From the outside, the McLaren Technology Centre looks like a Bond villain’s lair. A narrow, paved path skirts the edge of a semi-circular lake before tracing a thin bridge over the water. The main building itself is also basically a semi-circle, although its curved glass façade splits the building and the lake into what I imagine would appear somewhat like a yin-yang symbol when viewed from above.

“ The whole place feels like a high-tech maternity ward for cars.

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“ How McLaren have actually created this road car is quite astonishing.

The massive rear wing helps the Senna brake from 300km/h to 0 in just over 200 metres.

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“ It’s great to work with a game that really celebrates all the variety of British driving roads that we have.

All 500 Sennas have already been sold, so Forza Horizon 4 might be your only chance to drive one.

“ I don’t think there’s one single thing that defines British car culture.

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Inside things aren’t any less impressive. The entrance hall is wide, vast, and lined with millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of McLaren’s finest metal. McLaren Racing founder Bruce McLaren’s first ever racing car, a 1929 Austin 7, sits silently beside a special McLaren F1, the company’s famous road-going rocket which spent most of the ’90s to the early 2000s as the fastest production car on the planet. Indeed, the green F1 sitting in McLaren’s lobby is the very car Le Mans winner Andy Wallace reset the record with back in 1998. It’s still the fastest naturally-aspirated production car ever built.The whole place feels like a high-tech maternity ward for cars. There are tubular glass elevators and hidden, electronic doors indistinguishable from the surrounding walls. There are high, suspended walkways and trophy cabinets that stretch out of sight, which are perfectly curated with their contents arranged symmetrically. The whole place is impossibly clean – even the mammoth factory floor, where 300 cars are in the process of being completely hand-built, is totally spotless. It feels like the kind of place that should be perched on a mountaintop in the Swiss Alps; not five minutes off the M25, on the south-western fringe of London.To top off the tour? In a hidden room, behind a door which definitely wasn’t there a minute ago, is a car that petrolheads worldwide will get a taste of this October in Forza Horizon 4: the McLaren Senna.“Many manufacturers love to say their car is a race car for the road,” says Chris Phillips, senior car handling designer at Forza Horizon 4 developer Playground Games. “I think the Senna is one of the first cars we’ve seen where it genuinely is a race car for the road.”Phillips explains that this meant the team had to approach the Senna quite differently.“Most cars, as I said, they love to claim they’re race cars but in reality they’re not – so they function well within the realms of what a road car does,” Phillips continues. “But the Senna is definitely crossing that gap, so when it comes to tyres [and] aerodynamics we’re looking towards what a race car is capable of, but somehow it has to function on a road as well.”Downforce is another core area the team had to focus on.“It’s got a lot of active aero on it and we’ve had to introduce that,” says Phillips. “So, the car, when you back off and you brake, the aero balance on it changes. Not just downforce but the drag as well, constantly keeping the car stable through all these scenarios. And additionally McLaren have probably the best suspension in the world on road cars and we’ve had to focus on really trying to replicate that as accurately as we could. [W]ith an aero car, the ride height and the pitch angle of it [are] very sensitive. So we’ve had to make sure that our Senna deals with that, as well as all the massive loads you get around driving on roads with bumps and things like that.”This isn’t the first time McLaren has worked closely with the Forza franchise – the McLaren P1, the company’s first ‘Ultimate Series’ car, was the cover star for Forza Motorsport 5.“I think for Forza as a franchise – and for Motorsport and for Horizon as games, as they’ve evolved through the years – it’s gotten easier for us to align with significant car launches and significant partners, because they’ve seen what we’ve been able to do,” says Turn 10’s Justin Osmer, senior partner manager for the Forza racing franchise. “With the P1, that was one of the first big ones for us, with Motorsport 5. So they now know our cycle, so they’ll call us and say, ‘Hey, we have something special coming, we would love to be considered to work with you on that for our reveal and your reveal.’”“I think what made this particular instance with Forza Horizon 4 unique and the opportunity with McLaren unique is we’ve been working with them for many years on car releases in the game and what I’d classify as smaller projects, and the team came to us and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got something pretty special that we think might align really well with what you guys have going on, and we can’t tell you a lot about it yet, but trust us that we’ve got something good here.’”That something special was the McLaren Senna, which is the most mental McLaren the company has ever built. Powered by a pumped up version of the 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 that comes in the 720S, the Senna boasts 588kW, accompanied by 800Nm of torque – all in a package which weighs less than a modern-day Mini Cooper.