More than two decades ago, Mercedes and McLaren joined forced to create the world’s fastest, wildest-looking gran turismo.
Here in 2024, it’s rare that Mercedes and McLaren are mentioned in the same breath outside of talk about Formula 1. McLaren’s sports car lineup picks up where Mercedes-AMG’s drops off; a. McLaren’s vehicles are mid-engined supercars, while Mercedes’s sporty machines have engines ahead of the driver — except, of course, for theTwenty years ago, however, the two carmakers joined forced to create a machine that defied expectations and helped rewrite the supercar rulebook.
So it was all the more surprising that Mercedes-Benz went on to build it — with a little help from its friends over at McLaren.— and with barely more than 100 units hitting the streets over more than seven years, calling it a “production” vehicle was stretching the definition — British company McLaren had been racing for decades, ever since founder Bruce McLaren first put a car bearing his name into Formula 1 competition at the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix.
Murray— father of the McLaren F1 and boss of the McLaren Cars division that created it — wound up playing a massive role in the development as McLaren worked to satisfy the demands Mercedes-Benz wanted met. In order to give the car proper weight distribution, the engine had to be placed behind the front axle, moving it back nearly three feet from the bumper – thus stretching the hood and front end out to obscene proportions.
But the SLR didn’t have all the attention to itself when it arrived on the scene. It arrived hot on the heels of the Ferrari Enzo, the latest Prancing Horse supercar and heir to the legacy of the F40 and F50, which merged Formula 1-inspired tech, a naturally aspirated V-12 and a sequential manual gearbox in an utterly exotic, race car-like body.
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