Who Makes McLaren? Where McLaren Is From, Who Owns It, and the First McLaren
McLaren cars are made by McLaren Automotive, in Woking, England, and McLaren is British, not American. It was founded by the New Zealander Bruce McLaren, whose racing team dates from 1963, and since 3 April 2025 the road-car company has belonged to McLaren Group Holdings, owned by CYVN Holdings of Abu Dhabi.
The first McLaren road car was Bruce McLaren’s own M6GT prototype of the late 1960s; the first built for sale was the F1 of 1992. The McLaren to drive in Los Angeles is the Artura Spider, at $1,350/day.
| McLaren, in one table | Answer | What kind of fact that is |
|---|---|---|
| Who makes McLaren cars | McLaren Automotive | The road-car company. The Formula 1 team, McLaren Racing, is a separate business. |
| Where McLaren is from | Woking, England | British. Head office at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, Surrey. |
| Who founded it, and when | Bruce McLaren, 1963 | Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd, founded by a racing driver from Auckland, New Zealand. |
| Who owns it | CYVN Holdings | Abu Dhabi. Deal completed 3 April 2025, under the new McLaren Group Holdings. |
| First McLaren road car | M6GT, late 1960s | A prototype Bruce drove himself. Never put into production. |
| First McLaren built for sale | F1, 1992 | 106 made in all, road and racing versions together, until 1998. |
| First McLaren Automotive car | 12C, 2011 | The company was relaunched as a standalone maker in 2010. |
| The McLaren in Los Angeles | Artura Spider | Ours, black, at $1,350/day. |
Who makes McLaren cars, and who owns McLaren today?
Two companies carry the name, and the question almost always means the first. McLaren cars are made by McLaren Automotive; the Formula 1 team is McLaren Racing, a separate business with its own shareholders.
McLaren Automotive is a British manufacturer based at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, with the McLaren Production Centre beside it; the company’s history runs from McLaren Cars, founded in 1985, to McLaren Automotive, relaunched under that name in 2010. McLaren’s launch release for the Artura Spider says each car is hand-assembled at the McLaren Production Centre in Woking, Surrey, England. When you ask who makes a McLaren, the answer is McLaren, in Surrey.
Who owns it is the part that changed recently. In December 2024 Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings agreed to buy the automotive business from Bahrain’s Mumtalakat, and on 3 April 2025 McLaren announced the acquisition complete. CYVN placed McLaren Automotive, with its other British car interests, in a newly created company, McLaren Group Holdings, led by Nick Collins; in the same move McLaren was merged with Forseven, a British electric-car start-up CYVN also owned. CYVN, which belongs to the government of Abu Dhabi, also took a non-controlling stake in McLaren Racing.
So the one-line answer to “who owns McLaren” is: the cars belong to McLaren Group Holdings, which belongs to CYVN Holdings of Abu Dhabi; the Formula 1 team has CYVN as a minority shareholder. The cars are still built in England.
Where is McLaren from? Woking, England, and it is not American
McLaren is from England. The road-car company, its factory and the McLaren Technology Centre are all in Woking, a town in Surrey to the south-west of London, and the road cars are built there. McLaren is a British company, owned since 2025 from the Gulf, founded by a New Zealander.
That founder is the first source of confusion. Bruce McLaren was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 30 August 1937, and came to Europe on a bursary to race in Formula 1. McLaren is sometimes called a New Zealand company because of him; it never was one, because the team he founded was set up and run in England, and the idea for his first road car took shape at its factory in Colnbrook.
The American question has better grounds than most people realise. Bruce won his first grand prix in the United States, the 1959 United States Grand Prix, at 22, which made him the sport’s youngest winner until 2003; his loud, orange McLaren Can-Am cars won the North American series five seasons running, from 1967 to 1971; and McLaren still races in IndyCar today. Plenty of America in the story. The company is British.
Who founded McLaren, and when?
Bruce McLaren founded it, in 1963. McLaren’s own account of its founder sets out the order of things: he formed Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd in 1963, while he was still driving for another team; the team took its own cars into grand prix racing in 1966; and in 1968 Bruce himself won the first of McLaren’s Formula 1 races, the Belgian Grand Prix. In 1966 he had also won Le Mans, in a Ford GT40 shared with Chris Amon.
He did not live to see a McLaren on sale. On 2 June 1970, testing the team’s new Can-Am car at Goodwood, he crashed when the rear bodywork came loose and was killed, aged 32. The team went racing a fortnight later in Canada anyway, and won.
What carried his name afterwards became three businesses, which is why “when was McLaren founded” has three correct answers:
1963 for McLaren itself, the racing team, today McLaren Racing. 1985 for McLaren Cars, the company Ron Dennis set up for road cars, which built the F1 and then went dormant. And 2010 for McLaren Automotive, which replaced McLaren Cars as a standalone manufacturer, separate from the racing side, and has made every McLaren road car since.
What was the first McLaren car, and which is the oldest?
It depends on what you count, and each of the three honest answers is a real McLaren.
The first McLaren road car is the M6GT. In the late 1960s Bruce McLaren set out to turn the M6 Can-Am racer into a coupé for the road. The plan to build enough to race it was never completed, only a few M6GT prototypes were finished, and one became his own everyday car, registered OBH 500H. It never went into production. In 2026 McLaren Special Operations rebuilt one from the original drawings and moulds, in a cream it calls Colnbrook White after the factory where Bruce had the idea, and McLaren Special Operations describes it as “a tribute to the very beginnings of the company”.
