RETURN OF THE MAC

I’m kicking myself. The boys from McLaren Special Operations have just rocked up to the test track in a sun-bleached So-Cal VW ‘Squareback’ – the VW Variant, to us Brits – and I’m looking distinctly underdressed in my plain-Jane Volvo estate. If only I’d brought the Mustang instead.

I should have expected this. As we discovered when we ran a feature on McLaren employees and their classic cars in Octane 161, these people are proper petrolheads, doing jobs that mean more than just paying the bills. Today, gathered at a Surrey test track we have three key members from the skunkworks that is MSO, based in an anonymous industrial unit a few miles away from McLaren’s spectacular Technology Centre: MSO heritage manager Tom Reinhold, workshop manager Merrill Burton and senior SLR technician Matt Brown.

All three of these guys are proper car enthusiasts. The Squareback is Merrill’s; Matt has a Focus ST170-equipped Mk1 Escort track car, and Tom a 1927 Austin Seven Ulster. More significantly, both Merrill and Matt worked on the original Mercedes SLR McLaren from its earliest development phases and have been with MSO since its inception. ‘I recruited Matt during a surfing holiday,’ recalls Merrill with a grin.

This band of brothers is the core team behind the car we’re about to drive. Dubbed ‘SLR by MSO’, it’s a heavily reworked version of the 2003-2009 supercar that was somewhat Marmite in its appeal. Have MSO’s tweaks rendered it any more palatable?

BACK IN THE day, the SLR seemed something of an oddball. Technologically impressive, of course, but curiously un-McLaren like in its weight and bulk. Just over a decade earlier, the company had unveiled what to many is still the