"I want to be involved with every customer"

Dean Lanzante on what it takes to make a three-seat, 850hp McLaren - and a road-legal Sesto Elemento, too

By Matt Bird / Monday, 21 July 2025 / Loading comments

There are a few things guaranteed at Goodwood Festival of Speed. The food and drink will be even more expensive than last year, there’ll be at least one whoopsie up the hill - and Lanzante will bring something awesome to show at a stand that has fast become a fixture. This year they outdid themselves; did you hear much about the road-converted Pagani Huayra R, for example? Probably not, because Lanzante also revealed its street-homologated Lamborghini Sesto Elemento (one of nine on the planet) and the incredible three-seat 95-59. So plain old Pagani gets forgotten about, in the crazy world of Lanzante.

The stand definitely feels like a different planet when we get a chance to chat with Dean Lanzante. They seem to have sourced the greatest sausage rolls ever made, the giant television live streaming the action makes reality look better than what’s right outside the window and you can almost sense the wealth in the room. Or perhaps that was just the air con. Whatever, the fact that the invite-only stand was as busy as it was demonstrates the excitement that exists around Lanzante right now.

Apparently, Friday was nothing compared to Thursday, and the 95-59’s reveal. “Yesterday, and this is the absolute honest truth, I don’t even know how many people we saw”, says Dean. “It was as fast as we could get people through this room.” The room in question is a little configurator space where we’re chatting, with nice sofas and another big screen showing how a 95-59 might look in a customer’s chosen colourway. While a few clients committed to the £1.3m idea when it was just in clay form - “they’ve had projects from us in the past and the trust is there”, adds the boss - some were keener to wait until the full reveal before forging ahead. In all, 40 prospective customers were given the one-to-one preview ahead of Goodood. Apparently, folk were requesting specific chassis numbers on Thursday; there’s a confident grin on Dean’s face when he suggests that all 59 builds will be spoken for by the end of FOS weekend. Why wouldn’t they be?

You know more could have sold. The 95-59’s foundations are the 750S, aka the best series production McLaren ever, and its fresh design pays homage to the most famous McLaren ever. It’s going to have at least 850hp thanks to new exhaust headers, tailpipes, and software, plus a cooling package. It could well be more, reckons Dean, as they’ve been testing the upgrades in a Senna, and won’t know for certain until everything is fitted into the confines of the 95-59.

Speaking of which, it’s fascinating to hear that the new car occupies the same space on the road as a 750S despite the 50 per cent increase in passenger capacity. “It’s got to be usable in every sense”, adds Dean, so this runs the same wheel and tyre size as a standard car, the ride height is the same as a 765LT, and the pair of seats that flank the driver are 20mm wider than Speedtail seats. So you should be fine with a pair of passengers, assuming they aren’t the Winklevoss twins or anyone else similarly broad-shouldered.

The big difference now is having a fuel cell for the 95-59 rather than a tank. This can be moulded around the new seating arrangement, and means an increase to 75 litres capacity as well - but will need replacing every five years. But Dean promises it’ll be a day’s work to change (rather than the much more involved process for an F1, where the engine and ‘box must come out first), and it feels a worthwhile trade for getting those extra seats and range in. Those considering a 95-59 will know someone who can sort fuel bags out. Or have someone on hand who knows someone to sort it out.

Originally the plan was for 30 cars to celebrate the 30th anniversary, but Dean suggests that “huge” tooling costs meant that wasn’t going to be viable if the 95-59 was going to cost anywhere close to the million-pound target they set. (It came out at £1,020,000 plus taxes.) There’s even more carbon to factor in than the standard McLaren, as well as fiddly bits like glass in the roof, rear laserlights just 1.8mm thick and the entirely new cooling package.

“There has to be a limit or the cost goes through the roof”, Dean says, a fairly terrifying thought given how high the roof as a Lanzante project already is. So 59 was the sweet spot, a nice nod to the winning race number, an amount that keeps costs on track and enough that each customer gets the right experience. “We’re not a massive team, we’ve limited it to 59 because of the attention we want to give each customer”, Dean says. “If we scale that up much more… I’ve only got so many hours in the day. I want to be involved with every customer through this process, so does Paul [Howse] through rendering and styling.”

The process for making a 95-59 from a 750S is made to sound quite simple, though of course requires a heck of a lot of expertise. The client buys their McLaren (there are four options required, one being the performance brake upgrade), then gets it to Petersfield; around six months later, a 95-59 will be ready, with the entire 59-unit run set to be finished by the end of 2027. But that’s all dependent on spec: “Out of the 59, probably a third will go for crazy all-carbon bodies”, Dean adds. A super fancy paint job can take up to three months; thousands of hours were spent on paint for one of the road-converted 935s…

Speaking of which, no time at Lanzante would have been complete without mentioning the Sesto Elemento. Even by Lamborghini standards, the original ‘few-off’ special edition was pretty exceptional, thanks to the combination of 999kg and a V10. Now almost a quarter of the production run - two out of the nine - are to be made street legal. Which would be some way to show up at the supercar meet.

While a production engine and relatively sensibly sized wheels and tyres (it wasn’t running a race slick and chubby wheel, for example) made parts of the Sesto Elemento conversion simpler, there were clearly challenges to overcome. “Almost a carbon bathtub”, is the affectionate term Dean uses for it, so nothing can be drilled for wires or suchlike. The cabin is totally bare as well, so the air con install was not the work of a moment. Because where do you put anything?

This first Sesto is going to a Lanzante client with a TAG Turbo already, who was happy to go ahead without a thought for the cost. Doing a second car will make it slightly less bonkers. “A lot of this road conversion stuff has to be on a car of reasonable value, otherwise the cost just doesn’t make sense”, Dean adds. And remember we’re on planet Lanzante here; “reasonable value” is going to an enormous amount. Need proof? It’s converted a pair of Porsche 935s, and a set of forged magnesium wheels for road use is £5,000. But a minimum order was required, to make it worth undertaking, so the actual cost was £120,000. Little wonder Dean always asks those intrigued by the idea “if they know four or five more owners, as it’ll really bring your costs down.” You can say that again…

More road conversions mean more experience doing it, of course; think of rarefied track stuff being made MOT-compliant and it’s Lanzante’s name that comes to mind now. “By doing different projects, it’s given us a really wide skillset, so it’s put us in a good position to take on cars like 95-59”, Dean confirms. And they aren’t stopping here. “People think of us being McLaren because we won Le Mans with a McLaren. We’ve only ever done Le Mans once” (what a way to do it). “They’ll always be that association, because it was such a famous win. But we do a lot of historic stuff, we run Cobras, E-Types, GT40s. We were the first to road convert an F1 GTR, we’ve done a tonne of GTRs… That fed into P1 GTR, the visibility of which [30 were converted] means people think that’s all we do.”

But rest assured there’s plenty in the Lanzante pipeline that isn’t McLaren related, even if the 95-59 will be the focus of a lot of attention for a while. 2026 will feature just as many extraordinary projects; Festival of Speed wouldn’t be the same without Lanzante, after all.

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