McLaren Special Operations — The secret Surrey skunkworks producing Britain's most bespoke supercars

You could be forgiven for thinking that buying a McLaren was a simple process that involves handing over some money in exchange for a car, but you would be wrong. Or, rather, you could do it like that, but you shouldn’t. You should buy a McLaren and then make it yours.

The first step is to choose your vehicle. Perhaps a 750s, for pure power and performance, or an Artura if you want something light and zippy. Maybe a GTS if you need to travel a great distance with some luggage, or the W1 if you fancy the best of the best. But that’s just the beginning, the canvas on which you, the customer, can begin to paint your masterpiece with the help of McLaren’s in-house skunkworks division, the stealthily monikered McLaren Special Operations (MSO). Under the watchful auspices of its director, Jonathan Simms, and his team of craftspeople, your car can become something unique, something so personal as to be one-of-one. Their self-styled remit is ‘the art of possible’. There are McLarens and then there are MSO McLarens.

Inside the Silverstone Wing overlooking the pit straight, a man from the USA is negotiating with a barista about the temperature of his water. It’s got to be ‘just above room temperature’, so there is some delicate balancing going on with bottles from the fridge and a kettle. ‘Just a little warmer, please,’ he says to a university student who looks confused but willing.

That man is one of the many McLaren customers who are here at Britain’s premier racing circuit for McLaren PURE, a showcase day where the company and MSO handover cars, offer test drives, and generally puff out their chest about being one of the world’s top supercar manufacturers. On track, the high-pitched screams of the McLaren Solus GT and its 800bhp V10 shatter eardrums, zipping past and shedding sparks from diffusers that sit millimetres from asphalt. Chasing them, for the first time, is the new W1 hypercar, the latest weapon from McLaren’s Technology Centre (MTC) in Woking, stretching and groaning as it prepares to carry a legacy that includes the F1, the P1, and the Senna.

McLaren is all around. In one corner, customers can have bespoke Tumi luggage tags monogrammed on demand. Elsewhere, the original customisation cockpit for the F1 has a queue of people waiting to sit in it, so they can travel back in time to 1992, and have their trims and pedals adjusted to their bespoke needs. When it's my turn, I wonder whether it's possible for a man of almost two metres in height to feel at home inside. ‘We can make it work,’ says one of the McLaren engineers, before pushing a few knobs and twizzling a few screws. ‘Try now’. As I fold my calamitous body inside, all the sudden everything slots into place. ‘Comfy?’. You bet.

MSO can trace its roots directly to the customisation offered by the F1 and it still, to this day, manages, restores and services the remaining F1s of the world on behalf of their owners, as well as the Sennas, P1s, SLRs, Speedtails and any other lightning quick creation that has rolled off the production line at MTC. Throughout McLaren’s history as a manufacturer of supercars, MSO has been the singular thread that ties it all together.

Overseeing it all is Jonathan Simms, a man who looks like he loves cars. His background encompasses stints with BMW, Mini, Rolls-Royce, and Ferrari restoration company GTO Engineering. He is clear early on in our interview that for him, it has always been about small cars, luxury cars, sports cars and customer experience. He started at MSO just this year, and says that it is the usability of McLarens that has long been one of his favourite aspects of the brand, as well as its heritage.

‘F1 was, I guess, for anyone into cars, was a fantastic thing,’ he says. ‘I live near Goodwood, and when Rowan Atkinson had his, I remember seeing it in the car park with a Costa coffee cup inside. I just thought it was the greatest thing ever. People were actually out and about using these priceless cars. So I think that's the thing that drove it for me, was McLaren's feeling of openness and availability and actually seeing people really using them rather than wrapping them up.’ An MSO McLaren is undoubtedly a special thing, and customisation can be something as simple as a bespoke paint colour, a subtle detail on the exterior, all the way to a fully reimagined interior. In the most extreme cases it can lead to an entirely new car, such as the 15 McLaren Sabres developed for a select group of American clients back in 2021.

That customer experience is key to what MSO offers, Jonathan explains, and it is where McLaren excels. ‘What the clients really want isn’t a car, it’s actually an experience and it’s actually something that, when they park it up or arrive somewhere in it, it expresses something about them that they’re happy to stand by.’

‘If you just deliver technically well-engineered products, you’re only really exploring a fraction of what’s possible. The level of materials and quality you can put into it is ultimately capped, because clients are buying it as a car, they’re not buying it as an extension of them.’

