THE BRAKES.
THEY ALWAYS SAY IT’S THE BRAKES.
And they’re right. It’s always the brakes. You wallop them with everything you’ve got the moment panic sets in, and the next thing you feel is your scalp slipping forward, your cheeks attempting to clap in front of your mouth and a grunted gasp of air whooshing out from between slack jaws. Oh, I know, we all think we’re as chiselled and tough as Max Verstappen, but if you want a reminder of the relentless rigours of age and inability, g-force will do it every time.
There is nothing dignified about driving a million quid’s worth of track-only hypercar. They’re never easy to get into, they’re tricky to see out of, you need someone else to do your belts up and show you which way to turn out of the pit garage. They inflict exhaustion at will and when you come back in, probably
only 15 minutes later when the fuel runs out, everyone attempts to hide how alarmed they are by the red and sweating shambles in front of them. So why do it?
Because the bit in between is good, that’s the simple answer. But there are several points worth raising here: why not just have a racing car and y’know, go racing? Are these really the ultimate track toys? Wouldn’t I have more fun in a BAC Mono or Ariel Atom? The first
I’ll leave up to you. The answers to the last two, in case you were wondering, are both yes. Which sounds puzzling until you put yourself in the position of the kind of people who can drop a mill on a track toy. They want an experience. Don’t think of them as cars, think broader, car hand-in-hand with bespoke event. Lifestyle accoutrements, things to add to the collection along with heli-skiing the Chugach Range, fly fishing in Siberia and mooring a yacht in Monaco. Senna GTR at the Bahrain GP circuit fits neatly, no? Just another leisure activity.
And then think of the businesses behind them. These firms aren’t making wild-looking cars just to feed your Instagram habit. Ferrari led the way with its FXX cars, which purported to let owners ‘help develop’ the next generation of cars. Nonsense, it was just good business. So everyone piled in. Aston Martin, Pagani, Maserati, Lamborghini, McLaren. No need for road homologation, just go hardcore and have at it. Walk in at the ground level and spend your way up. Maybe move up to an ex-Schumacher F1 car, or move on to some customer racing – McLaren has both GT4 and GT3 programmes and will gladly rent you a race instructor, engineer, mechanic, track, the whole nine yards.
But you need to start somewhere. And to be fair, you’re probably going to have started somewhere more humble than the Senna GTR. Maybe a 570S on a track day, maybe something back in your youth. But the bug bit, and now you’re here. It seems as if McLaren’s Ultimate Series cars were created to answer questions. For the Senna, maybe it was something like “What if we ignored all normal definitions of beauty and allowed aero to rule?” or “How much downforce can we sneak past the legislators?” – 800kg, it would turn out. The road car intrigues me. The GTR was merely inevitable. You can’t not do a track-only version of the car named after the world’s greatest racing driver.
It looks furious, hackles up, teeth bared, tensed. But the ramp up over the road car isn’t that marked: an extra 25bhp thanks to the removal of the secondary cats, 200kg more downforce from extending the splitter,
“WHILE THE SENNA WAS A ROAD CAR FIRST, TRACK CAR LATER, THE BT62 COMES FROM THE OTHER DIRECTION”
angling the rear wing back and widening it (the GTR is over 200mm longer), plus dive planes, vents and a prolapsed rear diffuser like Bane’s gum guard. Elements of the suspension are borrowed from the 720S GT3 car, the brakes have new pads and booster. Compared to its rival here, the basics still sound pretty exotic: full carbon tub with midmounted 814bhp 4.0-litre twin turbo, seven speed twin clutch gearbox, DRS for the straights, see through panels in the roof and lower doors, and a cabin that looks reassuringly complete.
Brabham wants a piece of what McLaren has got. It has the antipodean racing name, but not the resources. But its aims are also less ambitious: it wants to go racing, because that’s what Jack did 60 years ago. Le Mans 2022 is the aim. While the Senna was a road car first, track car later, the BT62 comes from the other direction. It was only ever intended for track use, but when punters turned up saying they wanted to drive it on the road or there was no sale, Brabham capitulated. You can have your BT62 shopper-ready for an extra £150,000. But you shouldn’t because it’ll still give you tinnitus and backache.
