Walking into McLaren’s customisation suite is, I expect, a little like entering the Batcave.
Housed on McLaren’s high-tech campus in Woking, the room is accessed by a flourish of the hand. There are no buttons or handles to get in, just high-gloss white walls all around. Open sesame, and you find yourself in a simplistic room with high-gloss white furniture full of car options, a large screen to showcase how your customised car looks in CGI and, the pièce de résistance, a real-life Senna, McLaren’s latest hypercar.
Named after Ayrton Senna, the car was revealed at the Geneva motor show in March and the first of 500 customer cars will be delivered in July. So McLaren is well under way entertaining the first round of Senna buyers, showing them endless options: paints, carbonfibre, seats, seatbelt harnesses and push-to-drink systems complete with carbonfibre bottle (yes,really). The ultimate goal (other than money-making) is to ensure no two Sennas are the same.
“We’ve seen 150 clients so far and each typically spends a couple of hours with us,” says Jamie Weir, McLaren Special Operations bespoke sales manager responsible for helping people customise their Ultimate Series hypercars. “Most clients come here for their session, but for global Senna customers, we’ve already travelled to Japan, Switzerland, the US and more.
“They know all about the technical aspects of the car already. This is more about sitting in the car, getting an idea of the proportions.”
It’s not just existing McLaren owners who get a chance to buy a Senna, either. “It’s a good way of pulling people in,” says Weir. “It’s 70% existing customers and 30% new.”
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Rachel Burgess
Glad to see from the photographs and the wonderful presentation about McLaren that Rachel will be enjoying her time off, wish her well with the oncoming pregnancy
mysteryx wrote:
are you for real?
mysteryx wrote:
What are you, an arsehole?
Just plain silly...?
I suppose if your spending this kind of dosh then adding changing the spec to what you want is fine, it’s just seems to us mere mortals that spending in some cases the price of a Flat for a Paint job is mind boggling, and why offer the option of deleting the Aircon and then advice the customer not to?, surely that’s not a deal breaker..?