There were precious few manufacturers that sustained long-term commitment to the GTE ruleset, Aston Martin, Corvette, Ferrari and Porsche, plus a few that came and went. Interestingly, there was one that never appeared but did have a couple of shots at putting cars on the grid for ACO rules racing during the decade and more of the GTE era: McLaren.
McLaren defined the original GT1 era with its mighty F1 GTRs in both short and long-tail form, with the brand then absent from both the road and racing GT fields until the advent of the MP4/12C road car in 2007 and its GT3 race version in 2010.
The new road car came courtesy of a new entity, Mclaren Automotive, with lofty ambitions. Its racing activities were contracted out to another new body, McLaren GT, operating out of the brand’s old F1 HQ in Woking. It was run by a team born out of the CRS outfit under Andrew Kirkaldy with a management and ownership team including Chris Goodwin and Chris Niarchos.
With the original MP4/12C GT3 replaced by the incoming 650S GT3 in 2014/15, and competitive success coming quickly for the new car, thoughts turned to a parallel GTE programme.
Publicly, little is known about the programme, but DSC is aware that Ilmor (The British high-performance engineering company) completed extensive work on a GTE spec engine. A GTE-spec chassis was also completed and is understood still to exist!
The 650S GTE programme was canned though, in the wake of a potential ‘convergence’ between GT3 and GTE regulations that eventually came to nought.
McLaren’s flirtation with GTE had another chapter to be written, however, and this time the programme went much, much further.
The programme got underway during a period where McLaren was looking to bring its GT operations in-house, a process that started messily and ended badly, in court.
Putting that part of the saga aside though, the genesis and the reality of the second abortive McLaren GTE programme starts with a simple truth.
The car is based on the McLaren Senna, and the proportions of the Senna road car, arguably the least attractive of all of the McLaren Automotive road cars, were defined almost entirely by the prevailing GTE regulations.
Beyond that, the programme proceeded quickly and with significant external industry and commercial interest.
High-profile commercial partners were identified, factory and customer teams for the WEC and IMSA were successfully courted, factory drivers were evaluated and the car was fully designed and built, ready for a global launch at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2018.
More than one source suggests that the WEC programme involved two teams, one set to race the Senna on Michelins, and the other, in a period where tyre choice in GTE Pro was free, on Pirellis.
And then it all went wrong!
Internal turmoil within the Mclaren Group was rife, the Formula One effort was in disarray, voices were suggesting that a top-class prototype effort would cost no more than the GTE programme and somewhere, someone’s confidence snapped.
Up until just a couple of days before the launch the groundwork was being done to prepare an audience for the global ‘reveal’. And indeed that launch happened, but with the car rebranded, not as a GTE race car, but as a limited production Senna GTR, a track-only car outside of competition.
Look closely though and the signs were there for all to see of the reality.
With Richard Mille backing on the rear flanks of the car, and, in particular, the presence of ACO-regulatory position lights on the side of the car. Make no mistake, this was a close to complete GTE-spec race car.
The GTR found customers of course, but the canning of the race programme exposed a lack of confidence at Mclaren. There followed a period of consolidation around the funding of the brand’s Formula One programme that would have knock-on effects on this and other programmes.
And arguably it set the pattern for uncertainty that has continued to date around the ‘will they, won’t they’ pattern of whether McLaren will finally commit to Hypercar. This in a period where, ironically, Mclaren is finally set to debut in the FIA WEC, in GT3 machinery!
