The Mystery of the Custom, Hot Pink McLaren That Hasn’t Moved in Years

The story goes like this: in the parking lot outside the very fancy St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, next to King’s Cross St Pancras station in Central London, UK, is a very fancy car that’s seemingly been abandoned there. It’s a McLaren wrapped in hot pink, so if a McLaren wasn’t an instantly noticeable sight, that wrap does the job.

According to a recent, now-viral post on TikTok, the car has been there for at least the past couple of years and hasn’t moved an inch. We all know rich people do all kinds of ridiculous stuff, which may or may not include forgetting where they parked their custom McLaren or even willingly abandoning it like that to the elements, but even in this context, this story is strange. St Pancras is not your run-of-the-mill motel where no one cares or would mind if you left a beater car in the farthest spot on the lot outside. So, whatever is happening to this McLaren is sanctioned by hotel management.

So... what exactly is happening? That’s the pressing question, and one you will have to guess an answer for yourself.

Depending on who you believe, the McLaren has been left outside the hotel at least a couple of years ago or has been sitting there since way back in 2014. Commenters to the video joke that it’s probably turned into a statue in the meantime and might be as road-worthy as one, too, since it doesn’t look like it has moved an inch since it was driven there. Whether parked for 2 or 8 years in the same spot, the McLaren is even visible on Google Maps, so go ahead and call it a London landmark.

Other commenters who claim to work at the hotel say that the owner is a permanent resident there, who came to visit and then opted for St Pancras as a home when some unspecified issues prevented him from returning to his country. Others say that the McLaren actually moves and that it does so regularly, but since the owner resides at the hotel, he got the spot with the apartment upstairs.

Here’s what we know: the McLaren is a 540C, and it’s been custom-wrapped by none other than celebrity-favorite customizer slash YouTuber Yianni Charalambou – Yiannimize by his social media moniker. As for claims that it’s been sitting outside the hotel since 2014, those can’t possibly be accurate since he only wrapped it during the initial period of lockdowns. That would be in early 2020, with the owner taking delivery of it in February 2021.

The owner of the McLaren is some guy named Jordan, who was also at the wheel of another infamous, pink McLaren – infamous not because of the pink and exposed carbon choice but because he crashed it and totaled it in August 2020 in a very fancy area of London where the speed limit is of a meager 20 mph (32 kph). Police said at the time that the driver “lost control” and T-boned a Volkswagen, and while the McLaren wasn’t driving at high speed, damage to the front end was impressive.

As Yiannimize says in the video below, Jordan wrote off that McLaren, which was erroneously identified at the time as a 570S. With insurance money, he bought a new one, in white, and came back to the shop to have it custom wrapped in pink: that’s the McLaren sitting outside St Pancras. The crashed 540C ended up at the junkyard but was salvaged by YouTuber Henry Arnold – and brought back to life. Arnold then brought it in for a wrap, opted for the original pink, and sold it off in early 2021.

While we can’t say with certainty the duration of the pink McLaren’s extended stay outside the St Pancras Hotel, we can say this to solve the mystery: there are now two custom, hot pink McLaren 540Cs in London, apparently similar but with slightly different specs. One of them likes to stay outside the St Pancras Hotel, while the other crashed again in May 2021 and hasn’t been seen since.

@soggyspin4ch THAT PINK CAR HASNT MOVED ???? #kingscross #stpancras #kingscrossstation #pinkcar #fyp #london #iykyk ? Sensual Seduction - Snoop Dogg