McLaren Golf: Dream or Disaster?

Mar 31
9 min read

The McLaren Golf website today. A logo, a button, and a launch date. That's it. 29 April can't come soon enough.

One of motorsport's most iconic brands just announced it's making golf clubs. History says be sceptical. Instinct says pay attention.

On 2 March, McLaren — yes, that McLaren — announced it's entering the golf equipment market. Full launch on 29 April. No products revealed yet, no prices, no tour player names. Just the papaya logo, a lot of language about "high-performance DNA," and 26,000 Instagram followers who appeared almost overnight. I signed up immediately. Then I went and read the history books and felt slightly less excited.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

McLaren Golf, as it's being called, is a standalone venture drawing on the combined engineering heritage of McLaren Racing and McLaren Automotive. And unlike most automotive golf ventures, the hiring is credible. CEO Neil Howie is a former President of Callaway Golf Europe — not a car person parachuted in to run a vanity project, but someone who has sat at the top table of one of the sport's biggest equipment brands. That matters enormously. Technical staff from both Cobra and TaylorMade have also reportedly joined the venture, which means they have people in the building who've actually shipped drivers, irons and wedges at scale, in conforming equipment, for serious golfers. Car brands trying to do golf with only car people has a name: failure. McLaren appear to have read that memo.

Zak Brown, McLaren Racing CEO, called it "a natural step." Nick Collins from McLaren Automotive said they're creating equipment that is "beautifully engineered, meticulously refined, and unmistakably McLaren." The quotes are slick. The PR machine is running hot. But for once, the people behind the press release have the CVs to back it up.

"Car brands entering golf isn't new. The track record — pun very much intended — is underwhelming."

THE GRAVEYARD

Before we get carried away, let's look at who tried this before and what happened to them.

Porsche Design	Late 90s - 2000s	Beautiful irons, TaylorMade collab, never took hold. Retreated to soft goods. Bentley followed the exact same script twenty years later.
Mercedes-AMG	Early 2010s	PGA Show booth, interesting metalwoods. Then: nothing.
Williams Racing	2014	Launched a club line. Anyone remember it? Exactly.
Ferrari / Cobra	2014	One driver collab. One and done.
Red Bull / TaylorMade	Ongoing	Limited edition cosmetics only. Smart — they knew the limit.
Bentley	2016–present	Three club collections, £12,500 limited editions. BD1 driver cleared at 78% off. Now sells bags, balls and umbrellas. No clubs. Sound familiar?

The pattern is consistent. Prestige automotive brand enters golf. Makes beautiful-looking equipment. Golfers admire it. Golfers don't buy it in meaningful numbers. Brand quietly retreats. The Rules of Golf cap performance gains, so you can't actually engineer your way past Callaway and TaylorMade's R&D budgets. That's the inconvenient truth underpinning all of this.

There is one that's worth examining in more detail: Bentley. And what their story looks like right now is the closest thing to a live case study — or a warning — that McLaren has.

THE BENTLEY BLUEPRINT

Bentley launched their golf equipment line in 2016, partnering with Professional Golf Europe and manufacturing in Japan. The logic was simple and data-driven: their own research showed that nearly 80% of Bentley car buyers play golf. These are people who already spend £150,000–£200,000 on a weekend toy without blinking. Why wouldn't they carry matching clubs?

Pricing has always been unapologetically stratospheric. The Classic Collection launched with a set of eight hand-forged irons at around £2,750. A driver added another £600, a putter £400 — so a basic ten-club setup came in at roughly £3,750 before customisation.

And customisation is where things got creative. Grips in alligator skin. Clubheads painted to match your car's exterior. Shafts from Seven Dreamers — a Tokyo aerospace composites company whose bespoke shafts start at around £950 each and are made with materials used in Japanese satellites. Peter Lord of Professional Golf Europe, who ran the Bentley partnership, was direct: "You can easily exceed $100,000 for a set of irons" — once you factor in premium shafts throughout, custom finishes, and the full bespoke treatment. The 2019 Centenary set — 100 limited editions inspired by the Continental GT, finished in black with Centenary Gold accents — retailed at around £12,500 for the complete package.

