Just imagine for a moment if McLarens were made not in Woking, but Modena. I’d not now be facing having to pepper the next few thousand words with ‘Long Tail’, a term devoid of flow, poetry or romance, but instead be relishing the prospect of punctuating my text with as many references to ‘Coda Lunga’ as I thought I could get away with. What is it about the Italian language that makes everything just sound better? Still, had they been built in Germany they’d have all been ‘Langhecks’ which is even worse. At least to me. I think.
It has been known for over a century that long cars have a greater capacity for aerodynamic efficiency. Look at the Sunbeam 350HP with which Kenelm Lee Guinness raised the Land Speed Record to over 133mph in 1922, and almost as eye-catching as the 18.8-litre Sunbeam Manitou V12 engine at one end is the long and tapering tail at the other. More recently long tail designs have been employed by racing cars both to increase the aerodynamic leverage on a rear wing and also create a larger surface area for negative pressure to be developed under the car.
Not that these McLarens have especially long tails, or that the name was adopted in homage to some wildly successful McLaren racer of yore, unless it was referring to the long tail version of the F1 GTR which took second place in the 1997 FIA GT Championship. Then again, the Porsche 911 GT3 wasn’t named after the now famed category of road-derived sports racing cars because said category didn’t even exist at the time, but rather because it already had a GT1 and GT2.
