McLaren GT

Another day, another lightning-quick McLaren built around the company’s featherweight (just 75kg) ultra-stiff carbon fibre ‘MonoCell II’ tub and mid-mounted 4.0 litre twin-turbo V8. Woking does seem to be able to turn out new variants with mercurial adroitness.

However, shunning the company’s numerical nomenclature norm, this machine is simply dubbed GT; a grand tourer, a gran turismo, no less. And that, in theory, finds it removed from familiar, impending-gleam-of-a-track-day McLaren terrain and sidling onto turf already occupied by the more blatantly opulent likes of, say, the Bentley Continental GT, Ferrari’s Roma and the Aston Martin DB11. Interesting.

As a piece of sculpture, the GT certainly has presence. But it lacks -to my eye- the artfully judged meld of bite and sheer unalloyed elegance apparent in both McLaren’s 570S and 720S. Oh, and all sight of the engine has vanished under a swathe of fabric designed to turn the long, shallow space beneath the tailgate glass into a luggage compartment fit only for golf clubs or a heavily-sedated juvenile crocodile.

However, I suspect I’m alone with this niggle; whether by dint of colour scheme, rarity or patriotism I know not, but any McLaren attracts more mobile phone camera attention than any other machine I’ve driven for an age, appealing to the small boy in even a substantial number of passing women.

The delicious sense of occasion elicited by entry through those trademark, up-and-out dihedral doors never wanes, but in comparison to the opulence unearthed aboard rival GTs previously mentioned, the McLaren cabin reveals itself to be somewhat more cockpit, and very much a place of work.

Don’t get me wrong, build quality is superb, as are ergonomics provided by snug hugging yet comfortable seats and a deliciously sized steering wheel free of switchgear frippery. Perhaps it’s merely that the machine I drove was effectively all black, inside and out… I have seen images of cabins decked with lighter leather, adding a whiff of the poetic to an otherwise overwhelming sense of purpose.

I have only one major gripe with the interior, and that’s the impossibly fiddly seat adjustment and memory controls, tucked down at the front of the left hand side of the driver’s seat; out of sight but far from out of mind. Once you’ve learned to use them and the air has returned to a normal hue, you’re still likely to undone by the memory function…

In the car I drove, it allowed to me set and forget once, thereafter steadfastly refusing to memorise my subsequent wish to have the seat set an inch or two further back. Moreover, having automatically displaced seat and wheel for easier ingress and egress, the system simply would not return same to their original position.

Warning: watches of the size worn by those who can afford a £163,000 McLaren will be scratched on the centre console trim during the tedious business of ensuring you’re sitting pretty. Mine was, and it is certainly not of the size worn by those who can afford a £163,000 McLaren. This relentless palaver came to irritate me so much I’d have to insist on manual adjustment were I ever able to afford the car.

Better news is that what was once a dauntingly pricey options list is now almost entirely billed as a no cost option. That includes all manner of fancy trim, a sports exhaust, carbon ceramic brakes and a 12-speaker Bowers and Wilkins stereo -until recently billed at £3,400- which you will not listen to…

And that’s because you’ll be too busy enjoying the entertainment provided by a 4.0 litre, twin-turbocharged V8 that has been gently tweaked for installation behind the driver’s head. Smaller, more responsive low-inertia turbochargers now give access to some 95% of the GT’s peak torque of 465 lb ft from only 3000 rpm. Allied to 612 bhp on tap, this means you don’t have to work the wonderfully tactile seven-speed paddle shift so hard to get the view coming at you with considerable vim.

Straight line performance is, of course, hilariously brisk; the seamless swelling of the velocity at which the car simply inhales the road surface ahead relentlessly intoxicating.

After a couple of days I was left wondering for just how long you need to drive a car like this to become fully attuned to such outrageous performance capabilities. If the secret of safe overtaking is to spend as little time on the wrong side of the road as possible, then not much out there can best a GT smearing from 3000 to 7500 rpm in third gear…

The same cannot quite be said for the engine note. It barks into life enthusiastically enough, in the wake-every-neighbour-for-a-five-street-radius manner that is now the accepted norm for performance machinery. But, on the move, you need to be pedalling extremely rapidly to elicit anything especially sonorous by way of a properly howling sound track. And even then it’s more of a breathy, flat, vicious snarl… Some have complained about this, but I think it rather suits the character of a car in which -seat memory aside- the white heat of technology clearly holds sway.

The car’s gran turismo potential is most apparently unlocked by its remarkably pliant and relaxed ride quality. With conventional anti-roll bars, double wishbones all round and a three-way adaptive damping system, the GT is hallmarked by longer, softer coil springs and more ground clearance than any other McLaren.

Moreover, the seven-speed twin clutch gearbox is more than happy to potter you around in fully automatic mode, giving the car pleasing everyday usability credentials.

When you do wish to up your work rate -which is pretty much constantly- the McLaren shuns a raft of steering wheel-mounted controls in favour of two simple, rotating switches on the lower centre console, through which you may adjust Performance (engine and gearbox) and Handling (adaptive dampers) through Comfort, Sport and Track modes, and a simple button marked ‘Active’.

So, dial in the settings required, press Active to engage, and then Manual to bring the steering wheel-mounted flappy paddles into play. Press the same button again to promote good behaviour in built-up areas, and the whole shooting match simply reverts back to automatic guise, your chosen settings temporarily dormant.

All of which makes the GT a ridiculously easy machine to exploit and thoroughly relish.

Left in the Comfort setting, the GT rides far more comfortably than expected, with none of the crash and thump you’d expect from a car of such dynamic ability. And you’ll have to be seriously cavalier in your attitude to other traffic and or license loss to feel the need to toughen up the undercarriage in the interests of greater handling prowess.

This is a candy floss-sweet chassis; responsive, agile and highly rewarding to push down twisting roads. Levels of grip are so high that, in the absence of a track on which to experiment, the car proves far braver than I, darting into corners with precision, urgency and minimal body roll, challenging you get back on the throttle ever earlier as confidence in its abilities grow.

Throughout, the steering is a delight of crisp, direct and communicative accuracy, the rim trembling under your touch like a gun-shy Labrador on a shoot. Only once -with the handling set in Sport mode- did I stumble across a section of Mudfordshire tarmac so dire that the wheel was quite aggressively knocked about by the surface below…

Carbon ceramic brakes offer massive stopping power, but the pedal itself requires acclimatisation, feeling somewhat wooden and lifeless unless you’re leaning on it with considerable vim, at which point your passenger will be retrieving their tonsils from the glovebox.

All of which adds up to a high-performance car as utterly enthralling and addictive as any McLaren. A GT, though? Of that I remain somewhat unconvinced. But that’s not the car’s fault -it didn’t choose its name.