We already know all about the new McLaren W1. Successor to the F1 and P1, the W1 offers white-hot performance: 1,275PS (938kW), 1,340 Nm (988 lb ft) of torque and a 217mph top speed. But McLaren couldn’t resist whetting our appetites further with a deep dive into its new halo car’s powertrain – how exactly does it accelerate from 0-186mph in just 12.7 seconds?
Answer: with much work from many clever people.
The W1’s MHP-8 motor is four years in the making and it is quite something. The 90-degree V8 has a flat-plane crank, 92mm bore, 75mm stroke, 3,988cc capacity and twin turbos. It revs to 9,200rpm, produces 928PS (683kW) and 900Nm (665lb ft) of torque and its 233PS/litre specific output is higher than any other McLaren. The MHP-8 develops as much as 30 per cent more torque than the old M840T engine from as low as 2,500 rpm.
Add to that an electric drive system – comprising an electric motor with 347PS (255kW) and 440Nm (325 lb ft) of torque – and a 1.384kWh battery that is 90 per cent more powerful and 40kg lighter than the P1’s, and you have serious motive force.
The V8 and electric motor’s total system output gets the W1 from 0-62mph in 2.7 seconds, 0-124mph in 5.8 seconds, and 0-186mph in 12.7 seconds.
But McLaren has never had a problem with performance. Since the MP4 12C went on sale in 2009, the company’s cars have always embarrassed rivals in terms of acceleration. But heart and soul? That was somewhere the old M840T engine was found lacking. Not that the old motor wasn’t a charismatic unit. It had a guttural gurgle at low engine speeds and a powerful roar at high revs, but it lacked the tuneful tick-over and screaming crescendo of a Ferrari unit.
Expect that to change in the W1; McLaren has done almost as much work to inject character into its new engine as it has power – it is an important factor when you’re enticing wealthy buyers to spill millions on your hypercar and not someone else’s.
Alex Gibson, Vehicle Line Director for the W1, expanded on what the company did to extract more heart for its new engine.
“Let’s start with the exhaust manifolds. Long, equal-length runners [headers] play a big part in the acoustic character. That is generating a much more engaging sound character, and we have tuned that, so the crescendo is as you near the red line, so it is an intuitive point at which you shift.”
“It’s an audible cue to shift gears… the powertrain mounting system, we’ve also put a lot of time and effort into the tuning of that, so again, with rising RPM, you get a different vibration signature coming through [into the cabin]. It is soft mounted; it is not rigidly mounted to the structure, so you do have that isolation for comfort driving on the road, but then as you start to dial things up with your right foot, you do get a lot more vibration transfer to the cabin to enhance the experience.
“We also have put a lot of time and effort into transferring intake noise and exhaust noise into the cabin. There’s no artificial sound generation. The tuning has gone into the hardware designs on the engine and then we have worked on enhancements of the transfer path into the cabin.”
Richard Jackson, Chief Engineer of Powertrain, added, “The increase in engine speed is all around engagement and making it more exciting. We didn’t need to add 700rpm to make the power. We did that purely to excite the driver, make them push or have more revs to push towards. So that is a pure excitement and engagement feature.”
McLaren did lots of work to make its V8 capable of more than 9,000rpm. The W1 is the first of the company’s cars to feature hollow valves, and it has a stiffer crankshaft to deal with inertia forces that have increased by 20 per cent.
As well as amplifying the noises you want, McLaren has also reduced the noise of the components you don’t want to hear. Moving the engine’s timing drive to the rear of the motor takes it further from the driver’s ears, reducing unwanted mechanical chatter.
Driver engagement is also one of the main reasons McLaren has stuck with rear-wheel drive when others – Ferrari and Lamborghini – have turned to four-wheel drive.
Four-wheel drive would be “really helpful” for accelerating in a straight line, admits McLaren, but the upsides don’t outweigh the downsides – most notably, the weight. Four-wheel drive adds an awful lot of weight to a car – between 60 and 80kg, depending on the system – and that’s weight you’re always carrying around. Putting a motor on the front wheel would also mean no hydraulic power steering, a widely praised feature of every McLaren.
But McLaren’s deep dive wasn’t done serving up titbits. The following Q&A session revealed that the MHP-8 won’t just serve as the lungs for the new W1. It will also power the new 750S and likely more McLarens to come. And is McLaren reaching the limits of the combustion engine? Will the time for the company to switch to EV soon be upon us?
Not according to the company. Jackson said the McLaren expects to expand its hybrid-power offerings: “When you’ve spent the last four years trying to lift things by the amount that we’ve lifted, I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached the limit. I’m sure there is more that we can do. I think the key thing for the internal combustion engine is where emissions standards go in the future. Certainly, when we were starting this, it looked like they were going to be more stringent than maybe they are.
“So, I think there is a potential for us to continue developing internal combustion engines further, maybe even than we’ve got here in W1. I firmly believe this is the best that can be done today when you consider the power numbers, the weights, the package volume, [and] the efficiency targets.”
As a result, even if you weren’t one of the lucky 399 people to get their names down for a new W1, there’s still plenty in McLaren’s future for you to look forward to.
find more news here.
