McLaren boss hints at future plug-in

Mike Flewitt, CEO of McLaren Automotive, has told motoring.com.au that at some point the British sports car manufacturer will sell electric vehicles with range-extending internal-combustion engines on board, much as BMW has done with its i8, but perhaps even more extreme.

"If you go far enough out I think you'll find the IC engine becoming less significant, one day potentially nothing more than a range extender," Flewitt said, "that's the way the whole segment is moving."

"10 years from now I think at least half the cars we will produce will be hybrids," Flewitt said. Given that the Sports Series is predicted to make up half of production, that's a clear steer that everything else will be using part-electron fuelled powertrains.

That timeframe would leave out McLaren's 'P14' as its first plug-in hybrid however. Few details have sneaked out about the P14, which is due to surface in 2017. It's the car that will replace the 650S and its variants, and it's anticipated to be faster than the existing car, with insiders hinting that it's likely all versions will use a performance hybrid system similar to that fitted to the P1.

We're also told to expect that the P14 will have far more aggressive active aerodynamics than the 650S, again drawn from the technology used on the P1. It's also a safe bet that it will be lighter, Flewitt saying that he sees McLaren as being involved in a weight-reduction race with its competitors as much as a power race.

Energy recovery is the lynchpin of current F1 regulations, and it's also a significant factor in the drivetrain packaging of McLaren's road cars. While the McLaren F1 team is currently languishing second from the bottom in the F1 constructors' championship after a season from hell, the atmosphere within the road-car building side of the business, McLaren Automotive, is buoyantly optimistic.

The current 650S has spawned several variants, most recently the fire-breathing 675LT (pictured). The new Sports Series is about to be launched – dramatically broadening the brand's appeal to the top end of the sports-car market – and both the P1 and P1 GTR are sold out, despite their seven-figure price tags.

But there is considerably more to come as well...

Some diligent sleuthing suggests that this will feature a larger luggage compartment that will be positioned behind the mid-mounted engine, making it a very obvious candidate for the same "Long Tail" moniker recently applied to the 675LT. If it follows the same logic as the bigger LT it will also be the most powerful version of the Sports Series. However, head of sales and marketing Jolyon Nash recently told us that there will be no power overlap between the Sports Series and the faster Super Series, so it won't have more than the 625PS (460kW) of the 625C. Our bet would be that it ends up as a 595 LT.

Mike Flewitt promises that we will definitely see more Ultimate cars, but warns that it may be some time before we see a full P1 replacement, likely after 2020.

"It won't just be P1-and-a-bit," he told us at the McLaren financial results conference last month, "it's going to have to be another significant technology step."

He also acknowledged there's a good chance we will see other Ultimate models before then, including a possibility of further track-only variants like the P1 GTR.

"Some will be for the track and some for the road, there's demand for both," he said, "the demand for a road car is far bigger – 100 to 500 units, depending on a car. For a track only variant I would say it's 25 to 50, but obviously the engineers have much more freedom when it comes to designing a model that doesn't have to meet compliance testing."

"We do have one car we're working on conceptually at this stage, but it's just on paper and as a virtual model," Flewitt said. "We've got the concept of what we want to do and we're working on the rest."

Will it be quicker than the P1 GTR?

"We would have to be very brave not to get faster," Flewitt said, "that's the way the market tends to move. We'd love to do a car that's cut right down, maybe just 1200kg and with no regard for top speed – great aero, light weight, and a total focus on driveability. But would we get panned in the press if we did that? If we produced a car that couldn't match the performance of the last car?"

That sounds like a McLaren Sesto Elemento to us. Good idea; build it.