How to Kill a McLaren (And Why That’s a Brilliant Idea)

If you think your job is tough, try stepping into the fireproof boots of a McLaren bodywork engineer — someone whose daily task is to make a supercar suffer more than a Norwegian fisherman in the dead of polar winter... and then check if it still drives.

In the new video series Behind the Badge, McLaren finally pulls back the carbon-fibre curtain on its most secretive inner sanctum — revealing the brutal gauntlet every McLaren must endure before it’s deemed worthy of wearing the badge. We're talking 450 individual tests, each sounding like something even James Bond’s car would politely decline.

They throw these cars into torture chambers — quite literally — where temperatures swing from -40°C to +50°C in just 90 minutes. Imagine waking up in Lapland, having lunch in Dubai, and ending the day in the Sahara — all on one tank of fuel.

The cars are subjected to humidity, searing heat, deep freeze, constant vibration, choking dust — and let’s be honest, even the Terminator would ask to be sent back to 1984 rather than go through this.

At McLaren, there’s no such thing as “Sorry, the carbon fibre door cracked because it got a bit chilly.” There’s only one acceptable outcome: perfection. And perfection, as it turns out, is born only when the car has been nearly destroyed — multiple times — long before you ever touch the start button.