After the McLaren P1, came the P1 GTR. Take the 915-horsepower hyper-hybrid and make it a 1000-horsepower track monster. Well, as the production run approaches its end, McLaren decided to deliver six road-legal cars... which somehow are even more extreme. The "P1 LM" debuted at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last weekend. The power unit is unchanged, but it's 60kg lighter thanks to wafer-thing carbon buckets from the legendary old F1 GTR, removing the onboard air jacks, using plastic for the windows and using titanium for bolts and fixings. There is also the sort of steering wheel you get on McLaren's GT3 racing cars (itself based on the design for the 2008 MP4-23 formula 1 racer), while bigger front and rear wings mean 40% more downforce... as if it was lacking before. Despite being fit for registration plates, the only concession to luxury is standard air conditioning. The work to upgrade and legalise the car has been done by the same company that converted the F1 road cars into racers and back again in much the same fashion back in the 1990s: Lanzante. So you see, while the cars are delivered through MSO, this bit of history pillaging is not entirely McLaren's fault...
As part of its debut, McLaren sent the P1 LM up Goodwood Hillclimb for a timed run, in the hands of Kenny Brack. The former Indy 500 winner hustled an F1 GT Longtail up the hill last year, so even discounting his heroics in a GT40 at a wet Revival race, he's well qualified to set a record-breaking time for road-legals cars... as you can see above. It may be a bit of a stretch to call it a production record, given that it's essentially a run of six one-off cars so to speak, but you can't argue with it being road legal, so when it shatters the old record of 49.27 set by the NISMO GT-R N-ATTACK [sic] in 2014, it still counts all the same.
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