McLaren

Soaring oil prices might be putting the squeeze on margins for airlines around the world, but that hasn't deterred United Arab Emirates national carrier Etihad from splurging more than $20 billion on orders for Boeing and Airbus aircraft.  Read More

So the traffic's a little heavy and you don't feel like taking the SLR McLaren roadster BRABUS to the shops. The solution: take the high-performance smart fortwo "tender". The yachting term has made its way into the automotive world via the latest offering from German performance specialist BRABUS. On World debut at the 2008 Geneva Motor Show, the BRABUS “tender to the SLR” package consists of two identically painted and equipped vehicles - an aerodynamically enhanced, finely tuned, 211mph SLR McLaren Roadster BRABUS (the yacht) and the BRABUS ULTIMATE 112, a drop-top two-seater based on the latest smart fortwo Cabrio that puts out 112 hp and achieves 0-62mph in under ten seconds (the tender).  Read More

January 9, 2008 Vodafone McLaren Mercedes has presented the team’s 2008 Formula 1 car at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. The MP4-23 was completed just in time for the event where drivers Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen were joined on stage by Pedro de la Rosa and fellow test driver Gary Paffett to unveil the car.  Read More

September 12, 2007 Now here’s something very much out of the ordinary. This unique black Ferrari 360 Modena carbon fibre stretch limousine will undoubtedly spin heads when it’s unveiled at the European Limousine and Chauffeur Show in the UK this month. The fastest limo in the world according to owner Dan Cawley, the 23 feet long, 400bhp vehicle achieves 0-60mph in less than six seconds and has a top speed of 170mph.  Read More

July 18, 2007 With McLaren now hot favourites to win both the driver and constructor World F1 title in 2007, the announcement of the new model Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Roadster takes on new dimensions. The exquisite roadster is built in the same factory as the cars driven by Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, and combines all the F1 high-tech you can imagine, a 626 bhp AMG kompressor V8 producing an almost obscene 780 newton metres of torque and the long-distance attributes and sophisticated atmosphere of a classic Gran Tourismo car. The most telling F1 gift in constructing the open-top 332 km/h masterpiece is the systematic and intelligent use of high-tech materials for the body and safety technology. As in the Coupé, the bodyshell of the high-performance Roadster is primarily carbon fibre, as are the front-end and rear-end structure, the passenger cell, the swing-wing doors and the bonnet. Compared to steel, the high-tech material represents a weight saving of around 50 per cent, which is why the Electrohydraulic braking system employs massive brake discs made from carbon-fibre reinforced ceramics. There’s even an airbrake in the boot lid that extends automatically when you hit the anchors at high speed.  Read More

July 17, 2007 An intriguing tale of industrial espionage and general skulduggery at the highest level is breaking out in the world of Formula One. Amidst an investigation of one of Ferrari's chief mechanics, who is under suspicion of sabotaging the two Ferrari F1 cars before the Monaco race this year, it has emerged that the McLaren-Mercedes team's chief designer was in possession of a large amount of highly classified documents detailing the design of the 2007 Ferrari F1 cars. While it may be some time until the truth emerges, this scandal in the top ranks of racing's richest competition is threatening to overshadow the jaw-dropping debut season of McLaren's Lewis Hamilton as the defining moment of the 2007 Formula One GP season.  Read More

June 30, 2007 Forbes magazine released its annual Celebrity 100 list recently, noting that golfer Tiger Woods banked US$100 million in the last year, becoming the first athlete in history to do so. Woods is the perfect corporate ambassador, being handsome, charming, beautifully spoken, dominant in a major TV sport and black, giving him a commercial edge in that his sponsors are perceived to be inclusive of minorities. SportBusiness International Magazine once forecast that Woods could be the first athlete to earn a billion dollars in a year given he had all the boxes ticked and global TV sport was emerging as a gargantuan money spinner given that it’s the only time-critical news you can pre-sell. Remarkably, a new sports star has rocketed from obscurity who will almost certainly push his way onto next year’s Celebrity 100 and might well elbow his way past Woods as sport’s highest money earner in the next round of sponsorship negotiations. Unknown three months ago, Lewis Hamilton’s sporting career has begun more spectacularly than any other in history … in any sport.  Read More

May 5, 2007 Mercedes-Benz has opened up a new dimension in refinement for open-top super sports cars with the news that it will release a roadster version of its SLR McLaren super sports car in September. Using carbon fibre technologies developed from its Formula 1 cars, the roadster will be endowed with a high degree of safety as well as extreme torsional stiffness at the same high level as the coupe version. Performance will also be identical to that of the coupe, with a maximum speed of 332 km/h and an AMG V8 compressor engine delivering 460 kW/626 bhp. Developed and built at the McLaren Formula 1 complex in Woking (UK), the company refined the aeroacoustics of the new car in the team’s wind tunnel to ensure conversation is still possible at well over 200 km/h with the top down.  Read More

January 16, 2007 The launch of the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team was predictably huge – with Vodafone is joining as Title Sponsor and Official Mobile Partner, the event took on gargantuan proportions on a bespoke circuit around the Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias in Spain, coincidentally the homeland of their stellar signing, newly crowned world champ Fernando Alonso. Alonso and new teammate Lewis Hamilton form one of the youngest driver line-ups in the history of the sport and Hamilton in particular must have wondered just how big F1 would be when the pair unveiled the new livery in two MP4-21 race cars in front of a crowd of more than 150,000. This was followed by the unveiling of the 2007 car, the MP4-22. Tomorrow, the 2007 challengers will conduct a shakedown test at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia. Vodaphone released three commemorative edition phones for the affair.  Read More