For Las Vegas' Big Race Weekend, Bowers & Wilkins and McLaren Continue To Champion the Pursuit of Perfection
Pushing their decade-long “performance-rooted” partnership to the next level with the Px8 S2 McLaren Edition wireless headphones.
There’s a reason that McLaren named Bowers & Wilkins its Official Audio Partner across both McLaren Automotive and its McLaren Formula 1 Team. For over a decade – from 2015’s McLaren 540C through the newest McLaren W1 supercar – the UK-based audio imprint’s engineering team has worked closely with the automotive empire to advance each car’s audio system with the most updated, advanced speaker technologies.
Ever since 2015, Bowers & Wilkins and McLaren have worked to bridge the high-end audio and automotive worlds through their shared technical precision and performance-led approach. With an unwavering commitment to not settle for anything less than perfection, the seasoned partners have now collaborated on three co-crafted headphones, the latest a new version of the award-winning Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 wireless headphones, arriving just in time for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Entitled the “Px8 S2 McLaren Edition,” the new over-the-ear pair was created in collaboration with McLaren Automotive and the McLaren Formula 1 Team, with drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri leading the campaign visuals.
“Both brands are anchored in performance, so it has really always felt like a very natural partnership at the end of the day,” said Giles Pocock, VP of Brand Marketing for Bowers & Wilkins to Nicolas Brown, McLaren’s President of The Americas, at Tuesday night’s intimate launch event at The Wynn’s McLaren store. Norris himself also showed out at the launch event for a brief Q&A, speaking more about how important “consistency” is to him – making him a textbook-perfect ambassador for the enduring Bowers & Wilkins x McLaren partnership.
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
Building on the base of the Px8 S2, the special McLaren edition takes to a slimmer silhouette, and features Bowers & Wilkins’ noise cancellation technology, levelled up with new bespoke 40mm Carbon Cone drive units; these are built with an entirely updated chassis, voice coil, suspension, and magnet, carefully angled so both ears remain equidistant from the entire driver surface, improving both spatial accuracy and stereo depth.
In true McLaren fashion, the headphones come complete with McLaren’s signature Papaya colorway finish, complemented by sleek Anthracite Grey and McLaren Speedmark hits. Diamond-cut bright edges land on each of the elliptical logo plates, with soft memory-foam cushioning and a headband trimmed in soft Nappa leather.
Similar to the original Px8 S2 model, the new collaborative headphones feature Qualcomm’s aptX Adaptive 24/96 wireless technology, in tandem with Bowers’ aptX Lossless plus Digital Signal Processing, to deliver premium 24-bit/96kHz sound quality.
Bowers & Wilkins X Mclaren
The Px8 S2 McLaren Edition are the ideal representation of the steadfast union between Bowers & Wilkins and McLaren, both on and off the track. Epitomizing the pair’s ease of collaboration and the authenticity behind it, the commemorative headphones push the pair’s performance-first approach to the top of the podium, echoing John Bowers’ founding ethos into the modern-day racing circuit.
When asked about the shared priorization of performance, Pocock referenced Bowers’ foundations as the “driving force” behind the longstanding collaborative partnership. “John Bowers didn’t start the company looking to make money; he started by looking to make the world’s greatest loudspeakers,” he explained. “It’s a relentless pursuit of perfection.”
Brown agreed, saying the duo owes it to its clients and growing fanbase “never rests on its laurels” – literally finishing Pocock’s sentence before he could even get the words out, so if that’s not an indicator of the seamless synergy between the two pioneering partners, I’m not sure what is. “There’s a quote from John Bowers that I really like, in terms of ‘If you make a better product, people will buy it.’ That’s the mentality behind our partnership: what can we do better?”
Surely, the pair delivered on their commitment with the Px8 S2 McLaren Edition. Get your hands on a set of the headphones now, retailing for $899 USD at the Bowers & Wilkins website.
