Mad Mike has finished building his McLaren P1 drift car

MadMac is finished! Well, it looks that way on the outside. As you’d expect with a bespoke, one-off drift hypercar, the testing phase didn’t exactly run smoothly. As in, ‘the 1,000bhp engine is so powerful it’s twisting the chassis subframe’ not-smoothly. 

Given the car will soon be spending most of its time enveloped in a thick cloud of tyre smoke, it’s worthwhile taking your time to appreciate the details now. MadMac is obviously a P1… and yet somehow so much more extrovert. It’s a P1 that’s been at the protein shakes, the ‘roids, and whatever the Incredible Hulk fell into that turns him all green and angry.

Up front there’s dive planes and a race-spec splitter. Vented front wheelarches are joined by a widebody kit from RocketBunny in Japan, fabricated just for MadMac. Front aero wheels are chosen, because everything looks better on aero wheels. 

The butterfly doors follow a 650S’s simpler cooling channels rather than the P1’s more complex ‘doubleskin’ design, but there’s extra cooling via gratuitous holes cut into the bodywork behind the cabin, which gives a tantalising glimpse into the rotary engine bay. 

And have you ever seen a more random exhaust arrangement on a car? One artillery piece pointing out the back, and two smaller anti-aircraft guns shooting from the rear deck. 

On initial test runs the team discovered that the 3D-printed gear-lever mount wasn’t tough enough to withstand the forces of loaded-up gear changes – it sheared off in Mike’s hand. 

So did the hydraulic handbrake mount, so both have now been remounted with metal foundations. With just minor issues like that and a major oil leak to content with, it’s now all hands on deck to get MadMac back to full fitness and ready to be flown over to the UK for Goodwood…

Photography: Rowan Horncastle