A trio of hybrid hypercars got together for the weekend. You won’t believe what happened nextOpen link in new tab

A trio of hybrid hypercars got together for the weekend. You won’t believe what happened next

Ars Technica|Jonathan M. Gitlin

Alex Bellus

The car in the middle is a McLaren P1. The two cars either side are Porsche 918 Spyders.

Earlier this week we published our review of BMW's i8 plug-in hybrid sports car. You should still read that piece, but the short take home is that it's an amazing car and you ought to buy one if you can. However, it's not the only game in town when it comes to plug-in hybrid sports cars, merely the cheapest. Ferrari, McLaren, and Porsche have all recently brought such cars to market. While they may beyond the reach of most of us, Alex Bellus (a good friend of Cars Technica) just conducted a photoshoot with a McLaren P1 and not one but two Porsche 918 Spyders. And because both Alex and Imola Motorsports (not to mention the cars' owners) are nice people, they've allowed us to share the results.


The two cars embody the two different corporate philosophies at work at McLaren and Porsche. The McLaren P1 brings to the road a lot of know-how and technology McLaren have learned from Formula 1, with a drag reduction system just like the F1 car (a button on the steering wheel changes the rear wing's angle of attack to let you go faster in a straight line). Porsche's 918 Hybrid also has racing roots—the naturally aspirated V8 engine is derived from the mid-2000s RS Spyder prototype racer—but by all accounts is a more thoroughly developed road car, no doubt a result of Porsche's much longer experience building road cars, as well as the fact that its larger production run (Porsche is building 918 918 Hybrids, compared to 375 McLaren P1s) gave the company a bigger budget to work with.
Sadly we've yet to log any time behind the wheel of either of these hybrid hypercars (or a Ferrari LaFerrari for that matter), so if you (or someone you know) happen to have one in your garage and want to see it featured on these pages, don't be a stranger.