McLaren MP4/2

Among the 101 McLaren entries in the MotorJury library, the McLaren MP4/2 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the McLaren MP4/2, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the McLaren MP4/2 reads like this: quoted output is : varying setups i.e. turbo boost levels 650-850 bhp (race trim) - 800-960 bhp (qualifying trim); kerb weight is recorded at 540 kg. Worked together, those figures give roughly 1204 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the McLaren story

Within McLaren's own catalogue the McLaren MP4/2 sits alongside the McLaren M15, the McLaren M16, the McLaren MCL33, the McLaren MCL34. The record names the McLaren MP4/1E as its predecessor and the McLaren MP4/3 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to John Barnard / Steve Nichols / Gordon Kimball / Alan Jenkins / Tim Wright / Bob Bell / Hans Mezger.

On the record

The McLaren MP4/2 also has a competition record: 22 recorded wins from 48 starts and 2 ( , ) championships. A race history changes how a car should be valued — competition machines appreciate on provenance, not depreciation curves.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the McLaren MP4/2 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.