Photo: McLaren
These weirdly contrived correlation products between high-end sports car makers and non-automotive pieces of equipment seem to not make sense sometimes. Just look at the Bentley Mulliner-branded kid's tricycle if you don't believe us. But sometimes, an automotive-branded product is so beautiful and so elegant in its execution that, for a brief moment, you forget the thing is an elaborate and carefully thought-out piece of advertising. The XP2 prototype custom guitar inspired by the McLaren Speedtail hypercar is one such example, a real case of form following function.
This particular one-of-a-kind, one-off custom guitar is the brainchild of a Miami-based luthier named Dean Gordon. A long-time fan of exotic supercars for nearly as long as his love of music, Gordon had the skills to meld the mutually exclusive worlds of his two biggest passions and create a custom guitar that inspires the same vision as McLaren's arguable halo of halo vehicles, the Speedtail, first released in 2018. With a top speed in the area of 250 mph, Dean Gordon needed to make a particularly aggressive and special guitar design to match the intensity, savagery, and elegance of the Speedtail. Especially if he wanted to shred riffs with the same speed as a Speedtail racing down a straightaway.
"McLaren being synonymous with cutting-edge design and pushing boundaries made it a no-brainer choice of inspiration for my automotive-inspired line of guitars," Gordon said of the only McLaren-inspired musical instrument that isn't just an F1's exhaust pipe. "These guitars are my artistic exercise, where I not only try to make the best playing and sounding guitars possible but to put an artistic flare on them beyond what I normally do. The Speedtail was the perfect muse."
With soft yet stunningly defined curves and finished in stunning, champagne-colored Saragon Quartz, this isn't a case where a couple of automotive-branded stickers were slapped on an already-made product built in China and shipped overseas to shamelessly peddle an automotive brand it would've otherwise never had anything to do with. In the same way that a McLaren Speedtail beckons people to look at it just by sitting parked outside an exclusive resort, the XP2 guitar almost makes anyone holding it look like Eddie Van Halen when they strap it around their back. That's regardless of whether their skills on six strings are more in line with Stephen Segal than a real rock star.
With a carbon fiber backplate and hand-stitched leather accents finished in Oxblood Red, the contrast between bright and dark colors on this guitar matches the best paint jobs ever applied to McLaren road cars. It's hard to put a price tag on a guitar like this. But we're sure the thing would suffice for a down payment on an actual McLaren. Albeit, probably not the Speedtail.
"McLaren being synonymous with cutting-edge design and pushing boundaries made it a no-brainer choice of inspiration for my automotive-inspired line of guitars," Gordon said of the only McLaren-inspired musical instrument that isn't just an F1's exhaust pipe. "These guitars are my artistic exercise, where I not only try to make the best playing and sounding guitars possible but to put an artistic flare on them beyond what I normally do. The Speedtail was the perfect muse."
With soft yet stunningly defined curves and finished in stunning, champagne-colored Saragon Quartz, this isn't a case where a couple of automotive-branded stickers were slapped on an already-made product built in China and shipped overseas to shamelessly peddle an automotive brand it would've otherwise never had anything to do with. In the same way that a McLaren Speedtail beckons people to look at it just by sitting parked outside an exclusive resort, the XP2 guitar almost makes anyone holding it look like Eddie Van Halen when they strap it around their back. That's regardless of whether their skills on six strings are more in line with Stephen Segal than a real rock star.
With a carbon fiber backplate and hand-stitched leather accents finished in Oxblood Red, the contrast between bright and dark colors on this guitar matches the best paint jobs ever applied to McLaren road cars. It's hard to put a price tag on a guitar like this. But we're sure the thing would suffice for a down payment on an actual McLaren. Albeit, probably not the Speedtail.
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