A thread on GolfWRX tells the story well enough. Someone picks up a set on a trading site. The seller claims he won them at a tournament — or perhaps received them as a gift when he bought his Bentley. Nobody is entirely sure. That pretty much tells you everything about who actually ends up owning these clubs.

The Tech Collection followed in 2020, with titanium-faced irons, carbon fibre backs and those distinctive weighted 'B' screws — replicas of the Le Mans-winning EXP Speed 8's wheel centres. Beautiful objects. And you can find them at substantial discounts if you look, because the market for £10,000 golf clubs from a car brand turns out to be thinner than their marketing department hoped.

Actual golfer reviews of Bentley equipment are rare — which tells its own story. Forum threads occasionally surface someone who picked up a set secondhand or received them as a dealership gift. The consensus, where it exists, is that the engineering is solid and the aesthetics extraordinary, but that nobody actually chose them in a fitting room over a set of Mizunos or Titleists. They were received, displayed, occasionally played. They were rarely chosen.

And now the evidence is suggestive, if not conclusive. The official Bentley Motors shop still carries a "Golf Clubs & Accessories" category — but click through and there are just six products: a £750 stand bag, an £85 umbrella, a £50 sleeve of balls, a £35 glove, a £12 tee bag, and an £80 scorecard holder. Not a single club in sight. Whether that's a temporary stock situation, a new collection in development, or a permanent retreat to soft goods, only Bentley knows. What we do know is that over at Scottsdale Golf, the Bentley BD1 driver — originally £599.99 — was recently being cleared at £129.99. A 78% discount. Out of stock even at that price, which tells its own story.

It looks a lot like what happened to Porsche — beautiful clubs, genuine engineering ambition, then a quiet drift toward branded accessories where the margins are safer and nobody asks how it performs against a Ping. Whether Bentley has definitively exited hard goods or is simply between collections, the direction of travel seems clear enough.

"A 78% discount on a £600 driver is not a success story. It's a postmortem. And the bag and umbrella left behind are the footnote."

SO WHY MIGHT MCLAREN GOLF SUCCEED?

Because they're not treating this as a licensing exercise, and the people in the room know what they're doing. Neil Howie with 25+ years running Callaway Europe as CEO. Ryan Lauder bringing TaylorMade's global marketing playbook. Nick Fergus on brand from Callaway. And Jacob Sanborn — the Wedge Wizard — as club design engineer, a man who has custom-fitted PGA Tour players and built a genuine following in the equipment community before most people had heard of McLaren Golf. This isn't a car company that hired a golf consultant and called it a day. These are people who've been inside the machine, at the brands that matter.

The golf industry is also in a genuinely interesting moment. Post-pandemic participation is holding firm at the premium end. Brands that can signal authentic engineering differentiation — not just a logo — are finding buyers. PXG didn't exist until 2014 and now has tour players and a genuine following. The market isn't as closed as it looks.

And the cultural crossover is real. Lando Norris, the current F1 World Champion and McLaren's own driver, is a proper golfer. Zak Brown plays. The Netflix effect — Drive to Survive pulling a new, younger audience into F1, Full Swing doing the same for golf — has made both sports hotter than they've been in years. McLaren sitting at the intersection of both isn't an accident.

"The question isn't whether McLaren can make beautiful golf equipment. It's whether beautiful golf equipment makes you better at golf."

— And that's where it gets complicated

POSERS OR PLAYERS? THE MACLAREN QUESTION

Which brings us to the most interesting question about McLaren Golf — and the one nobody's asking yet. Is this equipment for McLaren customers, or for golfers?

Because those are genuinely different products. Someone who can write a cheque for a McLaren 720S without checking their balance doesn't need clubs that perform at the highest level. They need clubs that are unmistakably McLaren, look extraordinary in the boot of the car, and make a statement when they pull them out at the first tee. That's a perfectly legitimate product. Bentley sells it. It works — after a fashion.

But McLaren's entire brand identity is built on something more specific than Bentley's. It's built on winning. On performance that is measurably, quantifiably better. Bentley sells luxury and heritage. McLaren sells the idea that the engineering is actually superior. That's a much bolder claim to make about a set of golf clubs, and a much harder one to back up against USGA and R&A conforming limits.

