NEW MAN FOR MCLAREN; AMERICAN-BORN DESIGN WHIZ TO WORK HIS MAGIC ON FERRARI FIGHTER.(News)(McLaren Automotive Ltd.)(Frank Stephenson )

Byline: JULIAN RENDELL AND GREG KABLE

The arrival of former Fiat and Ferrari designer Frank Stephenson at McLaren Automotive in England starts a significant new chapter in the development of a family of supercars that will carry on the legacy of McLaren's famous F1.

No one expects Stephensonthe Ameri-can who designed the Mini and the X5 for BMW, the Quattroporte and the MC12 for Maserati and the 8C Competizione and the MiTo hatchback for Alfa Romeomerely to fiddle with some door handles and badge positions. He has the serious job of redesigning the P11 family, McLaren's mid-engined Ferrari F430 chasers.

Although there have been scoop images of the P11, sources at McLaren say the production caroriginally due in 2010 but now delayed by a yearwill be very different. It's changed from those designs, the sources say; the basic engineering layout is fixed, but the styling is still open.

Stephenson also will get to design the rumored open-top version of the P11 and a GTR race version, the latter powered by a V10 making more than 600 hp. McLaren expects the P11 GTR version to have success similar to that of its F1 GTR predecessor. The lightweight and more powerful GTR version of McLaren's F1 was the second-best-selling variant, racing with considerable success, in-cluding an overall win at Le Mans in 1995.

McLaren has pushed back the launch date of the P11 to accommodate the redesign. Earlier plans called for it to be revealed at the Paris show in October or next March in Geneva, but now the car likely will have its world premiere in late 2009 or early 2010.

Stephenson's arrival is a coup for ...