The reaction to McLaren’s new identity has been loud and largely negative. Having spent two years as its head of brand, I don’t think the objections are really about a logo.
In 1970 the Rolling Stones were apparently booed off stage. The crime? They played Brown Sugar. The crowd had never heard the song (it wouldn’t be released until the following year) and they were there for the established hits. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, I was reminded of it last week by the reaction to McLaren’s rebrand. The reaction has been considerable, subjective and largely negative. Ironic when McLaren is somewhat defined by its refusal to stand still. A business that has spent more than sixty years making things better, faster, lighter and more efficient, often by taking something already extraordinary and finding a way to reimagine it as something better still.
And yet here they are, in the midst of a social media pile-on over a change to their visual ID.
When Jaguar had their moment, I thought it fairer to wait a year before offering judgement. I hadn’t been in the room. McLaren is different. I spent two years as Global Head of Brand and was involved in the new identity before leaving at the end of 2025. I have to be careful about what I say, and wouldn’t want to second-guess those now responsible for it. But I can discuss the publicly released work and its compatibility with the particular kind of brand I believe McLaren is.
A familiar kind of luxury
The new identity features a revised wordmark, expanded colour palette and a visual system shared across Racing and Automotive. The familiar Papaya, Speedmark and kiwi (both speedy and ‘fat’) remain, alongside a refined heritage shield. The wordmark is inherited from the family garage in New Zealand, including its distinctive underlined C. It resembles a cedilla, a typographic mark that changes the pronunciation of a letter. Here it serves no such function. An appealing history, although the contemporary expression is rather more familiar.
Scroll through the Instagram films and social content, and you encounter the established vocabulary of luxury. Restrained typography, immaculate art direction, carefully controlled colour and the studied visual repertoire that has served fashion and hospitality for decades. One viral post called it the Chanel-ification of McLaren. The internet has also made much of the apparent similarities to Marriott Bonvoy and the unrelated construction company McLaren, none of which is particularly helpful to a business apparently reaching for distinctiveness.
A racing team that made road cars
For me, McLaren has always been a brand defined by its acts and deeds. Its reputation was established by the races it won, the cars it built and the extraordinary lengths its engineers pursued in search of marginal gains. There is something fundamental about the direction in which McLaren’s culture developed. This was a racing team that decided to make a road car, rather than a road car manufacturer wondering what it might take to go racing.
For people arriving from Ford, JLR or other volume manufacturers, I imagine it can be a difficult culture to understand. Conventional product development begins with the customer, market opportunity and a proposition around which a vehicle can be designed and sold. McLaren’s approach is different. In Woking it’s decided what the car should be capable of, what the driver should experience, and then the engineers go to work.
The commercial proposition emerges from the result of those efforts (hopefully). The purest expression of this was the F1, followed by the P1 and W1. Three machines answering a similar question for successive generations. Icons not simply through design or craftsmanship, but because of what they could do. In brutal numbers, but also in how they made drivers feel.
When I joined McLaren, it was emerging from difficult years, blighted by reliability problems, complicated naming and a perception that the brand was cold and clinical…cold and clinical? I never thought it was. My view was that the stories it told had simply become detached from its history. We set about reconnecting them, from Senna’s legacy and the Le Mans victory in 1995 to the people and great firsts informing the W1. Grounded in a brand idea centred on Authentic Racing Spirit, reconnecting the road car business to Racing, from Bruce to Lando, and giving us an almost ludicrous number of stories to tell. All that no other manufacturer could claim.
The commercial value of fandom
During this period, I often considered who the brand was actually for. The owners? The fans? The people working at MTC? I concluded it was for the enthusiasts, including those with absolutely no prospect of owning a car. The bedroom wall, LEGO set, forums, pub discussions and cars’n’coffee gatherings are the crucible where desire is formed. Where reputations are established, debated and celebrated.
There is a parallel with McLaren Racing. Its extraordinary commercial transformation under Zak Brown began well before the team’s return to winning championships. Sponsors weren’t buying success on track (yet); rather, they wanted access to one of the fastest-growing, most passionate fan bases in sport.
The same principle applies to the road cars. Buying a McLaren means acquiring something already meaningful to an enormous number of people. The car makes a statement rooted in the achievements of the business and the knowledge of its community. It suggests a preference for what the car can do over what its presence on the driveway communicates to the neighbours.
Fundamentally a McLaren is an active object, rather than merely a trinket or signifier of wealth. Of course, some people buy one because it is expensive, exclusive and looks good. Their money is as good as anyone else’s. But they benefit from a reputation accumulated by people whose relationship with the brand is quite different.
Put simply, the enthusiast community helps create the meaning that ownership subsequently confers.
The Chanel-ification of McLaren
In pounds and pence terms, the Chanel-ification might work. There are reasonable arguments for pursuing a wider luxury market. But this is not new. McLaren has always been a luxury brand. Its price point, scarcity, engineering and extraordinary products established that position long before the arrival of a more conventional luxury aesthetic. It doesn’t need a sans serif typeface, restrained colour palette or collection of leather goods for permission to operate in this arena.
However, adopting the visual conventions of luxury raises questions about whether they communicate the qualities that created McLaren’s value. And, more worryingly, if they can sustain them.
Alongside the new identity McLaren has produced several narrative films. Performance remains central to the story being told, while the aesthetic increasingly draws on conventions developed by businesses whose propositions are rather different. Tom Ford, Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel have developed extraordinarily successful expressions of luxury. Borrowing their visual language doesn’t reproduce the conditions that made them successful. Any more than fitting a body kit, oversized alloys and a sport button to a Land Rover suddenly turns the mud-plugger into a performance car.
The enthusiast reaction to all this is not positive. My feeling is that the objections aren’t simply about change. They suggest an anxiety that the change is a signifier of something more fundamental happening. That the culture born out of racing, which produced some of the most extraordinary cars the world has ever seen, may no longer occupy quite the same place in Woking.
Bruce and the garage
Which brings me back to the historical inspiration for the wordmark. The McLaren family garage is a fascinating part of Bruce’s story. It was where he developed his early engineering interests and built the car that gave him his first racing victory.
But when Bruce came to England and later established his own racing team, he could have adopted the identity of the family garage.
He chose not to.
He dropped the possessive S (and the cedilla) and created a new logo for the organisation he was building. We cannot know what Bruce would make of the business now carrying his name. But his decision invites a distinction between preserving a brand’s historical artefacts and understanding the ambition that created them.
Start me up
And perhaps that is why I thought of the Rolling Stones. By 1970, the Stones had an extraordinary catalogue. They could have spent their careers playing those songs, occasionally releasing a ‘Best of…’ or a ‘…Live’ album. No doubt their management would have been delighted. Instead, they continued writing music, risking the crowd’s judgement (and more booing), but the hits kept coming. Songs subsequent generations would demand to hear.
McLaren has its own extraordinary back catalogue. Cars, drivers, tragedy, intrigue, heroes, villains, priceless artefacts, astounding achievements and world records. A history of an organisation doing things that have never been done before (many of which haven’t been done by anyone else since).
The challenge for a brand with so much history is to find the moments from its past that provide a North Star for its future, rather than playing restomod with stories of questionable provenance.
And so, as the dust settles on the new identity, we don’t know whether it will unlock new markets or alienate existing audiences. Or neither. Or both. Only time will tell.
What we do know is the Stones didn’t become the Stones by turning into a tribute band. And Bruce didn’t build McLaren by reproducing a version of the family garage in England.
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