McLaren Speedtail review

10

It has been labelled the spiritual successor to the legendary F1, but the Speedtail is something even more inspiring

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We’d been on the road for hours. Hours in which I thought I’d come to know and understand the extraordinary, £2.1 million McLaren Speedtail.

And if it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, that was just fine. It’s always good to have an element of the unexpected, even with a prospect as interesting as this.

I knew it was fast, fast in a way perhaps no other road car has ever been. And fascinating, too, for its engineering, design and significance.

But then – and forgive this very necessary opacity – I found myself able to open it up in a way that had hitherto not been possible. 

That was when I discovered the Speedtail had been toying with me all day. After 30-something years of testing road cars, here was an entirely new experience. 

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DESIGN & STYLING

McLaren Speedtail 2020 UK first drive review - hero side

The Speedtail has a carbonfibre tub, a mid-engined configuration, a twin-turbocharged V8 engine, a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox and rear-wheel drive so, in such crucial regards, is no different to any other McLaren of the past 10 years. Yes, it has a hybrid powertrain, but so did the P1 back in 2013.

I don’t usually dwell on cars’ looks, because I’m no better positioned to judge them than you. But how can I ignore this? One can’t.

People will crash their tin boxes to get a better view of it. One bloody nearly did. Another on Woking high street was so fixated that, had there been a lamp-post or open manhole in front of him, he’d have stood no chance.

For me, it’s more than just achingly beautiful. I find it utterly beguiling, the way it takes a late-1960s sports racer idiom, with its forward cockpit and extravagantly extended tail, and transports those flowing curves to the present day without the result looking hackneyed, derivative or even conspicuously retro.

INTERIOR

McLaren Speedtail 2020 UK first drive review - cabin

The central seat is so natural; it’s the driving position of every other car and not the Speedtail that forever after feels awkward and displaced. And for those McLaren F1 owners who struggled in and out of their cars, know that access is immeasurably easier here.

There are three digital screens: driving data ahead, flanked by a sat-nav touchscreen on one side and an entertainment touchscreen on the other. It’s that simple. When I think back to McLaren’s hopeless original Iris system of a decade ago, well, the mind truly boggles.

Buttons are exiled to the headlining for functions you need regularly (engine start/stop, doors and tiny windows), while others are banished out of immediate sight ahead of your knees. If McLaren can reproduce interior forms of such crisp, clean beauty in the less unaffordable cars of its future, they will by themselves provide temptation of a new kind for the company.

Passengers fare worse than in conventional supercars and, surprisingly, in the F1. If the driver is short and thus has the seat a long way forward, all will be fine. But if the seat is positioned rearward, there’s simply insufficient space for the inboard shoulder of each passenger. Children and the slightly built will fare reasonably well, but anyone planning on using their Speedtail in its intended hyper-GT role may find their holiday plans somewhat stymied by passenger-seat protests if they don’t do their homework first.

Luggage space, by contrast, is fabulous. There’s a load of room in the nose, a load more in the tail and the almost racing certainty of at least one vacant passenger seat. Oddment storage, however, is almost non-existent, unless you count small cubbies beneath each passenger seat.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

The Speedtail starts like any other McLaren and makes the same noise – which is disappointing. Given it has a flat-plane-crank V8 like every other McLaren, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but its hard, gruff voice isn’t that of a GT, hyper or otherwise.

No, of course McLaren couldn’t package another cylinder at each corner, and for just 106 units it would be ruinously expensive even if it could. But if ever a car required a V12 (dare I say like that in the F1?), surely a hyper-GT is it.

It’s hilarious how effortlessly this 1055bhp car (thanks to the almost combined efforts of its 747bhp 4.0-litre engine and a 309bhp-plus electric motor) slips into the real world. Because the hybrid drive is set purely for power provision, there’s no electric-only mode like in the P1, nor can you plug it in, although you can charge it through an induction pad built into the floor of the hermetically sealed, dehumidified vault you’ll undoubtedly have for it at home. 

This also keeps the 12V system topped up, so there’s no need for a trickle-charger, which is a neat touch.