The first McLaren built for sale is the F1. Unveiled in Monaco on 28 May 1992, it was McLaren’s first purpose-built road car: chief engineer Gordon Murray’s design, with a central driving seat between two passengers and a 6,064 cc BMW V12 behind them. Production ran from 1992 to 1998, 106 cars in all, of which 64 were sold as road cars, and a racing version won Le Mans outright in 1995. It is also the most valuable McLaren by a distance, and the McLaren auction records are all F1s.
The first car from McLaren Automotive is the 12C. When the company returned in 2010 its first car, launched as the MP4-12C and soon simply the 12C, went on sale in 2011: a mid-engined, twin-turbo V8 sports car, and the start of the range that runs to the Artura today.
So the oldest McLaren road car is the M6GT, and the oldest McLarens of any kind are the racing cars of the 1960s; the first McLaren Formula 1 car, the M2B, raced in 1966. Two names you will read elsewhere are not McLarens at all. There is no McLaren “F7” and no “F11”; the car those stories usually mean is the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a Mercedes developed with McLaren and built from 2003 to 2009.
Three companies, one name
McLaren Racing is the team Bruce founded in 1963. McLaren Cars (1985) made the F1. McLaren Automotive (2010) makes every McLaren road car on sale, the Artura among them. Most confusion about McLaren’s age, its founder and its first car comes from treating the three as one.
The McLaren you can drive in Los Angeles: the Artura Spider
The idea Bruce had in Colnbrook, a car with the engine behind you, as light as it can be made and built by people who build racing cars, runs today through the Artura. Ours is the Artura Spider, at $1,350/day: a twin-turbo 3.0-litre V6 and an electric motor behind two seats, 700 PS, or 690 bhp, in McLaren’s own figures, 0–62 mph in 3.0 seconds and 205 mph, with dihedral doors and a one-piece hard top that folds in 11 seconds.
It is made in Woking by McLaren Automotive, under the ownership this article began with, so it is the whole story in one car. Here it is also the easiest McLaren to live with for a day: it can slip out of a hotel drive on electricity alone, its doors open close to the body in a tight garage, and with the roof folded the V6 is right behind your head on Mulholland. Drive the Artura Spider in Los Angeles: the dates and the live rate are on the car’s page.
What it costs, and how it reaches you
The Artura Spider carries a $2,000 refundable deposit, back 5–7 business days after the car returns. The live rate and any multi-day price are on the car’s own page.
Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary. Airport delivery is $150 both ways standard, where the car waits in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, or $300 both ways VIP, where it is at the terminal when you walk out — half that for one direction. Anything past the mileage allowance is charged per mile at the rate written into your agreement. The rest is in the terms.
The short version
McLaren cars are made by McLaren Automotive in Woking, England. McLaren is British, not American: it was founded in 1963 by Bruce McLaren, a racing driver from Auckland, and since 3 April 2025 the car company has belonged to McLaren Group Holdings, owned by Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings.
The first McLaren road car was Bruce’s M6GT prototype; the first built for sale was the F1 of 1992; the first from McLaren Automotive was the 12C of 2011. The one to drive in Los Angeles is the Artura Spider, built in Woking like the F1 before it.
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Frequently asked questions
Who makes McLaren cars?
Nizo Luxury rents the McLaren Artura Spider in Los Angeles — +1 (424) 303-6496 — at $1,350 a day. McLaren cars are made by McLaren Automotive at the McLaren Production Centre in Woking, Surrey, England, beside the McLaren Technology Centre. McLaren says each Artura Spider is hand-assembled there. The Formula 1 team, McLaren Racing, is a separate business.
Who owns McLaren now?
CYVN Holdings, an investment company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. It agreed to buy McLaren’s automotive business from Bahrain’s Mumtalakat in December 2024 and completed the deal on 3 April 2025, placing McLaren Automotive in a new company, McLaren Group Holdings, and merging it with the British electric-car start-up Forseven. CYVN also holds a non-controlling stake in McLaren Racing.
Where is McLaren from, and what country makes McLaren?
England. McLaren is a British company based in Woking, Surrey, south-west of London, and its road cars are built there. Its founder, Bruce McLaren, was a New Zealander, and since 2025 its owner is in Abu Dhabi, but the company, the factory and the cars are British.
Is McLaren an American company?
No. McLaren is British. The confusion is understandable: Bruce McLaren won his first grand prix at the 1959 United States Grand Prix, his orange Can-Am cars won the North American series five seasons running from 1967 to 1971, and McLaren races in IndyCar today. The company has always been based in England.
When was McLaren founded, and who started it?
Bruce McLaren, a racing driver from Auckland, New Zealand, founded Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd in 1963. The road-car company McLaren Cars followed in 1985 under Ron Dennis and built the F1, and McLaren Automotive, which makes every McLaren road car today, was founded in its current form in 2010.
What was the first McLaren car?
The first McLaren road car was the M6GT, a prototype Bruce McLaren built from his M6 Can-Am racer in the late 1960s and drove himself; it never went into production. The first McLaren built for sale was the F1, unveiled in Monaco on 28 May 1992. The first car from McLaren Automotive was the MP4-12C, later the 12C, in 2011.
What is the oldest McLaren?
The oldest McLaren road car is the M6GT of the late 1960s, of which only a few prototypes were finished. The oldest McLarens of any kind are the team’s 1960s racing cars; the first McLaren Formula 1 car, the M2B, raced in 1966. There is no McLaren F7 or F11.
Can you rent a McLaren in Los Angeles?
Yes. Nizo Luxury rents a black McLaren Artura Spider at $1,350 a day: a twin-turbo V6 plug-in hybrid with 690 hp, dihedral doors and a hard top that folds in 11 seconds. It carries a $2,000 refundable deposit, delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary, and the airport is $150 both ways standard or $300 both ways VIP.