McLaren Tooned: the animated F1 series, its episodes and cast

McLaren Tooned is the computer-animated cartoon series that the McLaren Formula One team made with the London visual effects studio Framestore between 2012 and 2016, in which the team’s real drivers voice cartoon versions of themselves at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking. Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton starred in the first 12 three-minute episodes, shown on Sky Sports F1 before each grand prix from the British Grand Prix on 8 July 2012, with the comedian Alexander Armstrong as their engineer, Professor M. In all there were 30 episodes: two series for McLaren, two mini-series for Mobil 1 and a James Hunt special.

As of 28 October 2026, McLaren’s official YouTube channel carries all eight episodes of the 2013 series, Tooned 50, the 2016 #Hunt40 special and the trailers for Oil: An Odyssey; the 2012 episodes are there only as a clip, and the full first series is watchable in uploads by fans.

How McLaren Tooned began

Tooned was the first production of McLaren Animation, a company the McLaren Group launched on 6 July 2012 as a joint venture with Framestore, the Oscar-winning London visual effects studio. McLaren’s press release of that day put the new company under the McLaren Group alongside McLaren Marketing, and said the series had been “targeted to generate new levels of audience engagement and brand loyalty”.

Ron Dennis, the group’s executive chairman, said in the release that Tooned was “the result of extensive market research carried out by McLaren, which John [Allert], our Group Brand Director, and I then analysed carefully together”, and that a “more demographically accessible ‘face’ for McLaren” would help the brand reach a wider audience. Allert gave the reasoning in the same release: children had gained more say over what families watched and how they watched it, “on PCs and smartphones as well as televisions”, and the series would follow “a tradition established by films such as ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Wall-E’”.

The brief McLaren gave Framestore

McLaren Marketing went to Framestore directly instead of hiring an advertising agency, so the studio acted as creative agency, production company and effects house at once. Framestore’s case study says the brief was open, with four conditions: the films had to be funny, leave room for branding from McLaren’s sponsors, work in any country and be able to run for years. Allert said in 2012 that the series let McLaren and its partners “integrate brand messaging in a format of a high-octane sport not known for an ability to laugh at itself”.

Who wrote and directed Tooned?

Framestore’s own directors, Chris Waitt and Henry Trotter, wrote the stories and directed both McLaren series, with Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley (writers on That Mitchell and Webb Look and The Armstrong and Miller Show) contributing to the first scripts. Simon Whalley was executive producer, Ian Spendloff art director and Carey Williams editor. Once the characters had been mapped out, the dialogue was recorded in voice sessions, with Waitt encouraging the drivers and Armstrong to improvise and play off one another. Ed Dyson and Tim Bain joined the writers for the 2013 series, and Waitt’s own credits list the music as his and Natalie Holt’s.

Who voices the characters in Tooned?

The racing drivers voice themselves. Alexander Armstrong is the one comic actor in the regular cast, and Brian Cox joined him for 2013. Hamilton and Button “voiced their own characters”, the 2012 release said, and every later driver did the same.

Professor M

Professor M is McLaren’s head of engineering and the comic foil of every episode, inventing the gadgets the drivers then misuse. The 2012 release described episodes built on the drivers’ “urge to race” that “test the patience of ‘Professor M’”. Armstrong said in 2012 that the character “isn’t based on anyone specific”, but was “a blend of Steve Jobs from Apple, ‘Q’ from the James Bond movies, and, yes, maybe even one or two people from behind the scenes at the McLaren Technology Centre”. Framestore calls him “a reinvention of Bond’s ‘Q’”.

The drivers by series

Sources: McLaren (2012, 2016), Framestore, Business Wire (2014), F1i, Pitpass, European Motor News (2013), episode credits listed by TheTVDB. The 2013 Hunt episode credits Tom Hunt; F1i and Pitpass name his brother Freddie as the voice in the 2016 version.

Guest characters

The first series has a tour guide showing visitors round McLaren memorabilia (one of Nigel Mansell’s moustaches among it), mechanics who carry out Professor M’s orders (the “mechanic minions”, Sidepodcast called them), the Mayoress of Woking, a robot test driver and, in the last episode, Ron Dennis himself. Two episodes centre on Nyck de Vries, then a member of McLaren’s young driver programme.

Tooned series 1: the episodes

The first series has 12 episodes of about three minutes, one shown before each of the last 12 races of 2012, from the British Grand Prix at Silverstone to the Brazilian Grand Prix. Sky Sports F1 ran them in advertising space during its pre-race programme, according to Framestore; a SkiddMark report of 31 August 2012 put the slot at around 11:45am on race day.

