McLaren Senna

Rob Melville's studio was given an aerodynamic target and a weight target and very little else, and the Senna is what happens when nobody is allowed to overrule those. The shape is a teardrop cabin with the mechanical parts of the car hung off it and then cut away wherever air needed to pass. The double-element rear wing is enormous and hydraulically actuated, doubling as an airbrake. The diffuser is double-element too, the front splitter is deep enough to be a liability on driveways, and the rear deck is mostly louvres because there was no room left for panel. The most divisive choice was the optional glazed lower door panels, which turn the doors into windows and let you watch the road pass under your elbow. Reaction at launch was brutal and almost entirely aesthetic, and McLaren's answer never changed: the car looks like this because the lap time required it. Several years on, the shape has aged better than the argument about it, which is the usual fate of function-led design.

The strangest thing about the Senna is that its racing version was finished before the road car was shown, and then never raced. McLaren GT at Woking built a full GTE-specification Senna, had factory and customer teams lined up for WEC and IMSA and drivers evaluated, and was days from a global launch at Geneva in March 2018 when the group lost its nerve. Formula One trouble, internal turmoil and programme cost killed it. What appeared instead was the Senna GTR, a track-only car for 75 customers that was essentially the same machine with the racing intent stripped out, still wearing Richard Mille branding and ACO-regulation position lights it had no further use for. The road Senna itself was never eligible for anything, because a car making 800 kg of downforce fits no class written for road-derived racers. McLaren's actual customer racing in the period was the 720S GT3. The competition record the name carries belongs to Ayrton Senna: three world championships with McLaren, in 1988, 1990 and 1991.

Putting a driver's name on a car is a risk, and McLaren took the biggest one available. The Senna family agreed, with a contribution to the Instituto Ayrton Senna attached, and Bruno Senna, a McLaren ambassador, did much of the public work around the launch. The 500th build slot was held back from the allocation list and auctioned to McLaren customers, raising 1,916,793 pounds for the Institute, which funds education for children in Brazil. The reception was not uniformly kind. A large part of the enthusiast internet decided the car was ugly and said so at length, and an argument about whether the name had been earned ran alongside it. The car's answer arrived through games rather than through debate: the Senna launched in Forza Horizon 4 and has appeared across the Forza series since, which put it in front of an audience that will never see one on a road. For a car built to be lapped, it became famous mostly for being looked at.

Living with a Senna is less fraught than the car's appearance suggests, which is the standing surprise of McLaren ownership. The mechanical package comes from the same family as the 720S, so it inherits that car's known items: coolant hose clamps that loosen and seep, radiators mounted low enough to collect stones, and hydraulic suspension accumulators that need attention on a schedule rather than lasting forever. The 12V battery flattens in a week or two if the car sits unplugged, and since most Sennas sit, a trickle charger is standard equipment rather than an accessory. The 2019 cars fall under the fuel tank corrosion recall, which is a documentation question rather than a mystery. Carbon bodywork is the expensive part of any accident, and the splitter sits low enough that a badly judged ramp counts as one. None of it is unusual for the type, and the cars that get used report fewer problems than the cars that are stored, which is worth taking seriously before buying one as an ornament.