McLaren Special Operations is McLaren’s bespoke division, which allows super-wealthy McLaren buyers the chance to get the company to make special versions of their cars just for a customer’s very specific desires, like a dashboard inlaid with the teeth of your enemies, or, in the case here, a paint color based on the color of Bruce McLaren’s own home.
The special color is called ‘Muriwai White,’ and here’s what McLaren’s press release has to say about it:
“Inspired by the whitewashed walls, deep blue doors and shutters of the handsome McLaren homestead, Muriwai White paint is white with blue flecks. The colour was developed by McLaren Special Operations, Amanda McLaren, Bruce’s only child and a brand ambassador for McLaren Automotive and McLaren paint Partner AkzoNobel. Amanda returned to her childhood home in the first 570S Spider to be finished in Muriwai White, recalling the importance of the house that shared the same name.”
Amanda McLaren gives a bit more history:
“My mother Patty had been at a dinner party with a palm reader, who told her she’d live in a big white house with blue doors and shutters,” revealed Amanda. “Whether by destiny or design, that is what transpired and Muriwai was a place of pride for Bruce and comfort to Patty years after my father’s premature death in 1970 at the age of 32. Muriwai was always special to my father; the exotic name as much as the house. Forty-two kilometres’ northwest of Auckland, it’s where he grew up and won his first hill climb, aged 15, at the wheel of an Ulster Austin which remains in McLaren’s heritage collection in Woking.”
So, the color is “white with blue flecks.” It’s sort of tricky to see the color in a lot of detail, so we used the atomic-powered Jalopnik Image Enhanceotron to get a better look at the paint itself:
Yep, it’s pretty much exactly what they said it was.