Titles and dates: TheTVDB’s episode guide and Sidepodcast’s 2012 compilation; the race weekends are the 2012 Formula One calendar. Hamilton is absent from episodes 8 and 11, Sidepodcast noted, and Button appears only briefly in episode 8.

Who could watch Tooned in 2012?

Only Sky Sports F1 viewers saw the first broadcasts: in 2012 the BBC and Sky both showed Formula One in Britain, and Tooned ran on Sky alone. A SkiddMark report of 31 August 2012 compared the two channels’ audiences for the first 11 races of the season, using BARB figures.

Source: BARB figures as published by SkiddMark, 31 August 2012.

The same report found no official way to watch the episodes online, and counted the views of fans’ uploads on YouTube: 437,000 for “Wheel Nuts”, 24,900 for “Slicks” and 46,400 for “Track to the Future”. Allert had told SkiddMark months earlier that McLaren’s plans for the online side were well developed. By June 2014 the series was on YouTube with “over 2.3 million views”, according to McLaren’s licensing agent, Evolution Europe.

Why did Lewis Hamilton leave Tooned?

Hamilton left Tooned because he left McLaren: his move to Mercedes for 2013 was confirmed on 28 September 2012, when McLaren announced Sergio Pérez, then at Sauber, as his replacement in the team (and, it turned out, in the cartoon), as Autosport reported. Six of the 12 episodes had still to be shown.

That day John Allert, McLaren’s group brand director, answered SkiddMark’s questions about the cartoon: “Correct. Lewis will continue and record the final 6 episodes as planned,” he said. “We will definitely continue with the series in 2013, when Sergio’s character will be written into the script.” He would not say whether Pérez would make a cameo in 2012, or how Hamilton would be written out.

The answer came in episode 12, “A Glitch Too Far”, shown before the Brazilian Grand Prix on 25 November 2012, Hamilton’s last race for McLaren. A fault in the team simulator scrambles the two drivers; Button emerges unharmed, and the episode ends on a cliffhanger over what has happened to Hamilton. Sidepodcast’s round-up of the series that winter noted “sightings of the Sergio Pérez character around the internet”, and the 2013 series opened with Pérez in Hamilton’s place.

Tooned 50: the 2013 anniversary series

Tooned 50 is the second series: eight three-minute episodes for McLaren’s 50th anniversary in 2013, six of them each built round one McLaren driver, from Bruce McLaren to Mika Häkkinen. The first was shown on Sky Sports on Sunday 30 June 2013 before the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, according to Little Black Book’s report of the launch, and the episodes were later cut together as a single 30-minute film.

The setting is McLaren’s anniversary party, where Professor M’s speech is hijacked by a new character, an old Scottish mechanic voiced by Brian Cox, who claims to know the true story of each champion. Trotter told Shots that the team wanted to make something “bigger and better and bolder” than the first series, and that “everything we came up with had to relate to the real stories, but still have a cartoon spin on them”.

Titles and dates: TheTVDB’s episode guide, from McLaren’s own episode notes; first episode date confirmed by Little Black Book.

The champions in Tooned 50

Each story bends the record for a joke. Bruce McLaren’s episode goes back to New Zealand in 1952, when he was 14. Emerson Fittipaldi, McLaren’s first world champion, is “the man, the mouse… or the wolf?”; James Hunt becomes a secret agent; in the Prost episode Professor M turns out to have been his race engineer, until the old mechanic brings up 1984. Bruno Senna voices his uncle Ayrton, and the Häkkinen episode reveals “the true power behind the ‘Flying Finn’”. Fittipaldi, Prost and Häkkinen voice themselves, and Murray Walker appears as himself.

Awards for Tooned 50

Tooned 50 won a Wood Pencil at the D&AD Awards in 2014, in TV and cinema advertising (long-form branded content), with McLaren Animation as client. Waitt’s credits also list wins for best branded entertainment at the Clio Awards and best branded content at the Cristal and Eurobest awards.

Tooned for Mobil 1: The Story of Oil and Oil: An Odyssey

Two shorter Tooned mini-series were made for Mobil 1, McLaren’s lubricant partner, in which Professor M explains motor oil with the drivers as his demonstrators; Framestore says they brought “some of the science behind the speed” to the fore. Tony Stewart, three times NASCAR Sprint Cup champion and, like Button, one of the drivers ExxonMobil called its Mobil 1 Racing team, joined the McLaren drivers in both.