You need the car in Sport driving mode, otherwise you won’t be given the full 848lb ft of torque. And you can’t transmit 848lb ft to the road through two 315mm-wide patches of rubber until they’re rotating extremely quickly. So what happens is different to anything almost anyone has ever experienced in a road car, and it happens at a different speed, too.

It’s acceleration, but not as we know it. This isn’t a bludgeon like the Chiron, using brute force to shatter the air around it, but a bullet, so slim, stealthy and slippery that the air scarcely notices it’s being penetrated. This is why the only performance figure McLaren quotes is a Bugatti-busting 13.0sec run from 0-186mph, despite the evident traction limitations. So when your nerve fails and you finally lift, the car, instead of headbutting an aerodynamic wall, barely slows.

So you need good brakes and, once you’ve got through the pedal’s initially quite dead feel, my goodness have you got them.

Of course this car can hit 250mph, and it would have been capable of a whole lot more had McLaren not concluded that it wasn’t worth the extra ride-wrecking unsprung mass (heavier wheels, tyres, suspension and brakes) required to make it safe at speeds nobody would ever reach.

That headline-grabbing top speed is a distraction. In essence, the Speedtail is just a wondrous car to guide along a good road. You don’t have to be doing 250mph to savour its looks, interior, driving position, displays, ride or handling. You don’t even need to be doing 150mph.

RIDE & HANDLING

McLaren Speedtail 2020 UK first drive review - on the road nose

The ride quality is exceptional, more like that of the 12C than any subsequent McLaren. Flawed though it was, the 12C was the best-riding McLaren to date. But it’s not as good as this.

The steering, too, has a lovely languid quality to it, thanks not only to one of the lower-geared racks at McLaren’s disposal but also a wheelbase that’s extended by 58mm, in the interests of comfort and stability as well as the need to package the hybrid drive between the engine and gearbox.

As the miles accrued, I learned to love the Speedtail for reasons I hadn’t expected, because all along I’d been programmed to think of it as a GT. 

But it’s not and, to be honest, with that engine, it could never be. I’ll admit that it took a while to recognise that fact and discard my preconceptions. 

The Speedtail may be state of the art in engineering terms but, philosophically, it’s actually what in the 1970s came to be known as a supercar. It’s like a post-modern Ferrari Daytona (albeit with three times the power, to within a single bhp), effortless over a distance, of course, but meant firstly, secondly and thirdly for drivers and driving.

Once I’d realised that, the rest fell swiftly into place. All performance issues aside, this is an awesome, unforgettable device to fire at the horizon. Its handling is just superb. Indeed, because it’s imagined that no Speedtail will be used for track days, McLaren has optimised its oh-so-clever suspension for street use, with the result that it breathes beautifully with the road.

Remember too that this car is properly light: at 1499kg, around 500kg lighter than the Bugatti Chiron. It flows as it flies, athletic, balletic, beautiful to behold and exquisite to command.

VERDICT

McLaren Speedtail 2020 UK first drive review - static front

Is it a replacement for the F1? No, in a word. But not just because the F1 went racing and the Speedtail won’t. 

Remember, the F1 was never designed to be a racing car. Indeed, its designer, Gordon Murray, once told me that had he intended it to race, he would have designed it in an entirely different way.

It’s not a replacement for the F1 because that car was designed with lightness as the number-one priority. Top speed, a clear consideration for the Speedtail, mattered so little that it took Murray four years to bother to find out what it was (240.1mph).

But the F1 and Speedtail are far closer relatives than you think, and not just due to their seating layouts and identical production runs. Just like the Speedtail, the F1 was designed to be usable, whether anyone was going to use it or not. It too rode uncommonly well, had generous cargo space and, by the deeply dodgy standards of 1990s exotica, offered decent air-con and entertainment.

At heart, both are supercars in the original sense of the word, aiming to provide a unique driving experience over a long distance to a massively moneyed and discerning clientele. And in their own eras, both do that job better than any other that I’ve driven.

Yes, the Speedtail is rare and exotic, but far more importantly, it’s an exquisite thing just to be aboard. And even if there is another that can get close to what this car does, I don’t believe any car can do it the way the Speedtail does. Because it’s more than just powerful and fast: it’s light and clever, too. A McLaren, in other words.