If McLaren pitches these as ultra-premium lifestyle objects for their car customers — available at the dealership, £5,000–£15,000, gorgeous to look at, occasionally discounted to shift stock — then they're following the Bentley model. Sustainable as a niche. Never transformative.

If they genuinely believe they can make clubs that a scratch golfer would choose in a head-to-head fitting against Mizuno, Titleist or Ping — that's a completely different ambition. And one that requires tour validation, independent testing, and probably some uncomfortable conversations about whether aerospace engineering actually moves the needle when the rules cap ball speed and spin rates anyway.

The former McLaren can definitely deliver. The latter? 29 April will start to give us an answer.

ALL THE GEAR, NO IDEA - OR IS THAT THE POINT?

There's a snobbish theory doing the rounds on golf forums: that anyone buying branded automotive clubs is telling the world they could only afford the sticks, not the car. It's a good line. But I'm not sure it survives contact with reality.

I have a friend on his third McLaren — currently the proud owner of a bright yellow 720S — who has never picked up a golf club in his life. He's not unusual. The idea that McLaren's customer base is full of serious golfers just waiting for papaya-orange irons is probably more marketing hope than market truth. Bentley's own research showed 70–80% of their buyers play golf. McLaren's demographic skews younger, more track-day than tee-time. The Venn diagram of "McLaren owner" and "avid golfer" has genuine overlap, but it's not the whole picture.

So the "all the gear, no idea" critique assumes a high-handicapper embarrassing themselves with premium kit. But the more likely McLaren Golf customer might not be a serious golfer at all. And if that's the market — if these clubs end up as a dealership sweetener, or a birthday present from someone who just collected their new car — then the business model looks quite different. You're not competing with Titleist and Mizuno in a fitting room. You're competing for wallet share from people for whom the price is genuinely not the issue.

That's actually a more defensible position than trying to out-engineer Callaway. The addressable market for "I want beautiful McLaren-branded clubs and money isn't a consideration" is probably larger and more loyal than the market for "I want the best-performing irons available and I happen to have McLaren money." Elite golfers are picky, independent-minded and deeply sceptical of lifestyle brands in their equipment choices. Wealthy new-to-golf converts looking for somewhere to start? They need equipment. And starting with something that looks like that isn't a bad entry point into the game.

There's even an argument that McLaren Golf's best long-term play is growing the golfer, not chasing the existing one. Get the 720S owner on a course. Make them passionate about the game. Let the equipment be the gateway. That's a genuinely interesting growth model — and one that Golf Foundation types would recognise immediately.

"The real test isn't whether McLaren can make clubs a low or plus-handicapper would choose. It's whether they even need to."

WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT TO KNOW

I've been obsessive about equipment since I picked up a club — old Lynx Black Cats to Cobra to Ping G425s to Mizuno JPX Tours in the bag now. I know what I want from an iron: feel at impact, workability, forgiveness that doesn't come at the expense of feedback. Have McLaren actually made something that competes at that level, or something that looks extraordinary on a car-owner's boot, hallway or wall.

Specifically, I want to know: what's the category? Full bag or irons and wedges to start? What shaft offering? Who are the tour staff players they've signed? And — the big one — what does it cost? Because if it's £4,000 for a set of irons, that's a statement. If it's £8,000, it's a collectors' piece. Neither is wrong, but they're very different products.

29 April will answer those questions. I'll be first in line to find out — and if there's a testing opportunity going, I'm in.

THE CHIPPEDIN VERDICT (PRE-LAUNCH)

Cautiously optimistic — with a caveat. The structural setup is more credible than Bentley's licensing model or Williams Racing's one-and-done attempt. The standalone business, genuine golf hires, and McLaren's engineering culture all point somewhere more serious.

But the Bentley comparison should give everyone pause. Ten years in, three collections, Centenary sets at £12,500, bespoke shafts made from satellite-grade materials — and it ended with a BD1 driver being cleared at 78% off on Scottsdale Golf, and a website that now lists six golf accessories where the clubs used to be. That's the most recent data point in this space. McLaren's people are more credible, their ambition appears more serious — but the market has spoken about what happens when prestige automotive brands try to sell golf clubs to golfers.

And that papaya orange against a forest green fairway is going to look absolutely filthy on camera either way. I'm first in line on 29 April. Watch this space.