The Story of Oil (2013) starred Button, his team-mate Sergio Pérez and Stewart, according to the description of the first episode as uploaded on 25 July 2013 by the news site European Motor News, which says the drivers voiced themselves. It ran to six short episodes: “What’s It Oil About” (online by 25 July 2013), “The History of Lubrication” (6 August), “Experiments” (8 August), “Oil Around the World” (22 September), “Inside an Engine” (30 September) and “Oil’s Well That Ends Well” (5 October), with the later dates from TheTVDB. Oil: An Odyssey followed on 23 May 2014 in three two-minute parts, for the 20th year of the partnership between ExxonMobil and McLaren. ExxonMobil’s release said it covered “molecular engineering, viscosity and extremes in temperature”, and was published on Mobil 1’s website, mobiloil.com, and its YouTube channel. Kevin Magnussen, McLaren’s new driver for 2014 after Pérez left the team at the end of 2013 (BBC Sport reported his departure on 13 November), made his animated debut in it. “Seeing yourself as a cartoon is kind of cool,” he said.

The #Hunt40 James Hunt special

The #Hunt40 special is a three-minute Tooned film that McLaren released on 22 October 2016 for the 40th anniversary of James Hunt’s 1976 world title. It reworks “The James Hunt Story” from 2013 around Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button: Hunt, voiced by his son Freddie, is racing in the Monaco Grand Prix when he is sidetracked by his work as a secret agent, and F1i noted that Stoffel Vandoorne, Alonso’s team-mate for 2017, appears too. Pitpass picked out Button calling Alonso “his little chorizo” and Alonso reclining on a lounger.

Allert, still McLaren’s group brand director, said in McLaren’s announcement that the anniversary “made for an obvious decision to revisit the TOONED archives”, and called the episode “an all-too-brief return to the TOONED universe”. It was Alonso’s first appearance in the series. The villain is called Lautfinger, whom Carscoops took to be a parody of Niki Lauda.

How many episodes of Tooned are there?

There are 30 episodes of Tooned in all, counting the two Mobil 1 mini-series and the 2016 special, plus behind-the-scenes films and a special edition of one first-series episode.

Sources: McLaren, Framestore, Little Black Book, ExxonMobil, TheTVDB.

The UK DVD of the first series has a version of episode 6, “Gone with the Wind”, made for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, in which the Queen visits the McLaren Technology Centre in place of the Mayoress of Woking.

The Tooned DVD and merchandise

The first series came out on DVD in the UK in December 2012 through Abbey Home Media, which held the exclusive UK DVD rights; Kidscreen gave the release date as 10 December 2012, while Motorsport Broadcasting reported 3 December. Motorsport Broadcasting’s report of 31 October 2012 listed the contents: the 12 episodes, behind-the-scenes features, a making-of film and an interview with Ron Dennis, about an hour in all, at £9.95 from the McLaren Store. Allert said in 2013 that it had been Abbey Home Media’s best-selling children’s title over Christmas. Tooned 50 later followed on DVD as one long episode.

In June 2014 Evolution Europe began licensing a children’s range, Tooned by McLaren, aimed at children aged three and up and planned to cover toys, clothing, home furnishings, school goods, video games, apps and 3D and 4D rides. McLaren’s online shop also sold Tooned clothing, posters and stickers alongside the DVD, according to Framestore.

How Tooned was received

Allert said in 2013 that the first series had “exceeded all expectations”: Tooned was the UK’s top trend on Twitter in September 2012, its YouTube views passed two million, and it gave McLaren “access to youth and family demographics: something that’s unusual for the sector”. Framestore’s Whalley put much of the success down to the studio’s “50/50 partnership with McLaren”, which let it suggest ideas, Tooned 50 among them, without waiting for a brief.

Sidepodcast called the first series “a genius series”, with “a couple of weak links in the chain”. DriveEuropeNews, reviewing the DVD on 27 December 2012, wrote that “Tooned absolutely nails it”, with jokes “appealing to both adults and children”. SkiddMark’s report of August 2012 rated the cartoons themselves “brilliant”, but faulted McLaren for showing them only on Sky and for leaving fans’ YouTube copies, which it could not measure, as the only way to watch online.

Questions

Where can I watch McLaren Tooned?

On McLaren’s official YouTube channel, which as of 28 October 2026 has all eight Tooned 50 episodes and the 2016 #Hunt40 special; the 2012 series is there only as a clip, and in full in fans’ uploads. The first series also came out on DVD in the UK in December 2012, and Tooned 50 followed on DVD as one long episode.

When did McLaren Tooned start?

The first episode, “Wheel Nuts”, was shown on Sky Sports F1 on 8 July 2012, before the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Tooned 50 began on the same race weekend a year later, on 30 June 2013.

Did Lewis Hamilton voice himself in Tooned?

Yes. McLaren’s launch release of 6 July 2012 said Hamilton and Jenson Button “voiced their own characters”, and every driver in later series did the same.

Who is Professor M based on?

