Here’s a blast from the past! Over 20 years ago the Mercedes SLR McLaren was hustled round the Top Gear Test Track by The Stig, but now McLaren’s special MSO division has been tinkering with it. There’s a freer-flowing exhaust, wider tracks, and a new High Downforce Kit (HDK, for short) with wings where there weren’t wings before. Can it go quicker, and by how much?
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MSO, HDK, SLR. You should be aware of all three of those initialisms especially if you’re a Mercedes McLaren enthusiast.
It’s important to remember that the Mercedes McLaren SLR is basically the stopgap between the McLaren F1 and the MP4-12C. So as it stands, it should be a track-day stormer. But… it never really was. It was a GT car and that’s absolutely OK. But nowadays, McLaren Special operations – MSO – has determined the legendary SLR can be even faster. And louder.
In an effort to make it what it should be, the SLR adorns a new badge: MSO. McLaren take their Mercedes lovechild back to the factory, fiddle with it a bit, and now you have an even badder, meaner SLR than ever before. Which is impressive, because the SLR was already imposing in its own right.
Now a decade or so after the SLR was released, new technology exists that allows older cars to be made quite a bit better. Manipulation of the wind is one of those areas of improvement and MSO has this SLR fitted with the high downforce kit, called… you guessed it – HDK. But it’s more than just some parts slapped on the car. The wing is huge, but also reinforced from within the inside of the trunk-lid. This allows the claimed 280 lbs of downforce to brace directly against the chassis, instead of the body of the car.
Below that big wing is the rear diffuser, which would be working its darnedest to create low pressure out of the air running below the car. In conjunction with that back wing, they both work together to help keep the rear end planted on the ground during all those big sweepers. Interestingly, not a whole lot of aero work is done up front. That’s likely because it is still dominated by that epic M113K supercharged beast of an engine. MSO paid no mind to extracting more power from it – if it’s not broke, don’t fix it – but consequently, 10 ponies were picked up with a straight-through exhaust. A few pounds were shaved because of it, too.
Top Gear’s test resulted in a lap time of just 0.5 seconds quicker than the “standard” SLR. But that’s not really the point. The point here is a statement piece. A big, blue, loud, McLaren developed, expensive, statement piece.
