Mclaren P1
Twenty years after the F1 ended the Eighties’ supercar wars, Mclaren reentered the fray. But was the P1 a worthy successor? Where better to put an original prototype to the test than Alpine Italian supercar country
There are no barriers and no second chances on the Passo San Marco. While F1 fans argue over whether tarmac run-offs have ruined the drama at Monza’s Parabolica curve down in Milan at the foot of the Alps, the danger up here in the mountains, 2000m above sea level, is as clear as the sky. There’s rock, there’s road, and there’s air. Thin air. That ought to focus the mind when you’re driving a 903bhp Mclaren P1, factory prototype PP3.
Lasting three whole days, my route with the P1 will take me over the Alps and down to Ferrari’s home town. Over several hundred miles I’ll drive it, love it, curse it and probably almost crash it a few times, racking up more miles than many P1 owners do in an entire year. You learn a lot about a car on a trip like this. Maybe not the stuff you learn on an empty race circuit, in a concentrated exposure to the outer limits of a handling envelope so large it’d swallow one of those giant lottery win cheques you’d need to buy yourself a P1. But it’s only when you have time like this that you can get under the skin of any car, and see it as an owner might. Wonderful, flawed, and all mine – for three days, at least.
Few P1s, other than those that ended up with a starring role on wreckedexotics.com, developed as much patina as PP3. One of the three pre-production prototype vehicles used by Mclaren Automotive’s marketing department, it was well used, accruing a peppering of stone chips around the nose and flanks, and fracture lines in the deep front splitter. Mclaren treated it to a full respray after 21,000 miles of press test-drive duties.
Already, there’s a sense that the P1 was treated with less awed reverence than the F1. With its 245mph potential combined with compact, small-sports-car dimensions and handling, all drawn together by Formula One design guru Gordon Murray, the F1 was the thermonuclear device that ended the Eighties’ supercar wars. No rival could get near it. However, 20 years and a Bugatti Veyron later, and Mclaren, by now a relative mass-producer of supercars, was launching the P1 into a market crowded not only by Bugatti, but also Ferrari and Porsche – and their output had come a long way since the EB110, F40 and 959 that the F1 vanquished. Whereas the F1 existed in an analogue world, making a Formula One car for the road in the 2010s called for Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) attached to the brakes, charging electric motors to bolster the internal combustion engine’s output. It meant adaptable aerodynamics to mirror the Drag Reduction Systems (DRS) employed when overtaking on straights. Suddenly, the master was playing catchup. And unlike 1993’s state of affairs where the F1 was taking on old Group B castoffs, the P1 had genuine high-tech rivals, in the form of Maranello’s V12 swan-song, the Laferrari, and Porsche’s straight-from-le Mans 918 Spyder. Does it convince as a true F1 successor? Especially given its slightly cocky name, the paddock reference for pole position.
‘Even when stationary, the P1 drops jaws like a set of cast-iron dentures’
Visually, certainly. Even when stationary, the P1 drops jaws like a set of cast-iron dentures. Frank Stephenson’s creation still looks like a portal to 2099, even more so than his better-known 2004 creation for Maserati, the MC12. More than that though, it has its own visual identity, something the earlier, more mass-market MP4-12C mainstay from the reborn Mclaren Automotive sorely lacked. I watch the hikers at our pass-top parking spot clap eyes on it for the first time. They nod sagely at the bonnet’s deep nostril vents and the way the complex mix of surfaces that make up the flanks intertwine like muscle fibres. But again and again they gravitate towards the rear. With the huge rear wing and its colossal struts retracted, the tail seems impossibly low, the jutting diffuser appearing to hang in mid air, giving the back of the car the look of an exploded technical diagram. The expanse of mesh across the tail suggests some tea-leaf has pilfered the rear lamps, until a thin bead of light illuminates from the edge of the bodywork above.
Getting in is tough. The open door points at your face, the lower front portion of the tub restricts how you step into the footwell, and like its F1 predecessor’s A-pillar-hinged dihedral arrangement, the doors don’t take any of the roof with them. Getting through the aperture is like being a cat-burglar trying to avoid triggering infrared security beams. To fold yourself into the tiny cabin itself is to know what a handkerchief feels like being stuffed into a magician’s clenched fist. You fall in, backside first, then head, and finally heave your legs through the too-narrow gap between the fat sill of the carbon tub and the carbon-clad dashboard, all reminders of the carbon-fibre architecture that links every roadgoing Mclaren to the groundbreaking MP4/1 Grand Prix car that appeared in 1981.
