British specialist Lanzante is best known as one of the only outfits with the know-how to properly look after a McLaren F1, as well as being the de facto place to go to make something road-legal that never should have been.
It can now add drift builds to its list of expertise, as it’s announced it’s collaborating with New Zealand drifter ‘Mad Mike’ Whiddett to create a wild McLaren P1-based drift car that’ll get its first outing at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. Yes, you read that right, a P1.
McLaren P1 ‘MADMAC’ drift car – front
Known as ‘MADMAC’, the car is apparently “designed around bodywork of the track-focused McLaren P1 GTR.” A video posted by Whiddett seems to suggest it’s genuinely based on one of the 58 P1 GTRs produced, or at least one of the 375 P1 road cars.
If so, then it’s certainly a platform Lanzante is familiar with, having converted a number of P1 GTRs to road-legal spec, as well as producing a run of five roofless P1 Spiders.
The project apparently came about when Whiddett visited the Lanzante stand at last year’s Festival of Speed, with the two parties striking up a conversation around a possible collaboration. Whiddett, known pretty much universally as ‘Mad Mike’, is renowned for his outlandish drift cars. In the past, these have included a quad-rotor powered Mazda MX-5, an 800bhp Lamborghini Huracan, and last year’s ‘787D’, a bonkers custom build with bodywork resembling the Mazda 787B Le Mans racer and the world’s first five-rotor Wankel engine.
Mike Whiddett sits in the McLaren P1 ‘MADMAC’ drift car
As a New Zealander, Whiddett is also a fellow countryman of McLaren’s founder, Bruce McLaren.
The MADMAC project, which has also seen involvement from California-based specialist car dealer O’Gara Coach, will debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, taking place between 11 and 14 July (that is, if we can see it within the vast cloud of smoke it’ll generate). It’s currently at Whiddett’s ‘Mad Lab’ workshop in New Zealand, being made sideways-ready.