McLaren 788HS: specs, price, and the end of the V8 era

McLaren has been quietly winding down the car that made the modern brand, and on Thursday at the Goodwood Festival of Speed it finally said the quiet part out loud. The 788HS isn't another special edition. It's the funeral, done properly - the last and most extreme version of the twin-turbo V8 platform that has carried McLaren since the 720S landed nearly a decade ago. If you shoot cars for a living in Southern California, this is the one to pay attention to, because a good chunk of the 200 being built will end up parked in a Rancho Santa Fe garage within a year.

We covered the wider event in last week's Goodwood 2026 recap. This is the car that stole it.

What McLaren revealed at Goodwood

The 788HS is the final evolution of McLaren's 700-series bloodline - the lineage that runs 720S, then 750S, then the track-hardened 765LT, and now this. McLaren is calling it the "definitive and final" chapter of that mid-engine V8 story, and the framing is deliberate. The company is moving to a new era of hybrid powertrains, so the 788HS is explicitly the send-off for the pure, non-electrified V8. There won't be another one like it.

It debuted Thursday, July 9, on the hill at Goodwood, and every one of the 200 cars is being finished by McLaren Special Operations - the in-house bespoke division - so no two will leave the factory identical. Production splits evenly: 100 Coupes, 100 Spiders. That's it.

The numbers that matter

The name follows McLaren's usual code: the 788 is PS, the metric horsepower figure. In the units the rest of us use, that's 777 hp from the twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8, plus 590 lb-ft of torque. It's a meaningful step over the family: 37 hp more than the 750S, and 22 hp more than the 765LT that was supposed to be the hardcore one.

The rest of the sheet, confirmed by Motor1's spec breakdown:

• 0-60 mph in 2.8 seconds, 0-124 mph in 7.0 seconds
• Top speed 205 mph - the same as the 765LT
• Dry weight 1,265 kg (2,789 lb) - 26 pounds lighter than a 750S, which is the harder trick than adding power
• 614 hp per tonne power-to-weight, the best of any car in the bloodline
• 10% more downforce than the 765LT, from a reworked aero package: an S-duct through the hood, a more aggressive front splitter with dive-canards, meaner side skirts, and an F1-derived rear diffuser feeding a large fixed wing

Pricing hasn't been formally published by McLaren, but it's been widely reported around $600,000 before anyone touches the MSO options list - and on a bespoke car like this, nobody leaves the options list alone. Read that as the floor, not the sticker.

None of these numbers are shocking in isolation. Plenty of hypercars now make north of 1,000 horsepower. What makes the 788HS interesting is the restraint - it's a lightweight, high-downforce, analog-feeling driver's car in a market sprinting toward heavy hybrid complexity. It's the last time McLaren builds exactly this thing.

What it looks like

From behind a camera, the 788HS is the most photogenic car in the bloodline, and it's not close. The aero package that makes it faster also makes it read better in a frame. The S-duct cutting through the hood gives the front end a shadow line that daylight loves. The dive-canards ahead of the front arches break up what was a fairly clean, almost soft nose on the 720S into something with edges and intent. The rear is dominated by that fixed wing and the deep F1-style diffuser, so the tail finally looks as serious as the car drives.

It photographs like a purpose-built object rather than a road car with a body kit, which is the difference between a car you shoot dutifully and one you actually want to chase. Low light rakes across the splitter and the skirts; a wet road throws the whole aggressive underbody back up into the reflections. This is a car that rewards being shot at speed, in real conditions, by someone who knows where to put the chase vehicle.

"High Sport" - a badge McLaren almost never uses

The "HS" is worth stopping on, because McLaren has spent it carefully. This is only the third time in the company's history that the High Sport badge has appeared, following the MP4-12C High Sport and a later MSO HS built on the same 12C bones. It is not a trim level McLaren hands out. Reaching back for it now is the company telling you where this car sits: not a variant, but a bookend.

That matters for how you'd want to shoot one. A 750S is a product. A 788HS is an artifact - one of 200, hand-finished, closing a chapter. The photography should carry that weight instead of treating it like another press-fleet loaner.

The end of the pure V8 McLaren

Read across the coverage and the theme is consistent. Evo framed it directly as possibly the last pure V8 McLaren - the emotional goodbye to a naturally aspirated-adjacent, non-hybrid platform before the electrified cars take over the range. The 720S architecture underneath is roughly a decade old at this point, and rather than let it fade out on a facelift, McLaren chose to send it off at its absolute peak.

That's the part that should register if you care about documenting cars rather than just owning them. The 788HS is going to be immediately collectible, immediately garage-kept, and immediately rare on the road. The window to photograph these in the wild - moving, in real light, on a real Southern California road instead of a static in a convention hall - is going to be narrow. Cars like this get driven for about eighteen months and then disappear into climate-controlled storage and auction catalogs.

Why the send-off cars are worth documenting

We've built the archive around exactly this idea: the interesting cars deserve to be shot like they matter, while they're still being driven. The McLarens already in the portfolio came from owners who understood that a car this significant is worth more than a phone photo in a parking lot. A limited, last-of-its-kind 788HS is the clearest possible case for it.

And it's a car built to be shot in motion. Every dollar of that aero package - the S-duct, the diffuser, the fixed wing - only does its job at speed. A static shot flatters the paint; a rolling shot shows what the car actually is, which is a 205-mph machine that generates real downforce. For a send-off car, the motion isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole point.

If one of the 200 is landing in your garage - or you're documenting a collection that a car like this belongs in - that's the shoot to book. And if you just want a McLaren frame on your wall in the meantime, the archive is open to license, every tier, every format.

The V8 era gets one last car. It's worth catching it while it's still moving.