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A worthy P1 successor? 1258bhp, RWD McLaren W1 driven on road and track

Tuesday, Jun 30, 2026 12:00 AM

McLaren introduces its third '1' car in its history, with almost 1300bhp and a £2 million price tag There is a recent trend for hypercars to have four-wheel drive, with engines typically in their middle and supplemented by electric motors at the front.And with good reason, because more than 1000bhp is an awful lot for two wheels to deal with by themselves. Some engineers say that to get the best out of so much power, it must be distributed through four tyres.McLaren engineers don’t feel the same. This is the W1, McLaren’s latest Ultimate Series hypercar and the third in the lineage of ‘1’ cars, after the F1 and P1 (and only the second ‘1’ during the new iteration of McLaren’s road car division). Like those, it is carbonfibre-tubbed and mid-engined – and exclusively rear-wheel drive.As with the P1 it’s a hybrid, but this time it can’t be plugged in, because that would make it heavier. McLaren has taken a different path from some of its competitors by attempting to rule out anything that adds unnecessary weight.So, as with equipping it with rear-wheel drive only, it has opted for a mechanical layout that makes the car as light as is realistically possible. McLaren claims a lightest dry weight of 1399kg (I’d prefer a wet kerb weight, but rivals use this number too). Anyway, you can imagine how hard they will have worked for the last kilo.Here’s how it pans out.