So what does an extension of yourself look like in a McLaren? It can look like a lot of things. ‘The obvious ones, where people's minds always tend to go, is colour. And some of the colours that we get asked to do are truly outlandish. We've had pinks and yellows and they're very bright things,’ he says. Perhaps of greater interest, he notes, is the precision and skill required to make things perfect. ‘Actually what we very often encounter in MSO is clients that, frankly, they don't care how much the effort is,’ he adds. ‘They want their car to be “that” exact shade, or they want “that” material in there. And that's where we see the most outlandish requests; ones where the average person would walk straight by them, because they have no idea that it's taken a year to get that shade of silver exactly to match the original F1 press car, or whatever it might be. That level of detail is actually what is probably most outrageous. You don’t see the man hours behind it, so it doesn’t compute. It's a silver car.’

But that dedication to the customer creates dedication in return. ‘The sense of connection to clients is like nothing else,’ Jonathan says. ‘Three or four weeks ago now, we had Salon Privé and I was picking up the phone to clients, and I was saying “I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could borrow your car for the weekend?” Not only did they all say yes, but then other people had heard we wanted cars for the stand, and they were sending me messages and emails saying, “would you like to borrow my car?”’ Car sales can often be transactional, but not for MSO. ‘They want to have us using cars for events, they want to have us put their cars on social media, because they feel it’s an authentic expression of them. They’re proud of what’s been created.’

I sit down in a room with two engineers from MSO and it is my turn to make my own W1, a car that will sadly only be mine in theory. Questions are asked about my tastes, my hobbies, my passions, and my favourite colours. I’m something of a traditionalist, who takes pride in where I work, so it is soon decided that today we will be making a hypercar for Country Life — a rural W1, if you will.

We begin on the outside, choosing the perfect paint colours, going through a variety of finishes, finding the perfect places to insert a bit of carbon fibre, and splashes of gold where appropriate. The signature Country Life peacock is downloaded from the web, and soon transplanted just in front of one of the vast rear wheels.

Inside, we repeat the process, going through various types of material, from sustainable leathers to synthetic fibres, to wood and carbon touches. Not a single stitch is left unbothered, and the whole process is revealed to me on a large tv screen in astonishing detail, as the car slowly comes to life in front of my eyes.

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Throughout the process, I am surprised by just how involved the engineers are in the design. Not simply ‘yes men’, they steer me from my worst desires, encourage me to try different styles and make every effort to create something outstanding from what is essentially nothing more than the fretted thoughts of a motoring journalist who has had too much coffee. The final car is perfect, more perfect than I could ever have made myself, and the process is so much more than messing around with a car configurator while bored on my lunch break, as I am want to do.

But I shouldn’t be surprised — MSO have 400 W1s to customise and design, so this a process they have long practised for, and they have been in lockstep with the production of the car, which means that ever since the phone started ringing and orders began being placed, they could get on with the job of making a perfect car for every customer.

The motto behind MSO is ‘The art of possible’, but what does it mean? ‘For me, I think it's quite disingenuous for a car manufacturer to say anything's possible, because the reality is, it's not,’ says Jonathan. ‘It's one of the most heavily legislated industries in the world, and for good reason. It's incredibly important that what's going down the road is safe for both the occupants and those around it.’ He stresses that he can’t remove an airbag, but there is almost always a workaround, and that by combining the immense skill and knowledge of his team, as well as the wider automotive industry, they will find it. ‘We’ll listen to exactly what you want and how you want it, and if it’s not directly possible, we’ll work to try and deliver that same result in a different way.’

‘Anyone can sit down with a blank piece of paper and come up with something impressive,’ Jonathan adds. ‘If I give you a list of 100 technical specifications and a price point and a timeline and say “now design me something impressive”, that’s where you see a great designer, because they can work with all of that and still come up with the output that the client wants.’

My mind drifts back to the American and his water. I never asked his name, or what he did, or why he wanted his water to be just a bit warmer than room temperature. It struck me as such an odd request, but then again everyone is different and perhaps nobody is more demanding than a McLaren owner. These are wealthy people, who are used to not only the finer things in life, but the finest things in life. These are people at the top of their respective fields, who associate success with precision. It is no surprise that they crave perfection and are passionate about who they are and what they want. And in MSO, they have a team of craftspeople and engineers who can make it happen. A car that is uniquely ‘them’.