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With Honda recently announcing its return to Formula One racing in 2015 as an engine supplier to its long-time partner McLaren, talk of the Japanese automaker’s engines ending up in one of McLaren’s new road cars started to develop.
McLaren’s 12C range of supercars as well as its upcoming P1 flagship are all powered by a twin-turbocharged 3.8-litre V8 engine built by British engineering firm Ricardo. The P1, of course, features a more extreme version of the engine and an advanced hybrid system.
With McLaren’s next road car to be an ‘entry-level’ model, it makes sense that the company would want to use a different engine than that used in its rarefied supercars.
Whatever engine ends up powering McLaren’s next road car, it isn’t likely to be built by Honda, however. In fact, Honda’s renewed alliance with McLaren in F1 is not expected to have any impact on McLaren’s road car business, an insider revealed to Autocar.
McLaren’s next road car, codenamed the P13 (the P1 was codenamed the P12 and the 12C before that was the P11), will target cars like the Audi R8, Ferrari California successor and Porsche 911.
It will get its own version of the carbon fibre monocoque used in the 12C and P1 and, as previously reported, will most likely share those cars’ twin-turbocharged 3.8-litre V8, albeit with output detuned to something less than 373kW.
A prototype is expected to be revealed next year ahead of a sales launch in 2015.
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