McLaren's design director Frank Stephenson on the nature of supercars

Frank Stephenson is no stranger to natural selection. Taking time out from designing high-performance supercars, the design director for luxury supercar manufacturer, McLaren Automotive, was in Australia to launch a new showroom, in Richmond, Melbourne.

The man, whose car design credits include the BMW Mini and BMW X5, Maserati Quattroporte and Maserati MC12, Ferrari 430 and Ferrari 612, among many others, finds inspiration for new supercar designs in one simple statement: nature does not design in straight lines.

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"Aerodynamics is a black art," says Stephenson. "A Peregrine falcon might not be the fastest bird horizontally, but when it goes into a dive it reaches over 200 miles per hour. You'd think it throws its wings back, to become like an arrow, but it doesn't. It actually curves its wings forward and tilts them a little.

"It does everything that you think would not be aerodynamic, but it makes it even faster. I look at principles like that for active aerodynamics designs."

Nature v nurture

Deriving cues from nature is not a new concept. Many famous designers have looked to the natural world for influence, producing spectacular creations of architecture, timepieces, jewellery, technological gadgets and even fashion in the process. Even more peculiar is the similar origin of some of McLaren's mind blowing technology.

If you can design a car that works really well, you can design a car that looks great as well, because that happens in nature.

Frank Stephenson

"I discovered a fish that goes 20 miles per hour faster than a cheetah and it's going through a much denser medium," says Stephenson. "When that fish is at speed, its scales create a series of air bubbles around it, so the fish is moving through a pocket of air and the water isn't even touching it at all."

"Once you understand how the fish scales work, you can then design material to line the intake ducts where air goes into the engine [of a supercar] and use that to actually pull air in."

Form and function

This unorthodox approach to creating a high-performance vehicle can be seen in various facets of McLaren's vehicles. From the curved NACA (air) ducts either side of a chassis to the side mirror stems protruding from each door; every element is a result of function giving way to form, all in the pursuit of an aerodynamic masterpiece.

When talk moves to the McLaren P1 – a car limited to only 375 final models that were available to buy via invitation only – the designer says the process at McLaren begins with an emotional need.

"Nobody needs a car like this," says Stephenson. "It's a car that you have to emotionally desire or have lust for. There's the appeal of having something very desirable, very unique and exciting to look at. I get goosebumps when I see an E-Type Jaguar. It's absolutely spectacular. It gives me an emotional desire to touch it, to sit in it and drive it. It's man's connection with art."

Model behaviour

"At McLaren we use clay models that you can actually touch and feel; it's a sensory thing. A modeller can create a surface and I can look at it and feel it with my eyes closed and tell if it's right or wrong."

There can be no doubt that the response one gets when first laying eyes upon a P1 is quite visceral – the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The reaction is the same for those lucky enough to own the P1's predecessor, the F1 – a car that saw only 106 manufactured in total, which can now easily fetch up to $17 million on the private market.

Drawing on more than four decades of Formula 1 racing history also gives McLaren the unique opportunity to inject the technology of every new car with the sum experience of that legacy; a process that then encourages the design of the vehicle to take shape.

Natural evolution

"I think form equals function," says Stephenson. "At McLaren we have race car engineers working with the design team, right from the get-go. That allows the designers to stretch – you have a race car engineer instead of a car design engineer, which is a completely different outlook. A race car engineer is hellbent on making something work, even if it's never been done before."

"If you can design a car that works really well, you can design a car that looks great as well, because that happens in nature. Nobody sat down and designed a tiger. A tiger is designed like that so it can stay on top of the foodchain. The car looks the way it does because it works."

It may be hard to believe that a high-performance vehicle, like the P1 – as beautiful as its performance is breathtaking - found its genesis in such simple ways. But for a company like McLaren, the design and feel of every luxury supercar that rolls out of the production warehouse in Surrey, England, has only ever been a natural evolution.

Scroll through the gallery above to see 11 of the most legendary McLaren supercars.

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