Bad news, hypercar shoppers: Your chance to acquire a McLaren P1 has come and gone. Production of the top-flight McLaren has ended—save for the track-only GTR, which continues into early 2016—after 375 customer cars and 21 prototypes and pre-production models. The P1 now follows the F1 into the history books, and any future purchase opportunities likely will be limited to private sales and the auction circuit. (At least one already sold at the Pebble beach Auctions this year.)
The P1 made its debut as a concept at the 2012 Paris auto show, and in production form at Geneva the following year. The first P1 rolled off the line in September 2013, with a mid-mounted hybrid powertrain consisting of 3.8-liter twin-turbo V-8 and an electric motor, for a combined 903 horsepower and 664 lb-ft of torque. McLaren claimed a 2.8-second 0-to-62-mph time for its new supercar, and sensibly limited the top speed to 217 mph. In C/D‘s own test drive of a 2014 model, our driver reported that the P1 turned him into “a speed-drunk sack of cortisol and adrenaline [with] wildly dilated pupils.”
Understandably, then, demand was strong, even at a price of $1.5 million, and McLaren says that all 375 examples were pre-sold, with each car being custom-ordered. Bookending the series were an Ice Silver example, the first series-production car, and the final car, wearing pearlescent orange livery (both pictured above). The company claims that no two P1s are exactly alike, but did allow that the most popular color was Volcano Yellow.
With the sun setting on the P1, focus turns to what’s next for McLaren’s Ultimate Series, an umbrella the company uses to cover its highest-tier supercars. In a conversation with C/D last spring, McLaren CEO Mike Flewitt acknowledged that there will indeed be a follow-up Ultimate Series model, but not before 2017 at the earliest. Oh, and he also said that buyers will expect it to be even faster than the P1. Naturally.
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