has gone out of its way to let folks know this is a track-focused car, more a piece of sports equipment than an automobile if you like.
That’s a tad disingenuous given that the ￡750,000 car is also road-legal; McLaren would not have already sold all 500 it will build were it not. What's the point of having the fastest car around a ring of slick tarmac if you can’t also park it around the back of Harrods?
The emphasis on the track performance also explains its looks. The 12C, 650S and 720S are three stages in the evolution of the “regular” kind of supercar that sits somewhere in the middle of McLaren’s offer. That bugged me for a while until I realised just how lovely the 720s is.
The Senna night not be quite as pretty as the 720S, but that’s perhaps because it’s a slave to the aerodynamics that produce colossal amounts of downforce, enabling it to get around circuits quicker than any other track car that’s also a road car.
I think it goes also deeper; we are now entering an era of supercars designed in the minds of supercomputers. If you still watch F1 you can’t fail to have been struck by the alien complexity of the front wings and aerodynamic detailing behind the front wheels of the current cars.
That is pure CFD: computational fluid dynamics, the language supercomputers speak when they’re talking aero. Computers of course can’t know, so don’t care, if it looks good or not.
I suspect the looks of the Senna come from that same place and the humans in McLaren’s design department haven’t had a lot of say in it, as they clearly did with the 720s.
However, in terms of the performance, the acceleration, the braking force and the speed into and through corners, the Senna is capable of demanded a rational approach to the design.
McLaren is not giving away any performance numbers yet (other than it will do considerably more than 200mph, suggesting the particular track on which this car is “focused” is Monza, home of the highest top speeds in F1).
It is said that the Senna will pack a 800PS (that 789bhp in imperial) twin-turbo V8 and weigh just 1198kg with all its fluids drained, meaning it has 668PS for every tonne of weight, which is around half that of an F1 car.
That explains details like that enormous rear wing; the fact that the bottom half of the doors are glazed to allow a better view of the track and also why the instruments will fold away, out of view at the push of a button. The only luggage space is for two racing helmets and your matching pyjamas if you’re lucky.
There is much more to fetishise. The Senna really is a performance geek’s dream and it is all beautifully manufactured and assembled, as is the way with McLarens these days. Not that practically matters one iota here.
The Senna will be quite astoundingly fast for those talented enough to go there. That’s on brand, certainly. But Ayrton’s appeal didn’t just lie in his ability to lap Monaco seconds faster than anyone. He was a deeply handsome man with a charisma and sex appeal that transcended his sport.
I don’t know about you but when I need to have something’s charisma explained to me it’s usually because it’s just not there in the first place...
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