McLaren Elva - Anniversary Orange

The Elva is McLaren's open-cockpit car - no roof, and in its purest form no windscreen at all. The name comes from the McLaren-Elva sports racers Bruce McLaren built in the 1960s. Underneath is the familiar 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8, and the whole point of the exercise was weight: it was built to be the lightest road car McLaren had made.

A car with no windscreen has no line where the glass would be, and that line is normally what carries the eye from the nose into the cabin. Without it the Elva is two front wings, a low deck between them and two seats sitting in open air. It reads as a shape rather than as a car, which is unusual and far less forgiving to frame - there's no roofline to hang a composition on.

The orange puts a second problem back. It's a strong colour, bright enough that it clips before anything else in the frame does, and indoors it bounces: the floor under an orange car goes orange, and so does the underside of the bodywork. Exposing for the car and exposing for the room stop being the same decision.