“Just press a button and KAPOW! At 217mph, it’s the nippiest road car in the world…”
The nippiest road car in the world! What is this shit?
That’s how Robert Hardman introduced the McLaren P1 to his Daily Mail readers. Yes, we’re asking the same question: WTF is Robert Hardman? And why on earth did McLaren pick him as one of the very lucky few to be given an early drive of the company’s latest hypercar?
Hardman’s specialty subject appears to be the Royal family. And from where we sit giving him the keys to the P1 is a right royal cock up by McLaren.
His article is written for people who would struggle to point out the difference between a wheel and a tyre and pretty much trivialises the P1 as some sort of gimmick rather than the masterstroke of engineering it should be aspiring to be labelled.
We get that a new audience is probably reading about a car they will have forgotten all about by the morning, but so what. Does McLaren really want or need Daily Mail readers to give a toss about the P1?
Add this to the bizarre handling of the P1’s Nürburgring secret-but-it’s-a-record-we-promise lap time and you have start asking what is in the water at the McLaren Technology Centre.
[Source: Mail Online]
3 replies on “McLaren’s marketing dept must smoke cones”
I particularly like how every (amateur) photo in that article has him in it.
It could only have been more tragic if he published a selfie with Ron Dennis in the background.
It’s tragic. I’m sure someone inside that building is looking at the ‘regular’ journos wailing and gnashing their teeth like this is some sort of victory. “We’re reaching out to a whole new audience,” etc…
Surely the vanilla tactic for a new 1.4m supercar is simple: TopGear, Pebble Beach, a couple of F1 rounds and a photo in the mens room of the Casino de Monte Carlo?
[…] don’t mean sells out in the sense that McLaren has loaned out its P1 hypercar to Big Ted for review purposes, or that it’s the subject of a fairy tale Nürburgring lap record, we mean all 375 examples […]