The flame came out sideways, not backwards. That was the first surprise. The second was how big it was: a white-orange ball wider than the wheel beside it, rolling across the asphalt from the flank of a purple McLaren P1 in a dark car park.
The purple P1 we found
We filmed it from just behind the right rear corner, at night, in a car park lined with trees and race transporters: a Toyo Tires truck, a pink-liveried pickup, flatbeds and team vans. Staff in dark jackets and lanyards stood around waiting for the next blip. The car itself is anything but standard:
- Wing. A huge fixed rear wing on tall mounts, far bigger than the road P1's active wing.
- Exhausts. Big pipes exiting through the side of the rear bodywork, next to the wheel, which is where the flames come from.
- Rear end. Open bodywork showing the engine and its plenum, with a deep finned diffuser underneath.
- Livery. Purple with Lanzante and O'Gara logos on the engine cover, a graffiti-style signature and the line "#DREAMBIGHUSTLEHARDER".
The Lanzante logo is worth a second look. Lanzante is the British firm that ran the McLaren F1 GTR that won Le Mans in 1995, and it later became known for converting McLaren's track-only P1 GTRs for road use. We can't tell you this car's history from a few seconds of video, so we won't say it is one of those. What we can say is that it looks the part.
What the McLaren P1 is
The P1 was McLaren's first hybrid hypercar, built from 2013 to 2015 in a run of 375 cars. It pairs a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 with an electric motor for a combined 916 PS, and alongside the Porsche 918 Spyder and LaFerrari it formed the "holy trinity" of hybrid hypercars of that decade.
"Rotary Mac"?
We posted the clip with the caption "Rotary Mac" and a #tokyoautosalon tag. The first part is a joke: the P1 is a V8 from the factory, and nothing we filmed suggests anything else is in there. The hashtag points to the week when Japan's wildest builds come out: Tokyo Auto Salon, held every January at Makuhari Messe. We can't confirm from the footage that this clip was filmed there, so treat the tag as a mood, not a dateline. Our Tokyo Auto Salon guide has the dates, tickets and how to get there.
The verdict
Japan does not do supercars quietly. Some nights it is a Koenigsegg in traffic, as in our Koenigsegg Agera RSR in Tokyo story; some Sundays it is a Countach under the ginkgo trees at Meiji Jingu Gaien. This night it was a purple P1 turning a car park into a fireworks display, one blip at a time.
Photos and video: One Breath Pictures.
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