ROA D TRIP: MCL A REN 720S
We drive the stunning Mclaren 720S from Rome to the UK via Ferrari’s back yard – and some of the greatest roads on earth
There’s much to admire about Mclaren’s 720S, from its blistering performance, technical design and its focus on delivering the purest of driving experiences. So how does it cope with a 1500mile road trip, a day at the proving ground and setting a lap time at Anglesey? Adam Towler and Steve Sutcliffe find out
HIS CHISELLED, ITALIANATE features show no change of expression, and if his eyes do widen, then they’re hidden from view behind impenetrably dark sunglasses. It’s all over in an instant. The scruffy 488 GTB test mule, air vents intriguingly enlarged over the regular model, appears without warning at the hairpin as I begin to thread the 720S energetically into the same tight curve from the opposite direction. Signor Ferrari Test Driver is committed to the racing line, downhill, which means he’s got at least half of his car in my lane, but a flick of the wrists is all he needs to carve a tighter arc and miss the Mclaren’s carbon front by just a few crucial centimetres.
I think there might have been the slightest jerk of his head in my direction. He played it cool, but not that cool. And I don’t blame him for being on it, nor his two colleagues in Portofino prototypes tucked up behind him, leaving their own black lines of rubber as they exited the hairpin. It’s Sunday morning, on his test route. His territory. Ferrari’s. He wasn’t expecting to see ‘ The Enemy’, especially not its newest and most ferocious offering. But we’re here alright, stomping all over his home patch – right up to the front gates – like some twin-turbocharged tomcat from Woking spraying 98- octane onto the Modenese asphalt.
Rewind to Saturday lunchtime at a lavish hotel in Rome. Mclaren’s event has concluded, and Y100 MCL’S stablemates are already loaded onto an articulated rig, bound for Woking. This car’s fate will be rather different, as it waits patiently in 30- degree-plus heat, both doors raised high like the wings of an exotic insect. Amid the quietly selfconscious hubbub, a silver-haired gent saunters over and raises his iphone, cradled in a leather wallet. There, on the rear face, is the prancing horse on its Giallo background. It’s game on.
Our plan is relatively straightforward. As snapper Dean Smith crams his battered Peli cases and tripod bag into the 720’s surprisingly generous front luggage tub and onto its belted parcel shelf, I attempt to cross-reference the map on my phone with some notes I’d made earlier and a text from evo’s John Barker with road numbers on it. Our aim is to head straight into classic Tuscan Mille Miglia territory, not just for the historical resonance with Ferrari’s competitive past, but also because an early ecoty took place up there and the roads have clearly left a lasting impression upon John. It’s a virtual dead- cert, then, that they’ll be corkers.
Now we just have to get there, and that means first escaping Rome. If there’s one thing you may have gathered about the 720S so far it’s that it’s a useable supercar like no other. It’s not just the combination of torque-rich turbo motor and seamlessly shifting twin- clutch gearbox; it’s more the incredible visibility afforded to the Mclaren’s occupants that sets it apart. We’ve become used to cars from Woking offering a near-perfect driving position and an expansive view out, but in the 720S the combined effect of narrow A-pillars and the revolutionary glass C-pillars equals something approaching 360- degree visibility more akin to a fighter jet. Today, this is a very useful thing, for while there are no Migs manoeuvring to achieve missile lock on the heat haze emanating from the hole in the 720’s rear deck, there are trains of battered Fiats running perilously and erratically alongside us and, inevitably, a native- driven Audi A6 just millimetres from the Mclaren’s diffuser.
Many of the road surfaces leaving Rome and heading north are hopelessly poor but the 720S is unfazed; the Proactive Chassis Control ( PCC)
‘In Sport and Track modes for the chassis and powertrain, the Mclaren snaps taut every sinew and simply erupts’
set-up of hydraulically linked dampers has been lauded from the earliest days of the MP4-12C for its surprisingly good ride quality, and the secondgen system fitted to the 720S is even better. Those new algorithms help foster not a mushy, wobbly-wheeled ride, but rather a precise pliancy that gives the impression no surface is too much of a challenge. Nevertheless, for a moment I fear we may have the misery of a lost wheel-weight to endure over the next 1500 miles because there’s a constant tingle from the steering wheel rim. Thankfully, it’s merely a discourse on the dreadful surface of the connecting roads to the A1 autostrada, a phenomenon that I believe used to be called ‘steering feel’. Bless Mclaren for persisting with hydraulically assisted steering.