Nobody in particular, according to Alexander Armstrong, who voices him: he described the character in 2012 as a blend of Steve Jobs, Q from the James Bond films and “one or two people from behind the scenes at the McLaren Technology Centre”.

Who voices the old mechanic in Tooned 50?

The Scottish actor Brian Cox voices the old mechanic, the character who tells the “true” story of each McLaren champion through the 2013 series.

How long is an episode of Tooned?

About three minutes. The two McLaren series were made in three-minute episodes, the 2014 Mobil 1 films in two-minute parts, and the eight Tooned 50 episodes were also cut together as a 30-minute film.

Is there a Tooned season 3?

The episodes after Tooned 50 were the two Mobil 1 mini-series, The Story of Oil (2013) and Oil: An Odyssey (2014), which Wikipedia’s episode list numbers as seasons 3 and 4, and the 2016 #Hunt40 special.

Who made Tooned?

Framestore, the London visual effects studio, wrote, directed and animated it for McLaren Animation, the company McLaren and Framestore set up together in 2012. Chris Waitt and Henry Trotter were the writer-directors and Simon Whalley the executive producer.

Sources

• McLaren Group, “McLaren Group announces launch of dynamic brand-new McLaren Animation media company”, 6 July 2012 (archived copy): McLaren Animation, the Framestore joint venture, the first broadcast date, the quotes from Ron Dennis, John Allert and Alexander Armstrong, the writers and the recording method.
• Framestore, “Tooned” case study (framestore.com): the brief, the Sky pre-race slot, the credits, Tooned 50, the Mobil 1 series, merchandise and Simon Whalley’s comments.
• Chris Waitt, “Tooned 50” portfolio page: writing and music credits and the Clio, Cristal and Eurobest awards.
• SkiddMark, “Has McLaren’s ‘Tooned’ animation series crashed out on the opening lap?”, 31 August 2012: the Sky broadcast slot, the BARB audience figures, the YouTube view counts and Allert’s earlier comments.
• SkiddMark, “Checo Pérez joins Button for a new series of ‘Tooned’”, 28 September 2012: Allert’s confirmation that Hamilton would record the last six episodes and that Pérez would join in 2013.
• Autosport, Jonathan Noble, “Sergio Perez gets Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren seat”, 28 September 2012 (archived copy): Hamilton’s move to Mercedes and Pérez’s signing.
• Sidepodcast, “The drawn supremacy: a compilation of Tooned animations from McLaren in 2012”: the first-series episode titles and stories, and the review quoted.
• TheTVDB, “Tooned” episode guide: titles and first-shown dates for every series, episode notes and voice credits.
• Kidscreen, “Abbey secures Tooned UK DVD rights”, 2012: the DVD deal and release date.
• Motorsport Broadcasting, “‘Tooned’ gets a DVD release”, 31 October 2012: DVD contents and price.
• DriveEuropeNews, “What is McLaren playing at? Tooned DVD review”, 27 December 2012: the review quoted.
• Little Black Book, “McLaren & Framestore’s Tooned 50”, 2013 (lbbonline.com): the Tooned 50 launch on 30 June 2013, the 30-minute film, Brian Cox, and Allert’s figures for the first series.
• Shots, “Framestore & McLaren Tooned to Perfection”, 2013: Henry Trotter on making Tooned 50.
• D&AD Awards archive, “Tooned 50”, 2014: the Wood Pencil and its category.
• ExxonMobil via Business Wire, “Jenson Button, Kevin Magnussen and Tony Stewart Race into New TOONED Series with Mobil 1”, 23 May 2014 (archived copy): Oil: An Odyssey, its format and the drivers’ quotes.
• Licensing International, “McLaren launches children’s line with Tooned by McLaren”, 6 June 2014: the Tooned by McLaren range and the YouTube view count.
• BBC Sport, “Sergio Perez confirms McLaren departure”, 13 November 2013: Pérez leaving McLaren after one season.
• McLaren, “TOONED Special Edition: #Hunt40”, 22 October 2016: the special, its cast and Allert’s comments.
• F1i, “McLaren releases James Hunt special TOONED episode”, 22 October 2016: Freddie Hunt’s voice role and Vandoorne’s appearance.
• Pitpass, “The return of Tooned”, October 2016: Button’s “little chorizo” line and the lounger.
• Carscoops, “McLaren’s Tooned Pays Homage To James Hunt”, 27 October 2016: the Lautfinger character.
• McLaren, official YouTube channel, checked 28 October 2026: the Tooned 50 episodes, the #Hunt40 special, the Mobil 1 trailers and the series 1 clip available there now.
• European Motor News, “Tooned Episode 1: What’s It Oil About”, YouTube, 25 July 2013: the cast of The Story of Oil.