Doesn't make sense for the 2014 car to have this much power unless the McLaren lightweight model gets even more horsepower. Which just is incomprehensible to do two additional engine modifications within such a short time period
For normal companies, perhaps.
These guys make F1 cars. In the same building. This is not some marketing bull like when Honda says we sponsor F1 cars so through osmosis our cars are zoomy fast. These are the same guys. How does that translate. You CAD/CAM adjustments on-the-fly in F1 for the next race to fix things. If a race shows a piece on an F1 car to be weak, they tweak the design, run a part, place it, test it, race it.
So here's an example of how that translates to our cars. An apocryphal tale I heard from one of the westcoast dealers. There have been parts in the A/C on an early model 12C that had some rattle, and i hear tell that this was picked up by a dealer before delivery to the customer. Mclaren apparently heard this, examined the issue, cut a custom piece, overnighted it, and replaced the part before pickup, and the design change got integrated into future cars.
It's in Mclaren's DNA to do this kind of feedback->rapid pro type->test->implement->more feedback design, and I have every belief that there will be a LOT of modifications coming forward. Now that the installed base is relatively sizable, we're providing a lot of data to tweak things, they've learned a lot, and I suspect will iterate a lot. I'm all for this. Of course I hope and expect some of the improvements will be easy software updates*, some will be hardware upgrades we might be able to gain/pay for, and other improvements will be limited to the newest cars. That's ok by me. I like the progressiveness/nimbleness of it all.
As always, YMMV.
*BTW, the free software update giving us 25hp more is mentioned as kind of a "meh" sidenote in reviews, but as a customer, I feel this is EPIC. I mean just beside myself kind of I-cant-believe-they-did-it EPIC. I hope that McLaren gets the feeling from their customer base at just how pleased we are with this. Because if it comes off as a "meh" and as a non-marketable thing, they may be less inclined to do it in the future. It is truly remarkable, and I wish there was more of a statement made by the press at how truly phenomenal this is. Tesla is also doing this, and they also deserve big kudos.