Is the McLaren Senna too tame for you? Do you wish it was more powerful, more expensive, more exclusive and even harder to miss in a crowded lot of other look-at-me hypercars? I don’t know what reasonable person would wish for such a thing, but that’s not important; what is important is that McLaren has delivered on your request, and the Sabre is the result.
The Sabre takes McLaren’s mainstay 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8 and cranks the output to 824 horsepower, with 590 lb-ft of torque. That kind of firepower will reportedly take the Sabre all the way up to a top speed of 218 mph, making this the fastest non-hybrid two-seater McLaren has ever sold. “Two-seater” is the operative hedge here, because the two McLarens that are quicker in a straight line — the F1 and the Speedtail — each have room for three.
McLaren Special Operations will build just 15 Sabres, and they’ll all be a little bit different, as each will be configured specifically to the customer’s liking. Above, we see one with a two-tone indigo and polished carbon-fiber finish with brighter blue accents; another is white and red, possibly as a tribute to McLaren’s grand prix-winning racecars of the ’80s and early ’90s; yet another floating around the web appears to be yellow.
The Sabre’s silhouette closely follows that of the Senna, with a few additions like a Le Mans prototype-esque shark fin bridging the space between the back of the cockpit and the rear wing. Up front, air will be sliced and funneled by a more elaborate splitter with prominent canards. Every single visual cue suggests the Sabre Means Business, though I do lament that all of this has evidently come at the cost of the Senna’s coolest exterior feature — its lower door windows.
McLaren says all Sabres are going to buyers in the United States, apparently because aspects of the car would prohibit it from being sold elsewhere in the world. We don’t know what those specific qualities are, but regardless, it is rare to see a hypercar from a British or European automaker kept out of Europe.
What do you think of the Sabre, then? Personally, I’m struggling to care, as I already found the Senna pretty garish; I’m more looking forward to the Artura, which will be McLaren’s first completely new product in the better part of a decade, rather than yet another patch on an existing model.
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