You’ve all heard of wrapping a car; it’s a rather easy and cost effective (kind of) way to change the appearance of one’s car. If done properly, it can make the car look simply epic. However, not satisfied with the standard material used for wrapping, McLaren has decided the game needs changing.
Flying Without Wings
Yes, that’s right – McLaren has created a ‘feathered’ body wrap, which consists of no less than 10,000 carbon-veined feathers. As you can imagine, it wasn’t an easy process to make this rather unique wrap. It takes a gargantuan 300 man hours to create and is done purely by hand. It will be available on the 570GT model as of today through the MSO service.
The reason for the feathers is to create even less drag than a standard 570GT, making it as slippery through the air as ever. Don’t think that those feathers will bring a large weight though – despite there being 10,000 of them, the whole wrap adds just 2.5kg. Each feather is 7cm long and are coated with a pearlescent lacquer to give the wrap that nice, shiny finish.
Rob Crane, Biomimicry Specialist for McLaren, explains in greater detail: “Our engineers and designers have long been inspired by nature in our aim to create the lightest and most aerodynamic shapes on the road. We call this biomimicry. And it was on a beautiful day walking around our Woking campus that one of us looked up at the birds circling our lake, then picked up a feather from the ground and placed it on a car… That turned into a conversation with the craftsmen and women at MSO that led to the creation of the Feather Wrap.”
The new wrap is available from today, for one day only…as it’s April’s Fools Day!!!
