The Breakup of Mercedes-Benz and McLaren

When Mercedes-Benz decided to enter Formula One in 1995, they couldn’t have picked a better partner than McLaren. The two worked together to create race cars that excelled on the track, and in their glory days (1998-1999) proved a veritable threat against Ferrari, BMW and others. But McLaren had an advantage of which Williams and Sauber did not have – they had the experience in building road vehicles, which came in handy when Mercedes-Benz wanted to build a real-world supercar, the SLR. Up until the introduction of the Bugatti Veyron, it was the McLaren F1 road car that held the title of world’s fastest car