Car and humans fuelled-up on superunleaded, excellent service station panini ( how do they manage this in the most mundane of places?) and aqua minerale, we continue north, the 4-litre V8 intruding little. At this low effort, and with the familiar Mclaren Active Dynamics Panel, er, inactive, there’s little more than a metallic ‘ umm’ coming from over our shoulders, rising in volume to an ‘ UMMM’ if the throttle is teased opened some more. It’s a hard, unmelodic noise of constant pitch, and it’s easy to see why some harangue Mclaren over this perceived lack of ‘character’, or perhaps, more accurately, ‘charisma’: it’s an undemanding car at the kind of speeds at which we all inevitably spend much of our time driving. Some will always desire more instant theatre from their supercar.
Our aim is to slog up the A1 until Querce Al Pino before carving off to the west, which should drop us onto the stretch of the Mille Miglia course between the towns of Radicofani and San Quirico d’orcia, a section between Viterbo and Siena after the halfway point at Rome.
It’s on roads like these that heroes such as Eugenio Castelotti and Piero Taruffi would have been manhandling Ferraris such as the brutish six- cylinder 121M in the classic 1955 race, sweat mixing with grit, dust and oily grime as they fought to keep their disintegrating cross-plys in contact with the road under the blazing Italian sun. It’s hard to comprehend that on the same 1000-mile course a three-wheel Isetta bubble- car would also be hammering along at the tail end of the 500- carplus field – this was a race that consumed in its fever and geography a large portion of an entire country and its population.
Taruffi, an older, wiser head than the fiery, aristocratic young Castelotti, became Stirling Moss’s main challenger in his ‘ works’ Ferrari during the 1955 event, once Castelotti’s race had ended not long after the start. Yet it was this stretch that
saw Taruffi’s demise through mechanical issues, leaving the Mercedes-benz SLR of Moss and ‘Jenks’ unopposed on their way to one of the greatest victories in motorsport history, and Enzo no doubt seething at such a defeat on home soil.
Lost, momentarily, in imagining the tempo and fury of that race, I snap my attention back to the present and the beguiling scene that’s unfolding before us. A line of cypress trees marches to the horizon and a stately hilltop villa, their shadows growing increasingly long across the golden, gently undulating fields in what could easily be an advert for an upmarket supermarket. And through the middle of it all, the curiously ceramic-looking white-grey dart of the Mclaren, a crust of insect carnage now smothering its prow, charges on, along narrow valleys, past deserted farms and slowly decomposing Fiats long since abandoned.
The SP478 is the Mille Miglia route and it’s where the 720S wakes up. Such is the car’s monstrous performance that until now I’ve just been dipping my toe, literally and metaphorically, into its capabilities. Now, experimenting with Sport and Track modes on the slender central panel for both chassis and the powertrain, the Mclaren snaps taut every sinew and simply erupts. I can put raw numbers to this, too, because some time in between driving that road and writing these words I strapped myself rather nervously into another 720S at Millbrook Proving Ground and saw the following: 0- 60mph in 2.9sec, 0-100 in 5.6, and 0-180mph in an absurdly accessible 19.4, that last speed achieved in under a mile.
This isn’t so much driving, it’s a raw mental and physical ordeal; a brutally scientific experiment where soft, squidgy, organic matter – me, sadly – is subjected to forces it was never originally designed to sustain. The biggest challenge is processing everything that’s happening. There are times when I feel like my central cortex is a dusty Amstrad when it really needs to be some Silicon Valley mega-server, the result being that after a few minutes I just have to back off, cool down and contemplate what’s happening. Here, suddenly, is the real 720S, the car it doesn’t feel it needs to tell you about on first acquaintance.
