The First McLaren Speedtail Has Left The Building

The wait is over: McLaren has, at long last, revealed the Speedtail – its new hyper-GT, designed to traverse continents at rapid pace. So far, though, we’ve only seen it sitting still, and that’s not what it’s meant for. So what does it look like in motion?

It may yet be a while longer before we see it moving at the speed of which it’s said to be capable. (McLaren claims a top speed of 250 mph, or 402 km/h.) But in the meantime, the dealer in Newport Beach has shared this brief clip of the first new McLaren Speedtail starting up and leaving the factory in Woking – at a painstakingly slow crawl – with designer Alex Alexiev behind the centerline wheel.

For those just joining us, the Speedtail is the latest model in McLaren’s Ultimate Series, following the more track-focused Senna, the hybrid P1, and the legendary McLaren F1. It revives the latter’s iconic central driving position in a three-seat cabin, shrouded in a streamlined shape whose design has already divided opinion more than anything the British supercar manufacturer has produced to date.

Technical details have yet to be released, but it’s said to pack a hybrid powertrain capable of producing 1,035 horsepower. And from the audio track on the footage below, it certainly emits the low burble we’ve come to expect from the V8 engine that’s powered everything McLaren Automotive has produced since the MP4-12C that launched the marque in 2011.

Whatever the engine, whatever the sound, and whatever the speed, this may be as close as most of us will ever get to Woking’s latest. McLaren will only produce 106 examples, and they’ve all been spoken for – at a rate of about $2.7 million apiece – since long before the model was ever revealed.