In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different,’ said Coco Chanel, the French fashion designer – whose eponymous company now sells ten million identical bottles of No. 5 perfume every year. Such is the challenge in the age of mass production: how to be different.
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Bombarded by marketing and social media, we all know there’s plenty of stuff out there to buy, but what we really value these days is the rare, the exclusive and the different. From limited-edition sneakers to Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with urban streetwear brand Supreme, scarcity marketing works because we all like to think that mass production is only for the masses – and not for us individuals, right?
For the super-premium brands, even ‘limited edition’ doesn’t always cut it. These days, the ultimate purchase is the antithesis of a factory item. Wealthier buyers want unique, hand-finished and personal. If you can have anything you want in a world of overwhelming options, you’re looking for a symbol of individuality, an emotional connection, a way of distinguishing yourself by investing time, not just money.
Nowhere is this truer than in the world of luxury cars. Even though buying an Aston Martin or a Bentley puts you in a very elite group, customers want to order something even more distinct than just a ‘regular’ hand-built £250,000 sportscar.
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This explains the growing importance of personalisation in the world of supercars: all the major brands now have departments that take care of these ultra-customers. Aston has its Q division, Rolls-Royce has Private Office, Ferrari has Tailor Made, and Bentley has Mulliner. But within this super-rarefied, low-volume world, it doesn’t get much more boutique than McLaren. The British supercar manufacturer sold fewer than 2,500 cars worldwide in 2023, so already the chances of one McLaren meeting another coming down the street are vanishingly small. And yet, even here – like an ever-shrinking set of Russian dolls – this tiny, select circle has its own inner circle.
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McLaren Special Operations
It’s called McLaren Special Operations, or MSO. It sounds like an elite SAS unit but it’s actually more like a skunk works. Interesting phrase, ‘skunk works’ – it dates back to World War II, when aircraft manufacturer Lockheed isolated a secret team to develop the P-38 fighter. Its workshop was near a plastics factory which smelled so bad the team nicknamed their outfit ‘the Skonk Works’ (with an O), after an American cartoon character’s backwoods distillery that made moonshine from skunks, old shoes and kerosene.
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The Lockheed parallels are numerous: MSO is detached and, to a degree, autonomous. While McLaren’s high-tech HQ resembles a space-age dental surgery, MSO is based in an anonymous-looking industrial unit a couple of miles down the road. And yes, it smells when you walk in, though thankfully not of skunks. It smells of spray paint and glue and engine oil, like a witch’s cauldron of automotive voodoo.
‘A lot of our customers like the fact that we’re separate and perhaps a little less glamorous than the main McLaren building,’ explains Neil Underwood, MSO’s commercial head. ‘We’re smaller, less corporate and more personal.’
And being personal is what it’s all about. ‘MSO grew out of McLaren Customer Care, which looked after the 106 original F1 road and race cars back in the late Nineties,’ Underwood explains. Dealing with such a tiny handful of customers around the world, McLaren didn’t need a computer database, it just had a black book of phone numbers, and if a car needed servicing they’d fly a technician out to take care of it.
Thirty years later, the customer base may have grown, but MSO is still about relationships and customer collaboration. ‘We work one-on-one with our customers to turn their vision into a reality,’ says Underwood. ‘There really are few limitations – it’s just down to the customer’s imagination.’
Racing ahead of the competition
The only problem with saying ‘we can do anything’ is that a lot of people don’t really know what they want until they’re shown it. That’s why last year MSO created the 3-7-59 project – an elaborate, limited-edition livery for the new 750S supercar. Hand-painted by the MSO team, its modern, graffiti-inspired design celebrates McLaren winning the Indy 500,
the Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans – a unique achievement known as motorsport’s Triple Crown (the project name is derived from the three race-winning car numbers).
What’s interesting is the way the project borrowed from custom car culture and brought traditional skills into the elite world of bespoke supercars. So the 3-7-59 featured a lot of airbrushing, for example, which is done using incredibly fine sprays and is more usually found on the fuel tank of a California chopper bike.
‘The 3-7-59 was by far the most complex car we’ve ever done,’ says Gareth Jones, bespoke paint engineer at MSO. ‘I started many years ago in custom motorbikes and this is almost going back to my roots, but on a much bigger scale. I don’t know anyone else who’s doing it on supercars like we are.’
Likewise the silver-leaf gilding on the car – again, a technique normally associated with custom bikes and even fairground signs. Hand-laying the leaf is incredibly delicate and time-consuming, but the MSO team loved the finished look so they gave it new lease of life, adding small, silvery details to the 750S.
Of course, not every MSO project is quite so ornate – MSO reckons each of the six 3-7-59 cars took more than 1,200 hours to paint, using more than 20 colours. But most customer cars do feature a range of techniques, inside and out, and Underwood reckons their success is simplifying that complexity: ‘I think we’ve made it very easy to bespoke a McLaren with MSO,’ he says. ‘We offer a lot of inspirational “themes” when a new product is launched, to help customers get excited about bespoking their cars.’
These ‘themes’ are used by customers as a starting point. There’s the Spectrum theme, the Strata, the Geohex… trouble is, customers are often fiercely protective of their privacy, so much of MSO’s work goes unseen. However, in a Spear’s exclusive, MSO arranged for us to see a recently completed customer car and it’s every bit as complex, unique and sensational as you would imagine.
It’s a 750S with what’s called the ‘Dyad’ theme, blending two colour schemes. The driver’s side is McLaren Racing Green, while the passenger side is Sherwood Black. As these merge over the car, there are ‘Geohex’ details, painstakingly airbrushed into the colours. The paint scheme is then complemented with ‘visual’ (ie unpainted) carbon fibre details, such as the MSO louvres on the front wings and the rear aero parts.
Inside, the seats match the exterior, with one black Alcantara seat and one green, with special embroidery stitched into the headrests. Even the ignition key is painted two colours – a tiny work of art, created under a magnifying glass like an 18th-century miniature portrait painting.
The customer wanted something unique and personal – a hand-painted, one-off supercar with different coloured seats. Choices were made, decisions agreed, hundreds of hours spent bringing it to life. In a world of mass production, this is about as irreplaceable as it gets.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine issue 93. Click here to subscribe.
