It's a kind of magic

McLaren GT

With an insouciant charm I was advised to just drop it back on Monday. No rush. The exchange had less drama than borrowing a book from the library.

It is Friday and I’ve just finished my tour of McLarens’s Technology Centre in Woking, UK. What I need to return on Monday is a McLaren GT. I have a supercar for the weekend. It would have been rude to say ‘no’.

In the car firmament, where production volumes are small and the numbers - of every other type, - bar nought to 60 - are very large, you can find that rare thing, the supercar. It’s the car that supermodels arrive in to be pictured getting out of.

The left side of my brain was aware that the design had been sculpted by the wind tunnel; of course, McLaren have their own. The clinical would say form firmly follows function, but the result is far more than a dispassionate exercise in aerodynamic optimisation. It’s a heady mix of curves and soft angles that coalesce, from nose to tail, into 4.7 meters of voluptuous enchantment. It has the visual magnetism of all machines that have been built to go very fast.

The numbers are as eye catching as they are eye watering: 0 to 60 mph in 3.1 seconds and a top speed of 203 mph. The GT has a starting price of £163,000. With options, what I had the keys to was worth £185,000. It was brand new and finished in Papaya Spark, a vibrant orange hue used by the McLaren Formula 1 racing cars of the 1970s. It attracted abundant attention, even when still.

In car lore Bruce McLaren is a titan. His first F1 win was at the age of 22, a record that stood for 40 years. I had heard that a tribute to the New Zealander is in every modern McLaren in the form of a small-engraved Kiwi symbol. And, yes, I did look for it.

My wife thought it was a make-your-heart-sing machine. Not bad from a woman whose default is to feel both sick and vulnerable when I’m driving. After a ride in the McLaren she was all for downsizing our house and buying one.

Her transformation was the result of a whole bubbling cauldron of McLaren magic.

The experience starts with how the car wraps around you when you enter.  You don’t so much get into it as put it on with the dihedral doors soft closing behind you. In the cocoon, the seat snugly envelops you so you are instantly comfortable amongst the beautifully made interior where everything is unique to McLaren; there are no parts bin hand-me down bits here.

Naturally, you are low down, and above, the glass roof panel floods the space with light. It’s a cosy cavern of Alcantara and leather loveliness.

The sheer quality of it all distracts from the fact you are in a two-seat carbon fibre tub with the engine mounted just behind you. This set up partly explains why the GT feels super glued to the road, the centre of mass feeling very close to your hips.

With the gearbox set to auto, the delivery of power is eerily and utterly seamless; it feels like Hermes, the Greek god of speed, is pushing you smoothly forward with unlimited potential. Combine that with having a weight of just 1,530 Kg alongside 620 bhp available and its twisty road credentials are, yes, just super. McLaren have stuck with hydraulic steering that is also mesmerising, why would you mess with something so perfect?

The clincher for my partner, though, was the ride. McLaren’s Proactive Damping Control uses inputs from sensors and a software algorithm to ‘read’ the road ahead, interpreting what is likely to happen next and reacting predictively in just two milliseconds.

The result is progress over any road surface, and at any speed that is smoother than a glide on Aladdin’s rug; this was an astonishing jiggle and jitter free experience that produced much purring from my passenger. The technology to deliver this felt more like sorcery than science. 

All that McLaren are known for is here in abundance; the prodigious performance, the humungous handling, telepathic steering, an exacting eye for detail and fabulous build quality.

Grand tour needed? If you can’t live without those essential lemons from the Italian Amalfi coast, you could do worse than reach for the McLaren key. Put the suspension and gearbox into comfort mode for the motorway and just enjoy. With 570 litres of luggage space, it’s difficult to imagine a better way to pop to the shops when they are over 500 miles away.

Any negatives had nothing to do with the car or its towering abilities, the conundrum was with the marketing, and in particular, those two letters, ‘GT’. This confused some car commentators, who, incapable of out-of-the-box thinking could only compare it against traditional grand tourers; ones with armchair seating and room for a small shipping container of matching luggage. No matter how you position it, the McLaren GT is first and foremost a supercar with a little more stowage, the most useful in the nose, and a slightly softer ride. It is uniquely their take on a GT; a mind scrambling daily driver.

If I were a high net worth individual, the GT would be part of my car fleet in a heartbeat. Painted in Papaya Spark too. Every moment driving it makes you feel good and that’s possibly the whole point of a car like this; beyond the arid statistics, engineering genius and acronyms, how does it actually make you feel?

It’s the old feel-good factor, instantly recognisable, but as difficult to deliver as it is to catch smoke in your hand.

Did our weekend together take me to a happy place and make the hair on the back of my neck stand up? I needed a second opinion.

‘What do you think?’ I ask my car mad mum friend. Dropping down the gears via the manual shift paddles the twin-turbocharged 4-litre V8 just behind us starts to stir like an awakening volcano. A terse two-word answer – unprintable - can just be heard as the engine screams orgasmically up the revs towards the 8,200-rpm redline. ‘How is the old hubby?’ I enquire while we can still talk without shouting. Seconds pass. Outside the scenery is turning into a toddler’s watercolour. ‘Who, him? I need one of these’, she says smiling.

Indeed. If you like something that is beautiful to look at, drives based on witchcraft, and has a depth of engineering as deep as the Mariana trench, you will want one too.

Monday morning came around all too quickly. I handed the key back to the lovely lady at McLaren and didn’t look back. If I did she would have seen that I had something in my eye. What a whirlwind love affair. I knew it would end in tears.