This is an uncompromising car. At its core sits a tubular spaceframe steel chassis. No carbon tub. Mounted low behind the cockpit there’s a
“THEY’RE NEVER EASY TO GET INTO AND THEY’RE TRICKY TO SEE OUT OF”
5.4-litre Ford-derived V8 that develops 700 naturally aspirated horsepowers. No muffling turbos. No twin clutch, either, instead a six-speed Holinger sequential gearbox with pneumatic actuation. There’s full motorsport ABS and traction control, a 125-litre fuel cell, carbon Kevlar wheel housings, built-in air jacks and Michelin slick and wet weather tyres included. The brakes are full carbon/carbon, by Brembo, with a similar disc compound to F1 apparently. They need to have 450 degrees of temperature before they even begin to operate properly. The suspension is double wishbone all round, pushrod actuated. The whole lot is wrapped up in carbon: everything from the floor to the barge boards, wing, diffuser, splitter and all body panels.
It is basically a no limits GT3 car: it’s lighter than one (about 1,100kg wet), has more power and more downforce. Much more downforce. The claims are 1,200kg at 125mph, 1,600kg at 186mph. Chew on that Senna GTR. The BT62 is wide, low, mean. Sat on its jacks in the pit garage it spat flames, engine bawling, gearbox screaming. The place shook. Not the same place as I drove the
McLaren, I should point out. What you see here are actual pictures of the cars, but stuck together with digital sticky tape. Clever isn’t it?
I’m at Silverstone in the Brabham. Sat lower, and tilted back further than in the McLaren. It’s lumpy and uneven, but clears its throat as soon as you’re off the clutch and heading down the pitlane. Call it 4,000rpm in first. From there to when the red lights flash somewhere around the 8,000rpm mark, the Brabham feels not modern, but more like an Eighties Le Mans throwback: immense sound, whining gears, instantaneous throttle response. It’s ultravisceral and completely dominating.
This is where it’s most different from the Senna – 700bhp here, with each gear slammed home, every nuance of throttle pedal responded to, feels utterly fabulous. The Senna, with 125bhp more, is markedly less dramatic, the overriding sense I get from the McLaren is how efficient and effective it is, not how exciting.
There’s a phrase in the literature that initially impressed me: “95 per cent of the performance is achievable by 95 per cent of drivers.”
“IT IS BASICALLY A NO LIMITS GT3 CAR: IT’S LIGHTER THAN ONE, HAS MORE POWER AND MORE DOWNFORCE”
Wow, I thought, anyone can get in and extract a fast lap from this car. And they really can. OK, you have to get used to the brakes first, the fact you can still be doing 170mph, 170 metres before the hairpin at the end of the main straight at Bahrain, but after that it’s all process and precision. The neater you are, the more you nail the technique, the faster you will go. That is the lot of the modern racing driver – if you think it’s all sliding and machismo, you’re back in the days of Gentleman Jack. Downforce demands accuracy. And what the Senna GTR can do is very impressive – the car’s utter stability at speed and faithful steering give you confidence to turn into fourth gear, 100mph corners without batting an eyelid. You intuitively pick up the signals to know when the limit is approaching and respond accordingly. Within three laps I felt on top of it, started berating myself for my mistakes.
But my heart wasn’t racing, I wasn’t buzzing with adrenaline. I was impressed by the Senna GTR, no doubt, but it didn’t leave me needing another hit. Remember the old P1 GTR? Rougher around the edges, bit sketchier, but bloody memorable. And the same applies to the Brabham BT62. There’s more life in it, mainly because the components are rowdier and the intimidation is ramped up. Initially you’re just along for the ride, marvelling at the spitting fury of the thing, but within a relatively short space of time you realise this is a car you can get so much out of. It’s a downforce car that’s compliant over bumps, alert, delicate to drive. The steering – light, accurate, full of feel – is fabulous, so too how nimbly it moves into corners. It makes the McLaren seem almost flat-footed.
Now, a lot of this is a question of set-up. Everything on these cars can be adjusted, and in doing so you can fundamentally change the car’s attitude and behaviour. If you want your Senna GTR to scare you, it can. But it won’t ever have the Brabham’s thunder, nor the matched clarity of its engine and steering, which makes it so satisfying to build a rhythm with. It’s unashamedly old school, its closest rival perhaps a Group C Jaguar XJR-9, not the McLaren. You want it as a road car? I think you better drive it first. And you might come away from that preferring the Senna’s mellow manners. And that’s fine. Your choice. We should just be thankful there’s a choice to be had at all.
“THE MORE YOU NAIL THE TECHNIQUE, THE FASTER YOU WILL GO”