• McLaren reboots in Singapore
• New dealer Eurokars Supersports opens its new showroom
• Entry-level Sports Series cars introduced; 

McLaren makes a re-entry to Singapore, with new cars priced under a million. Can it find success here the second time ’round?

SINGAPORE — After a pit stop for much of the year, McLaren is ready to rejoin the race for supercar supremacy in Singapore.

A new McLaren showroom at 5, Leng Kee Road opened its doors last night. Run by Eurokars Supersports, a division of the Eurokars group, the new showroom’s opening effectively marks a reboot for the brand in Singapore.

Eurokars is McLaren’s second agent here in three years, after Wearnes Automotive launched the brand in 2012. The latter’s relationship with the supercar maker came to an end by mutual consent, say McLaren representatives.

The launch year was to be McLaren’s best in Singapore, with 33 cars registered.

Sales slowed to 25 units in 2013, after higher import duties aimed at progressive luxury taxation put the brakes on exotic car sales. 2014 saw only 11 new cars hit the roads.

McLaren’s rivals have had to fight off a tax, too — between 2012 and last year, Ferrari registrations slid from 80 to 31 cars, with Lamborghini’s sales collapsing from 56 cars to only 10 — but with this year’s transition from Wearnes to Eurokars, the brand is effectively starting from scratch: only four units are on the scoreboard so far.

Enter Eurokars. The group has a broad and varied portfolio in Singapore, with Mazda, Mini, Porsche and Rolls-Royce, and its executive chairman, Karsono Kwee, is an avowed car enthusiast.

When it comes to the infrastructure of selling cars, Kwee takes a spare-no-expense approach — Eurokars recently opened a $28 million Mazda facility, the Eurokars City Centre for Mini, Porsche and Rolls-Royce cost $42 million to develop, and the group has announced plans for a $60 million building for Rolls-Royce.

“He has an excellent reputation in this market,” says Jolyon Nash, the executive director for global sales and marketing for McLaren Automotive. “He really does understand luxury.”

For its part, McLaren is counting on an expanded product line to grow sales. It recently organised its cars into three broad “Series” according to price and performance: Ultimate, Super and Sports.

The Ultimate Series includes the P1 (main car, above), a 916 horsepower petrol-electric hypercar, whose presence is largely academic since it can’t be registered here. Yet, it is considered a collector’s item that serves as a sort of hero model for McLaren.

The core of the product range is the Super Series, says Mr Nash. There sit the 650S and 675LT (so named for the amount of horsepower their engines produce), cars that embody the McLaren’s engineering-driven approach to speed. “That’s where we started, and that’s the heartland of McLaren,” says Nash.

At $1,145,000 without COE for a 650S (above, in green) and $1,246,500 for an open-top version of the same, and $1,475,000 for the 675LT, the Super Series cars are aimed squarely at models from Ferrari and Lamborghini.

“We’re selling to owners of Italian supercars who want to move up into something different,” says David McIntyre, the regional director for Asia Pacific markets. Up? “In my view our positioning is the next step up from Ferrari and Lamborghini because of the technology and performance we offer,” he says. Fighting words, if ever there were any.

But it’s the newly-introduced Sports Series cars that could ultimately help McLaren find another gear here.

They offer typical McLaren characteristics in the sportscar segment, says Nash. The 570S is the lightest car in its class and offers the best performance, he says, but has a more comfortable interior than any of the Super Series models.

“It’s more of a daily driver,” he says.

At $899,999, the 570S runs up against some obvious German competition. The new Porsche 911 Turbo S, a $869,788 coupe that’s no slouch, is one direct target. It has more oomph (580 horsepower) and can teleport to 100km/h in a mere 2.9 seconds, beating the McLaren there by 0.3 seconds.

But there are other ways to measure a car, counters Nash. “Our two benchmarks in performance are laptimes and 0 to 200km/h. If you benchmark our cars against their equivalent competitors, we will be the best on those two,” he says.

That approach to success is hardly surprising for a company steeped in the competitive spirit of racing — McLaren traces its roots to a Formula One team founded in 1963 — but what’s missing is probably a sense of something less tangible.

Buy a Ferrari, for example, and you seem to buy into something infused with the spirit of Enzo Ferrari, who was the sort of man that people make films about. Buy a McLaren, however, and you have a machine the embodies… what, exactly?

All the more the cars have to let their performance do the talking, perhaps. And in a market like Singapore, at least, customers are much more interested in the intrinsic ability of a car, Nash feels.

But McLaren’s performance will have to be judged two to three years from yesterday’s reboot, when it becomes clear whether the firm can reach its goal of tripling its global volume to roughly 5,000 cars a year.

That would make it about half the size of Ferrari, which would be a remarkable achievement for a company that only properly got going in 2009. It gives observers an easy way to measure McLaren’s success, too.

Ultimately, some things are even more important than laptimes.

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How about one of these instead, sir?