Wildly fast P1 LM becomes fastest road legal car ever to run the hill climb at Goodwood.
McLaren and Lanzante Motorsport chose the 2016 Goodwood Festival of Speed to debut the P1 LM, based on the McLaren P1 hypercar and essentially a road-going version of the race-spec P1 GTR, and is the fastest and rarest of all the P1s made.
Naturally, the car is the kind that’s able to accrue speed at an ease that makes the mind boggle, and shortly after being unveiled for the public, it was piloted up the 1.7km Goodwood hill climb course in a blistering time of 47.07 seconds – the fastest of any road car in history – by Swedish driver Kenny Bräck.
There’s a lot that sets the P1 LM apart from the already otherworldly standard P1. It’s twin-turbo V8 hybrid powertrain benefits from the improvements made when converting it for track-only use during the development of the P1 GTR, producing the same bonkers 735kW but while running on regular petrol from the pumps.
This was achieved through some engine calibration wizardly matched with tweaked boost pressure. But of course the P1 LM isn’t just about out-and-out power, it has undergone some serious lightening to yield a weight reduction of around 58kg from the already featherweight P1 GTR.
Even the engine lining has been switched to gold – this is for a couple of reasons: for the material’s properties as a superior heat reflector and as a not-so-sublte throwback to the F1 which also had its fair share of gold lining.
There will only be 6 units of the P1 LM ever to be built, the first one being the development prototype in grey - the one you see here tearing through the Goodwood hill climb and setting a new record in the process. The remaining five will wear an orange paint finish and be delivered to some very lucky customers.
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