Thank Frankel It's Friday: The McLaren Senna is ugly and it doesn't matter

So allow me to put myself in what appears to be the minority camp of people who actually like the way it looks. No, it’s not pretty, but that does not mean it’s unattractive. I have never bought into the school of thought that says the pursuit of form and function are diametrically opposed aims. In fact I love the fact that the car appears barely to have been styled at all but instead assembled from whatever aerodynamic surfacing has been required to achieve its aim, which in all probability is a level of downforce unprecedented in the road car arena. Look at the Senna and even those who recoil in horror must admit it has a certain sense of purpose. A very great sense of purpose in fact.

The question that remains is that even if a quorum agreed it was ugly, would that actually matter? On the most obvious level the answer is clearly not because all 500 were sold to McLaren-favoured clients long before the general public were even made aware of the Senna’s existence. For McLaren, both as money maker and brand builder, it has already served its purpose. For the rest of who couldn’t afford one even if offered, the question hinges very much on what you want from such a car.

In the racing world, I would argue that the prettiest year for competition cars was 1967 – a contentious observation but one not made without substance. This was the essentially the year in which aerodynamic design principles that had been followed almost since the dawn of racing started to turn on their head. Up until that moment designers had considered the air flowing over the car as a source of drag and therefore sought to minimize its effects. This resulted in the cleanest shapes ever to race and the most beautiful too. And if you don’t believe me, look at a 1967 Eagle-Weslake and tell me I’m wrong. But then aerodynamicists started to ponder whether the air could not be put to more positive use instead, a force to be exploited, not avoided. And to do this the shapes of the cars they made needed to be polluted by devices originally referred to as aerofoils. And this principle has carried on in similar vein to the present day. And modern F1 cars are many impressive things, but gorgeous is not among them. At least not to me.

Closer to home look at the current slew of road-based GT3 racing cars, machines whose aerodynamics have evolved so much they now produce enormous amounts of downforce, despite their street-legal origins. Are they prettier than the cars from which they are derived? Hardly.

So we must be careful what we wish for: if we want our ultimate road cars to get ever faster, then the only way that’s going to happen is for the purity of their line becomes more compromised too, because downforce remains the last under-exploited area of road car dynamic endeavour. Manufacturers have been trying to design cars with better suspension, more powerful engines and grippier tyres since the birth of the car, but the pursuit of proper aerodynamic downforce remains in its infancy, at least in the road car arena. So we can have cars that are beautiful but ultimately not that quick around a track, or downforce monsters with wings, spoilers, planes, flaps and slats like the Senna which have the visual impact of a slap in the face, but which will lap circuits at speeds some Group C prototypes would have been proud to match. But what we’ll actually do is take the third way, and have both.