Jordan Golson, writing for The Verge:

An acquisition would give Apple a small but significant carmaker that has enormous amounts of technological expertise in building drivetrains, vehicle control systems, and navigating complicated supplier-OEM relationships. McLaren also has significant experience working with advanced materials like carbon composites, aluminum, and carbon fiber.

It’s a small but important firm, best known for its sports cars — it sold 1,654 road cars in 2015 — and its Formula One team. But the company is much more than just a car manufacturer. The 5,000 employees of the McLaren Technology Group work across six different divisions including automotive, racing, marketing, and as an automotive supplier for race teams and high-end performance cars.

McLaren has quietly been growing its consulting division as well. McLaren Applied Technologies works with firms across a number of industries — both automotive and otherwise — to provide R&D and technology expertise behind the scenes. McLaren is privately owned and one of the smallest independent carmakers, making an acquisition logistically simpler.

I am a big fan of McLaren and of Formula One. McLaren represents automotive state of the art, one of the few firms with the technological prowess to compete at the Formula One level, no easy task. Formula One lays out strict regulations for the design of every competing car, and changes those rules every season, requiring competitors to redesign a race car, sometimes from scratch, every year.

On the flip side, McLaren makes and sells vehicles you can buy (if you’ve got the wherewithal) and drive on the street. They’ve got invaluable experience with the automotive supply chain, and they have the kind of industry relationships that an Apple auto effort would benefit from.

I’ve long said supported the notion of Apple buying Formula One, en toto, purely as a brand play and investment. But buying McLaren makes even more sense. They’d have cherry picked just the right player, a rising star in the Formula One world with an old school brand.