McLaren 720S
Six years on from the paint-by-numbers MP4-12C, has McLaren finally learned that science isn’t everything?
Has Woking managed to make a car that the heart will love as much as the head?
Open this new McLaren and insert a fat bloke into the passenger seat. Add another one, strapped across its rear wing. Fill the boot with bottles of their beer. There. Now you’ve equalled the weight of a Lamborghini Aventador SV. And yet the McLaren’s new twin-turbo V8 is only a few horsepower shy of what Italy’s dozen fnest cylinders can muster. Thanks to two turbos, the British car actually yields a whole lot more torque. Now release your victims (it was a thought experiment, OK? TG does not condone kidnapping) and return the McLaren to its manufactured weight. With just you on board, it’ll send the McLaren, as if on a trebuchet, from a standstill to 125mph in 7.8secs. Seven point eight. The boss Lambo is still clawing towards that mark for another 0.8secs.
The 720S’s performance pretty much hits it out of the park. Full-noise away from an Italian motorway toll booth or slip road, it’s quite the rocketship. The gears shift so fast they kind of merge, but once you’re into fourth it’s plainly possessed of the wherewithal to resist the usual decline in acceleration. I know this because I later tried it on a track, and the sensation is that speed simply reinforces its greed for yet more speed.
To an extent, this isn’t even an illusion. As with Ferrari’s turbo V8 (and also as with the 675LT, although McLaren made less fuss about it than Ferrari), the 720S’s engine delivers more as you climb the gears. There’s a diferent boost map for each gear, so that in the low ones the mid-range torque is moderated. That keeps wheelspin under control, and also makes it feel more naturally aspirated since with reduced boost there’s less lag, and it means it’s worth climbing right to 8,200rpm to collect the full 710bhp (720ps).
So it doesn’t feel too turbocharged. That isn’t the only reason of course. It’s now 4.0 litres instead of 3.8 and is heavily reworked in other ways. It answers the pedal sharpish at mid revs, and if you keep it planted then the red line exerts a black-hole gravitational pull on the rev needle.
Its noise begins soft and smooth, and as you climb it progressively strengthens its tenor. But that’s it. Progressive and well-mannered. Only in a car ftted with the optional sonic combo of intake resonator and sports exhaust does the music change from earbuds to actual gig. From 6,000rpm upwards there’s real excitement there. Even so, it’s recognisably the sound of a turbo engine and, as when I drove a 488, my fngers involuntarily type these words: Audi R8 V10.
But, of course, McLaren is leaving space here for an LT model of the new series. The engineers’ 720S target was that it can be almost as fast and engaging around a track as the last 675LT. Yet by the same token, if specced with electric seats and the quiet pipe, as refned and comfy as the 570GT. I’d agree this highly stretched aim has pretty much been met.
It’ll hum through a town with a soft throttle, gently greased takeup of its clutches and very little noisy disturbance of the streetscape beyond this one’s loud orange paint. On a motorway, there’s some tyre roar and slap over expansion joints, but otherwise it just hums along. And it’s so usable. A front boot is augmented by a big space behind your head. The infotainment system is worth the name, and in contrast to the 488’s and R8/Huracán’s, is shared with the passenger. The doors open diagonally, so they don’t need much space alongside the car and they present a huge aperture through which you drop to your seat. Once there, your outward vision is panoramic. The door-hanging and the vision are intrinsic advantages of the new structure, which uses carbon fbre for the pillars. It’s so strong they can be made uncommonly thin, and the ones behind you are split into two fne spars with glazing between.
“Full-noise away from an Italian motorway toll booth, it’s quite the rocketship”
In trafc, and I’m talking the mayhem of Rome, it’s a huge confdence-booster to be able to see so much.
Looking backward is all very well, but this is a supercar and we need to see ahead. For that we have deep windscreen pillars far back, and LED active headlamps. Even the instrument panel does its bit. The readout doesn’t just alter its graphics depending on need and situation. That’s so last-year. It also physically moves. Go to track mode and it drops towards you to show only the vital info, via a second shallow screen embedded in the panel’s edge.
Cabin theatre doesn’t stop there. It’s a swoopy space, the architecture of dash and doors and sills all positioned with the degree of craziness a supercar requires, but at the same time remaining usable and comfortable. The switches and selector knobs are knurled metal, the work of human craft. It’s special, but the operating logic is friendly. You can have carbon-fbre fxed-back buckets, or electrically adjustable seats that still maintain a determined grip on your skeleton.
Sorry, I’ve approached things inside-out. The outside is a thing of beauty. You probably don’t want me to waste your time regurgitating designer claptrap about “form following function”, or “if it looks right it is right” or “taking inspiration from the wind-driven shapes of nature” or the most worn-out of the lot: