McLaren knows how to put on a show, and with the Las Vegas Grand Prix in town, the brand was not about to blend into the background. Enter Project Viva by MSO, a one-off McLaren 750S Spider that treats Sin City not as a backdrop, but as a muse. It is part supercar, part art piece, and all Vegas attitude.

Project Viva starts with the already wild 750S Spider, McLaren’s lightest and most powerful series production supercar, and hands it over to McLaren Special Operations. MSO is the in-house skunkworks that normally handles custom colors, unique trims, and one-off commissions for deep pocketed clients. Here, it uses the 750S as a canvas to tell a story about Las Vegas, McLaren’s racing roots, and the shared obsession with spectacle and speed.

The twist is that instead of going full neon, MSO leans into a monochrome theme. Las Vegas is usually defined by color, but Project Viva looks at the city through what McLaren calls a “Sketch in Motion” idea. The body is covered with hand painted linework that feels like an artist’s notebook come to life at highway speed. The shapes trace out skyline elements, signage, musical references, and subtle nods to McLaren’s motorsport heritage, all flowing together so it looks like the car is in motion even when it is parked.

Two bespoke paint finishes do the heavy lifting. Muriwai White appears on details like shutters and doors worked into the artwork, tying back to McLaren’s Muriwai House motif and Bruce McLaren’s early racing history. The main body is finished in a new MSO color called Vegas Nights, a deep black infused with tiny flecks of cyan, magenta, and green. Under bright lights, those specks give off the same shifting glow you see walking the Strip after dark, like casino signage reflected in a black glass building.

Look closer and Project Viva starts to feel like a scavenger hunt. Every sketch, every texture, every stroke is there for a reason. The lines hint at architecture, at the rhythm of the city, at music and performance. McLaren wants this car to be a narrative you read with your eyes rather than a simple graphic wrap. It is a reminder that MSO commissions often begin with a story or emotion rather than a paint chart, then work outward into color and form.

There is also a strong motorsport thread woven into the car. McLaren Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were invited to get hands on with the design. They added their own touches to the rear bumper, including the tenth Constructors’ Championship star that celebrates McLaren’s recent achievement in F1. The drivers also contributed signature lines and small sketches within the artwork, turning the car into a kind of collaborative piece between the race team and the MSO studio. It is the sort of detail that only a few people might notice in person, but it means a lot to fans who follow both sides of the brand.

Underneath all of this visual drama, the 750S Spider hardware remains as serious as ever. You still get the mid mounted 4.0 liter twin turbo V8 pumping out around 740 horsepower and 590 lb ft of torque to the rear wheels through a 7 speed dual clutch transmission. Performance is very much supercar grade, with launch control sprints that push toward the 2.7 second mark in the 0 to 60 mph run and a top speed north of 200 mph. In typical McLaren fashion, the focus is not only on raw numbers, but on light weight and feel, so Project Viva is not just a showpiece that gets rolled off a trailer for static display. It is fully capable of backing up its looks on track or on a desert highway.

Inside, the press release focuses less on specific trim details, but you can safely assume that MSO did not stop at the bodywork. One-off stitching patterns, custom embroidery, and unique interior color splits are very much part of MSO’s playbook, so the cabin likely mirrors the outside theme with carefully placed accents rather than sensory overload. The whole project fits McLaren’s current personalization philosophy: create something deeply personal and meaningful, rather than just throwing every bright color in the catalog at the client.

Jonathan Simms, Director of McLaren Special Operations, frames Project Viva as a perfect example of what MSO exists to do. The idea is to take a story, a place, or a personal memory and translate it into a car that could not belong to anyone else. In this case, the “client” is as much the brand and its Las Vegas narrative as it is any single owner, but the process is the same. Start with an emotion, find the right design language, and then let skilled craftspeople spend countless hours bringing it to life by hand.

Project Viva will not just live in photos. McLaren is putting the car on display at the McLaren Experience Center inside the Wynn Las Vegas Hotel from November 13 to 20, right in the heart of the action around the Las Vegas Grand Prix. For guests wandering through the hotel, it is a chance to see just how far McLaren will go when a commission is limited only by imagination and the skill of MSO’s paint and design teams.