“Some of the characteristics of the car are really interesting as well, with the glass doors,” says Osmer. “Some of the things we can do with that visually in the game is really exciting and unique; the way the sun comes through the car and hits the ground.”McLaren has had a number of effective partnerships previously when it comes to video games – from the North American debut of the McLaren P1 at E3 2013 with Forza Motorsport 5 to the company’s more recent work with Slightly Mad Studios on Project CARS 2, where the handling for the game’s McLarens was tuned in conjunction with former McLaren chief test driver Chris Goodwin. Nonetheless, McLaren’s Jamie Corstorphine admits there’s an extra thrill seeing Forza Horizon 4 using Britain as the backdrop for this year’s instalment.“Obviously McLaren is an international car company with roots that stretch back to Bruce McLaren and New Zealand,” says Corstorphine, global marketing director for the carmaker. “But in its modern history it’s a British car company and we’re based here in Woking, England, and it’s great to work with a game that really celebrates all the variety of British driving roads that we have.”“I think clearly and obviously the most exciting part, and the most impressive part of Forza Horizon 4 is the ability for all the players simultaneously around the world to experience the same change in seasons, and to have that integrated, and to be able to replicate one location so perfectly, but in four different seasons, and all the way through the times of day; the level of information that must be put into that model is just mind-blowing. To make it so lifelike and engaging… it’s super impressive.”Osmer confirms joining forces with an iconic British car manufacturer for Forza Horizon 4 was somewhat of a happy coincidence, but he’s very pleased that’s what happened.“At the same time [McLaren was] able to tell us more about the car we were able to tell them more about the game, and I think got them more excited about the opportunity because of the British nature of it,” says Osmer. “Having seen the success we had with Horizon 3 in Australia, that opened up a lot of eyes and brightened a lot of faces when they got the chance to start seeing some of [Forza Horizon 4] and learning more about it.”“It wasn’t necessarily planned that way, but it was great that it worked out that way.”Playground Games creative director Ralph Fulton feels the British connection has made McLaren the “perfect partner.”“It felt really natural and appropriate to have a British manufacturer providing the hero car, which is an incredibly important car in our list and plays an important role in our game,” says Fulton.“We’ve had phenomenal cover cars previously. The Senna is no different in terms of the level of engineering which is present, and obviously McLaren are renowned worldwide as this incredibly pioneering engineering firm. They’ve brought that all to bear on the Senna, and it’s been a real privilege to be involved as we’ve brought that into the game, and McLaren have been incredibly open and forthcoming in allowing us access to whatever it is different parts of the team need to recreate it as perfectly as possible.”Of course, while the McLaren Senna is front and centre, there’s still plenty of love being shown to Britain’s eccentric car culture in Forza Horizon 4.“The UK’s a very interesting one actually,” says Phillips. “We have a thing back in the F1 days called the garagistas, the shed built cars – all the way up to the sophisticated things, like Jaguars, McLarens, Aston Martin.”“But within the UK we have… the way we pick our own cars. Hot hatches are an incredibly big thing in the UK. With the car selection we wanted to get not just what the outside world sees as a British car, but equally what it is that people in the UK are actually driving. So that’s been the two big focuses for us: getting in some of the more unique stuff from the automotive industry, but also the stuff the Brits are actually driving.”“But there are still lots of things out there, from boutique manufacturers to idiosyncratic, British traditions, like the hot hatch. You go to America, hot hatches are not a thing; they are not a big chunk of the cars you’ll see on the road, and certainly something so linked to youth car culture as they as here. And I think that’s sometimes a point of confusion for people who aren’t familiar with British car culture in much the same way that utes were a point of confusion for people that weren’t familiar with Australian car culture.“But that’s all part of the tapestry, I think. That we don’t just go and recreate a landscape; we recreate the country that we’re in. The way it looks, hopefully the way it feels, and its nature as well. I’m looking forward to people being able to see that I think in lots of different areas of our car list, which at 450-plus cars is bigger than it’s ever been before.”Osmer is also enthusiastic to get Forza Horizon 4 into the hands of car nuts.“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for British makes across the board,” says Osmer. “MGs, and TVRs, all the way up to Aston Martins and McLarens, so there’s a huge range there of great motoring heritage and vehicles that can be celebrated. A lot of makes and models that some people around the world maybe haven’t heard of before and haven’t seen before.”“That’s one of the beauties of what we feel we can bring to the table as the Forza franchise, which is that celebration of cars. That broad swath of different types of cars, historical cars, significant cars, performance cars; it’s all there.“Similar to what we did with Holden in Australia. There were a lot of people that’d never heard of a ute – never driven one, never seen one – and so being able to share that with the world and share that with our fans is really something that we keep sacred.”For much more on Forza Horizon 4, especially the technology and philosophy behind its new dynamic seasons, check out IGN’s report from our behind-the-scenes visit to Playground Games in the lead up to E3 2018, and our video deep dive on why seasons change everything in Forza Horizon 4.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days