Who on earth gets the idea to do the weekend shopping at the local Migros in a McLaren? We do. And the trouble starts at the car-park entrance: crouched low to the ground, your arm is too short to take the ticket from the machine. Of course, the «Maccie» doors swing up spectacularly — at least they free up part of the roof, so you can rise and finally grab the ticket. The McLaren finds a spot with three empty bays between the pillars and is parked dead centre, «like someone from Aargau», thinks the Zurich man.
Three bags of groceries later, a few onlookers are gathered around the car. The remote brings the lighting to life and the spectators disperse. The front bonnet lifts quickly — heavier than expected, despite carbon — and the goodies vanish into the deep shaft of the «luggage» compartment. The ensuing crawl through the underground car park takes discipline: the 7-speed dual-clutch gearbox hates trundling along below pit-lane speed. But at last there is daylight, and the road opens up again.
The hard edge
It quickly becomes clear: merely pottering about in the McLaren feels soul-destroying. The flat-crank V8 — four litres, two turbos, 720 hp — was not built to glide along in ordinary traffic. The music plays beyond the rev range taught in driving school. Even in first gear you can catapult yourself into a licence-less pedestrian within seconds: the factory quotes 2.9 seconds to 100. Driven gently at 120 km/h, the car feels like it’s in a 30 zone. So off the motorway, towards a small, fine country road.
There, once in the flow, you swing the 720S up a mountain road like a gibbon through the jungle of Borneo. The suspension, mounted to a torsionally stiff carbon-fibre monocoque, sends the right signals — though a touch «edgy», as the British would say. The McLaren is less good-natured than a Ferrari F8 Tributo; here you have to work to look good. Only the brakes startle you the first time, but once the carbon-ceramic discs are up to temperature they deliver negative acceleration enough to make you dizzy.
At the controls
Since you’re wedged in the vice anyway, you take a look around. Gear selection is by push-button — a feature once blessed in Chrysler’s Torqueflite and gone again by 1965. Not much fun, unlike the little «Active» button: the instrument cluster then takes a break and shows only a rev counter on its edge as a shift light. There is plenty of Alcantara, plenty of leather too — including in the doors, which double as the roof above the passengers and, on this 720S with barely 10,000 kilometres, are already starting to come loose. Seems to be a British disease.
Fundamentally the cabin is decent and visually interesting, the central screen usable. But the underlying feeling is that of a piece of gym equipment: a blend of design, functionalism and pragmatism. You can live with it — and anyone who wishes, and doesn’t mind the cost, can have the car endlessly personalised at the factory. But we need the McLaren for driving: it handles so fabulously, accelerates so absurdly fast and emits such an addictive sound at high revs that we almost forgot the three Migros bags up front.
This article appeared in MEN issue 1/21 (November 2021).
