Surprise! The next McLaren supercar is an 809bhp kiwi bird* called McL 820

Looks like McLaren is set on replacing the superlative 750S supercar with [checks notes] a giant statue of a kiwi bird called McL 820. Carmakers can be weird, huh.

We jest, of course. The bird’s just a marketing ruse to promote the new super-hyper-mega-thingy’s name, which also denotes how many metric horsepowers it intends on producing.

So that’s 820PS, or 809bhp, packaged inside something that… well, isn’t a bird, but will be a McLaren.

“The naming convention marks the next chapter in McLaren’s evolution,” said McLaren, “creating a clearer and more consistent approach that unifies cars across McLaren Automotive and Racing.” Answers on a postcard, please.

The news of the new McL 820 – following the naming convention set by the surprise Pebble Beach reveal of the delightful and delightfully manual McL 6GT – follows news not just a redesign of the company logo that harks back to founder Bruce McLaren’s service station, but also some bidness.

McLaren recently revealed it’ll invest some £500m into the UK, expanding manufacturing and engineering ops, and creating at least 1,000 jobs in the process.

This will allow the British carmaker to build not just this 750S successor (yeah, good luck with that guys), but also a hybrid SUV (seriously, good luck with that guys) and overall just more… cars.

That SUV incidentally, will be built to rival stuff like the Lamborghini Urus and Aston Martin DBX, not slightly more rarefied, V12-flavoured fare like the Ferrari Purosangue, an admittedly brilliant ‘SUV’.

Anyway, the bird. Weird way to announce a supremely technical and hugely powerful new supercar from a company that specialises in them. We’ll hear more about it next year. Maybe with a Hector’s Dolphin, perhaps?