It’s snug in here, though the expansive glazing helps disguise the fact. Unusually for a British car, all 375 P1s built were left-hand drive. The basic chassis tub is related to the car that began Mclaren road-car renaissance, the MP4-12C, but only the P1’s featured an integral autoclave-cured carbon roof section, in all weighing just 90kg. Likewise, the twin-turbocharged 3.8-litre V8 could trace its ancestry to the 12C too, but like a Ferrari F40’s V8 compared to its distant relative in a 308 GTB, its level of tune is on another plane altogether. The Mclaren V8’s block has the same basic shape as the 12C, but was a new casting, incorporating a hybrid drive system, and its twin turbochargers are larger than the 12C’s, running at 2.4 bar rather than 2.2.
A prod of the dash-mounted button starts the process of finding out just how serious that V8 really is. The 12C’s successor, the 650S, already made a thumping 641bhp and 500lb ft, but that’s lifted to 727bhp and 531lb ft in the P1, before you factor in the 176bhp provided by the 130kw/h electric motor. All told, there’s 903bhp at my disposal, driving the rear wheels alone through a seven-speed paddle-shift transmission. And the thing weighs less than 1500kg at the kerb.
Find the space and courage to deploy the lot and the P1 accelerates from corner to corner so fast it’s as if the straight in between has suddenly disappeared into a faultline. Though the throttle responds crisply, for all the supposed torque fill provided by the electric motor there’s often a yawning wait for the power to arrive if the gear’s too high and the revs too low. But when it does, THWACK!, you suddenly know exactly what it feels like to be a drug dealer’s front door right at the moment a DEA raid gets animated. That said, it’s only when you really wind the engine out to its 8500rpm redline that the V8 starts to make noises worth listening to, but you can’t let yourself get too distracted. There’s enough power here to light the tyres up in third gear at 70mph, so it’s wise to pay attention.
The San Marco Pass is too twisty to let you dip into the engine’s full power for more than a few seconds at a time, throwing the focus onto the chassis instead. The steering is glorious. Like grabbing two fistfuls of paradise beach sand, letting it filter through your fingers and sensing every grain pass, you feel the friction of the well-worn Alcantara covering ebb and flow against your skin as the front tyres treat the road’s surface like braille. Even the shape of the wheel is perfect – you can actually wrap your hands around the rim and grab the thing.
The brakes are mighty too. Not reference quality for feel – there’s a touch of ambiguity at medium speeds – but staggeringly strong and utterly resistant to fade as I punish them again and again on the way down the south side of the Pass. And by the time I hit Milan’s glacial traffic, those brakes are showing their other strong suit. Excused from the need to help out with any energy regeneration, their low-speed, light-application feel is great.
Tellingly, an F1-derived KERS was something P1 chief designer Dan Parry-williams considered but decided to leave off the P1. Its carbon-ceramic brakes, developed by Akebono, which built brakes for Mclaren’s Formula One cars, are still track-derived,
‘There’s enough power here to light up the tyres in third gear at 70mph’
but Mclaren reasoned that KERS had a detrimental effect on pedal feel. I’m glad it didn’t make the brakes’ only negative aspect worse. It did, however, incorporate Mclaren’s brake-steer system. Banned from Formula One, it applies the brake on the inner front wheel during hard cornering to enhance steering bite.
Not everything about the P1’s traffic manners is quite so smooth. Crawling across the city’s peculiarly square-tiled streets, the V8 feels so raw and vibey at low speeds, and the dual-clutch transmission insists on flaring the revs annoyingly high before engaging drive. I never thought I’d be saying this behind the wheel of a 903bhp supercar, but it’s great to be able to seek refuge in the P1’s electric mode in traffic. With plug-in capability, the electric motor’s 176bhp makes it more powerful than some hot hatches, although it doesn’t have much staying power. The electric range is a paltry six miles and by the time I arrive in Milan it’s down to just two. I look longingly at Milan’s overhead tram wires and have daft thoughts about the world’s most expensive dodgem. I even get into a bit of a tussle with a pensioner in a Citroën C1, the smug glow accompanying the image of him visibly receding in my mirror perversely as satisfying as dropping a Ferrari using the full 903bhp.
