Racing grids are filled with race cars. But they need pace cars, too – or what in Europe they’d call a safety car. These are almost exclusively road cars converted for the purpose, but not just any old road car will do.
That’s why the British GT Championship uses a McLaren. In fact, on the eve of its opening round for the season, the racing series just renewed its contract with Woking to continue using the 540C as its safety car for the season ahead.
The 540C, for those unfamiliar, is the entry-level model in McLaren’s entry-level Sports Series round. It’s based on the same underpinnings as the 570S, 570GT, and the 570S GT4 – six of which compete in the British GT series.
The 540C uses the same 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 as the other models in the series, detuned to produce 553 horsepower – and drive down the price of admission in the process. For better or worse, though, it’s not offered in the United States, where the 570S serves as the base model.
Safety or pace cars are typically equipped with specific features like strobe lights, emergency medical equipment, communications systems, sometimes a stripped-out cockpit with racing buckets and six-point harnesses, and special liveries to identify them out on the track.
They’re called out when the pack needs to be ushered around the circuit – in the event of a crash, bad weather, an impending restart, and the like. The 540C will continue serving that purpose for the UK’s premier GT racing series, just as it did last year.
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