INTERVIEW: How Lanzante's coachbuilt three-seat supercar was shaped

That winning car was run by Lanzante Motorsport, and three decades on it's celebrating that weekend in France with the new 95-59 that made its debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard. It takes its name from the year of the win and the winning car’s race number.

Fittingly, the 95-59 is based on a current McLaren platform and has three seats with a central driving position. It’s also categorically a road-going car. Beyond that, though, you won’t find too many direct references to the F1 GTR. This isn’t a pastiche or in any way retro. We met designer Paul Howse on Lanzante’s stand close to the FOS startline to find out how this car came to fruition in just twelve months.

Howse has worked with Lanzante before, having devised the company’s McLaren P1 Spider. And he was more than qualified for that job having previously had an 11-year career with the Woking supercar manufacturer. In fact, he had just got his Master’s Degree when his theme was chosen by Ron Dennis and the board for the P1 hypercar. 

“It was 2009 and I was a junior designer fresh out of university. I had crazy ideas, but I didn’t necessarily have the experience to execute them,” says Howse. “I always say it was my theme that was selected for the P1, and it was quite true to the early models that we did, but there was a lot to learn. That project was a huge learning curve about design execution with my seniors and the team around me.”

He continued to rise through the ranks at McLaren, designing the 570 interior, the 720 exterior as senior designer, and progressed to be design manager on the Artura.

But then he needed a break from penning supercars. “To be honest, I’d kind of fallen out of love with it,” he said. He spent a five-year career break painting with watercolours, punctuated by the P1 Spider project with Lanzante. The 95-59 marks his return, and he has approached it with a fresh perspective. “Just stepping back from it has renewed and rejuvenated my passion. I was able to look at the forms in a different way.”

Dean Lanzante set the brief for the car, but the trusting working relationship he and Howse had built meant the designer had a great amount of freedom. “When Dean approached me to design the car, we talked about some of the features that he was keen to include, like the bodywork coming down and sitting underneath the wing and culminating in an exhaust. That was something he’d been floating around his head but didn’t quite know how to execute it. He gave me the freedom to execute some of his ideas. It felt natural to pick the pen back up again and start sketching.”

The 95-59 provided the canvas on which Howse has been able to bring to life some ideas he had been mulling over during his sabbatical. One of them was the treatment of the shutline at the front of the door, which is a challenge for any car with a dihedral door. “If you have any form on the front wheelarch, the front door shut is massive because it has to clear and sweep.

"All McLarens have got a large eight to 10mm shut gap in the front. It’s a nightmare, but there's nothing you can do about it if you want form. My idea was to hide that shut gap within a carbon graphic so we have an air outlet vent made from carbon fibre that hides the shut.”

Consequently, visible shutlines on the whole car are kept to a minimum. Even the fuel filler cap has been relocated to the C-pillar to keep it as discreet as possible, which also plays into the other theme Howse was keen to realise with the 95-59: expansion.

Designer speak for the way volumes and curves interplay, this was something he wanted to improve upon compared to his earlier work. “With P1, I’m super proud of some of it but there are some areas that are quite static and quite naïve,” said Howse.

On the 95-59, most obvious example of ‘expansion’ to this writer’s untrained eye is the way it grows in volume from the front wheel to the rear. As the car rotates on its turntable, you see how the reflections broaden as the light travels along the side of the car.

Howse drafted in two former McLaren colleagues to work on modelling, and the three of them interacted directly with the company’s engineers. And because Lanzante operates as a small team, the interior and exterior operate as a singular vision.

“It’s not like being a chief designer or design director trying to get two teams of people to work together and create an interior and exterior that work together,” said Howse, who has been able to pen elements of the 95-59. “We really wanted to 'hero' the centre seat,” says Howse. “The central driving position is such a rare layout for a supercar, so that was a big part of it."

"Having that central graphic on the bonnet of the car that leads into the interior, so when you stand at the front of the car, you can see the interior and exterior clearly linked. The other one is on the front clam. If you stand at the front three quarters looking at the car, you’ll notice that the interior dashboard mimics the front fender. So they have a literal kind of formal link. 

“From inside, we really wanted this feeling of space and natural symmetry. And then there’s a bone line that runs through from the centre of the dashboard around, sweeps around hidden air vents that are sat between the facial upper and lower. That creates a bit of a layered gap, which is again linking to the exterior. But that bone line runs around into the doors, so that organic form language is present in both the interior and exterior.”

It means the design has remained true to the initial concept. “Quite often the design development sketches you see have actually been done after the car has been developed, but we still had my early watercolours on the wall when we were doing the clay model. It’s been a nice process with not too many chefs at the broth. We have a meeting with Dean, we show different solutions to a problem, then choose one and go.”

While the 95-59 isn’t intended as a retro version of the F1 GTR, Howse does see some parallels when images of both are placed side by side. “But it wasn’t intentional," he added. "There’s the strike that goes up the side of an F1 which is kind of similar in a way to the bone line, and then you've got the doorblade on 95-59. It's going to a different angle on the F1, but there are a lot of similarities. It was never meant to be looking back. It was always looking forward but with a hint of a nod to heritage.”

Howse concludes: “I’ve been surrounded by McLaren my whole life. My dad used to work for McLaren and built all the F1s. As a kid growing up, the F1 was a big part of my life so I guess those things are always sinking in. It’s in my blood.”

The 95-59 is intended to be an accessible, useable road car. Behind the three occupants is a 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged McLaren V8 producing 861PS (633kW) and 881Nm (650lb ft) of torque. The body is all carbon fibre, while the show car features the LM30 pack which includes forged wheels, inconel exhaust headers with titanium tips and gold-plated heat shields. Only 59 will be built at a price of £1.2million.

What a way to mark that victorious wet weekend in La Sarthe all those years ago.

Photography by Toby Whales.