I eventually break free of the traffic and join the A1 heading south east to Maranello. I know the numbers the P1 generates - 62mph in less than 3.0sec, 100mph in 5.0, but what does that mean beyond the sensation of organs being rearranged like a lifetime of corset wear when you flatten the right pedal? Just
how quickly does it erase something like a Porsche 911 from its rearview mirrors? Unfortunately the country that has done most to popularise fast, beautiful cars doesn’t seem to care much for them itself, so finding a playmate proves tricky.
As does negotiating Italy’s Autostrada toll booths with anything close to decorum. Without a prepaid Telepass windscreen gadget giving access to the VIP lane and their automatic barriers, getting the ticket is a premier league nuisance. Paranoid that I’ll scrape the wheels or body, I keep straying too far from the machine to grab the damn paper or insert my credit card. So I open the door to get out but there’s no room to swing it up and I end up half opening it, then standing through the open window. I feel like sensitive Simon wearing his Fiat Cinquecento’s door in The Inbetweeners’ trip to Thorpe Park, and look about as uncool. Every time I get back in the car I start daydreaming about modifying one of those litter grabbers, shaping each jaw like the company’s tick logo and offering it as an official road-toll accessory – the Mclaw-ren.
But every time you get stung for another fistful of Euros you get another chance to give the thing absolute death from a standing start. Roasting Puntos never gets old, and I don’t think I would either, with a four-wheeled elixir of youth like this in the garage.
We settle in to a 100mph cruise heading south through the spine of Italy, occasionally slowing down to 60mph then adding 100mph from there in around nine seconds to break up the monotony, the turbos wheezing like a deflating air mattress as I modulate the throttle in response to the slowing and going of the cars ahead. The ride from Parry-williams’ hydropneumatic suspension design is eerily good. Unlike a Citroën DS, it features coil springs, but body roll is mitigated by an interlinked hydraulic circuit, keeping the car as flat as possible through corners and handily doing away with any need for anti-roll bars.
I won’t select it because it’s not road legal, but a dashboard button can trigger Race mode. As well as hoisting the monster rear wing by 300mm, boosting downforce to 600kg at 161mph, it also prompts the hydraulics to pull the bodywork 50mm closer to the floor, allowing the P1’s sculpted undertray to deploy the Bernoulli Principle and provide genuine ground effect in the manner of a Seventies Formula One car or Eighties Group C sports-prototype. So find a track and you can enjoy in a road car a technology that the FIA banned on single-seaters after its failure contributed to Gilles Villeneuve’s fatal accident in 1982.
Noise levels are surprisingly acceptable. This is actually a half-passable mid-engined GT in the Maserati Bora/ferrari Testarossa mould, with luggage room in the nose for a couple of squashy bags. There’s even a cruise-control stalk, but I don’t use it, preferring to fiddle with the dials and buttons that determine the feel of the car. Core to these are the twin circular toggles giving a choice of Normal, Sport and Track for chassis and powertrain. Below them lie our illicit Race button plus one for launch control and a third irresistibly marked ‘boost’.
Press this last one and you now have only the 727bhp of the V8 available via the accelerator, and previously simple overtakes now feel like trying to stream Netflix with a dial-up connection. How did supercars ever get by with a mere 700bhp, my by-now warped brain begins to wonder? Reclaiming those horses is simply a matter of pushing a button on the steering wheel marked IPAS (Instant Power Assist System) to summon the electric punch exactly when you want it, a briefly entertaining trick that reminds of Mclaren’s F1 heritage. The DRS button on the opposite side of the wheel mines the same seam, temporarily altering the rear wing angle to cut drag and provide an extra kick. Ferrari didn’t have any such tricks on its road cars, and its notoriously purist engineers would no doubt label them gimmicks. And yet these are features derived directly from Formula One cars. So who’s right?
I’m tempted to say Ferrari and Bugatti. The Laferrari’s V12 sound and response at the helm and throttle is marginally better than the P1, and Bugattis are faster. Both beat the P1 at Top Trumps.
But the P1 is savage. Savage in its power delivery. Savage in its lack of refinement. It feels alive, thrilling, weighs 450kg less than a Chiron and sends all 903bhp to its rear wheels. It’s also blisteringly fast, compliant and communicative. Combine this with hybrid boost, ground effect and an adaptable rear wing, and Formula One inspiration is over and above any rivals from Weissach, Mulhouse or Maranello. And as such, the F1 has a true successor in Mclaren’s own P1, even if it’s no longer the exception to the supercar rule.