Bruce’s dream and the McLaren 570S?
Kiwi hero Bruce McLaren always wanted to build a super-fast road car that you could drive every day. Fifty years later, we have the 570S. David Linklater drives it.
There’s a lot of partisan mythology surrounding the modern McLaren business. For example, that the company now is the same one that New Zealand motorsport hero Bruce McLaren formed in 1963. Or that the distinctive corporate logo is actually a stylised Kiwi.
For the record, after Bruce McLaren was killed in a Can-Am testing accident in 1970, the racing team charged on for another decade (including a Formula One constructors championship in 1974) before being ‘‘merged’’ with Ron Dennis’s Project Four Racing in 1981.
Merged meaning assimilated, with Project Four buying out the old shareholders almost immediately.
That logo really does look like a Kiwi, doesn’t it? But it’s not.
Cigarette company Marlboro was a major sponsor of post-1981 McLaren and the current logo is simply an evolution of the Marlboro chevron that used to sit above the ‘‘n’’ on the company name.
But we want a piece of McLaren so badly, because Bruce is a genuine Kiwi icon and remains an inspiration to many. The national pride is particularly intense today: June 19 marks 50 years since Kiwis Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon won the Le Mans 24-Hour race in the Ford GT40.
Bruce’s image is still a perfect fit for the current McLaren road-car division, which seemed to come from nowhere to give the established might of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche a big fright. That’s a very Kiwi modusoperandi, even if McLaren’s latest road cars are more carbon-fibre than number-eight wire.
So while we can’t ignore the business reality, let’s take what we can get. That’s still Bruce’s surname on the front of the cars and this country does have a significant stake in the history of the company – one which modern McLaren is very happy to embrace, by the way.
So, further on the feel-good track: the 570S featured here is arguably the closest thing yet to the road-car that Bruce McLaren wanted to build in 1970. He mated the M6A racing car’s chassis to a sleek coupe body, initially as a homologation project for endurance racing but also out of a desire to build a genuinely exciting road car.
The M6GT prototype was a daily driver for Bruce McLaren. It had a highly tuned Chevrolet V8 engine and could hit 160kmh in eight seconds.
So while McLaren Automotive has produced outlandish supercars such as the F1, SLR and the latest 675 and P1 models, the new ‘‘entry-level’’ (if you can call a $375k machine such a thing) 570S is really the spiritual successor to the M6GT. That’s my story (for the purposes of this story) anyway.
Entry level is relative of course, because the 570S looks and feels every centimetre a supercar. So what’s the conceptual difference between this and the 650S?
Both are based around McLaren’s carbon fibre tub (thank you Team McLaren F1). But the 570S has aluminium body panels instead of composite, adaptive dampers with conventional antiroll bars instead of trick hydraulic technology and there’s no activeaero.
The sills are 80mm lower in the 570S to allow easier access and it’s the first McLaren road car to have a glovebox!
In the McLaren world, the 570S is part of the Sports Series, which is distinct from the Super Series (650S and its siblings) and Ultimate Series (P1). So it’s not exactly a Mazda MX-5, but the idea is that you can use and enjoy this car every day. Did I mention it has a glovebox?
Truth be told, the initial impression is still of a barking-mad supercar. It’s a low-slung, midengined machine and it serves up a vast amount of power for something that weighs just 1313kg. Press the throttle completely down . . . at your peril.
But it’s also a super/sports car you get a feel for very quickly. Excellent visibility and beautiful electrohydraulic steering helps you place it accurately on the road, and the 570S can be set up just so for the driving environment with separate rotary dials for the powertrain and handling systems. Stopping is not a problem, even on track days: the 570S comes as standard with carbon-ceramic discs.
The raspy soundtrack and extreme levels of grip have the whiff of racing car about them, but the 570S chassis also has a very natural feel. Push hard and there’s a genuine connection between driver, car and road that justifies the ‘‘sports’’ tag.
As an indication of how engaging the 570S really is, I returned mine to McLaren Auckland full of praise for the car’s more compact dimensions, given that Kiwi backroads (or at least the ones you road-test a McLaren on) can be awfully narrow.
Fail: the 570S is actually 18mm longer and 20mm wider than its ‘‘big’’ brother, the 650S. It’s just that the 570S chassis has a more hands-on feel and I felt much happier throwing it around than the more complex, more expensive 650S. The Super Sports series is set to become even more accessible, with two more variants being launched in NZ next month. The 540C is down 22kW on the 570S and takes another 0.3sec to reach 100kmh (count the fractions in real-time if you can), but saves you a handy $45,000. Completely coincidentally, this is a McLaren Sports Series model that’s cheaper than the Audi R8 Plus and Porsche 911 Turbo.
Or there’s the just-announced 570GT, which has a different rear roofline to accommodate a sidehinged glass hatchback with 220 litres of load space. You can even have tailored McLaren luggage to make the most of it.
In line with its touring aspirations, the GT has (slightly) less direct steering and (slightly) more compliant suspension. But don’t expect it to be soft. The 570GT costs $410,000.