These roads aren’t just pretty to look at and entertainingly sinuous; their topography is curiously similar to that of a British B-road, with a pronounced crown and longitudinal waves of
bumps in the gutter. The beauty of the 720S’s suspension is that selecting Track mode doesn’t just give you a stiff car that only works on a modern, smooth racetrack. It makes the car hyper-alert and sensitive, yes, but it reacts to the road it’s working on, Mclaren’s chassis engineers realising that too harsh would be unusable. One snapshot moment sums it up best: the road rises uphill through a double ‘S’ curve to a crest, innocuous from a distance, but followed immediately by a hidden 90 left. At the pace the 720S is travelling, the crest morphs into a ski jump and the Mclaren leaves the ground for a brief moment. If it is to make the corner, it must land, compose itself and turn in hard, as one. Incredibly, it does.
It’s late afternoon when we reach San Quirico d’orcia, squeezing the Mclaren through the narrow medieval backstreets with the constant companionship of a group of wide- eyed youngsters on their bikes. We shoot until the sun is dipping below the horizon, and then pack everything back into the Mclaren for the drive to our hotel for the night in Sassuolo, just outside Maranello, some 150 miles away. The journey soon settles into a laborious slog in the dark, enlivened only when we make an impromptu roadside stop for pizza, scoffing slice after slice over the red glow of the Mclaren’s mood-lit engine bay. The 720S makes the shift from rabid supercar to long- distance GT surprisingly seamlessly, but it’s not perfect. The satnav is improved but still dimwitted, the softclose doors erratic; the seat began to make my lower back and right leg ache even before we’d left Rome, and now it’s really singing; and while luggage space is generous, there is very little stowage space in the cabin for all the usual roadtrip detritus. To be fair, nothing actually breaks, but there’s still the underlying, nagging thought that it might throw a hissy fit at any moment.
As the night draws on, the 720S is largely alone on the road north, hammering through long, brightly lit tunnels and endless darkness, stars twinkling through the transparent panels that constitute the Mclaren’s roof. The stalk for main/ dipped beam could be a bit closer to reach, but the crisp, unwavering beam of cool light stretching out in front of us more than makes up for that minor gripe. There is notable wind noise, but not around any seal or mirror, rather that constant rush you get around an aircraft’s fuselage, mixed with the thrum and slap of 305/30 ZR20 Pirellis and the constant murmur of the M840T engine, occasionally accompanied by the evil hiss of turbos as we accelerate up a gradient or past a truck. It’s the early hours when I finally crawl into bed, nearly 24 hours after the day started, still cursing that wretched driver’s seat, still stunned by the car’s speed and competency. Happy.
‘There are broad smiles for the Mclaren. They love a good performance car here, whatever the badge on the nose’
THE NEXT MORNING WE’RE DRINKING cappuccinos and eating pastries at the Maranello Cafe in the Piazza Liberta, Maranello. It’s a sleepy, sunny, Sunday morning, and we’ve made it to Ferrari town. A 458 and a Testarossa do a driveby, patrolling their patch, and periodically we see some poor old California from one of the numerous independent Ferrari rental forecourts, trailing water droplets, steam and oil smoke as it’s ‘ warmed up’ by a young employee after its morning jetwash, ahead of probably another day of tourist abuse.
I wasn’t sure what sort of reception we’d get, but while there is obvious pride in the home team and banter over the appearance of a British rival, there are also broad smiles and welcoming gestures for the Mclaren. They love a good performance car around here, whatever badge is on the nose.
We decide to head out of town to a road that Ferrari test drivers use, and as we accelerate up into the hills there’s a roadside coffee bar that looks worth a quick halt. Parking a 720S directly outside the front door of the establishment is a sure-fire way of opening up a conversation, even if most of it is by visual communication, and I instantly recognise the proprietor from the Testarossa we saw earlier this morning. His name is Gigi, and the ’ Rossa was originally his late father’s; apparently his first one got nicked, and this one dates from 1990. There, on the wall of the bar, is a large, framed photo of his dad, Giancarlo, laughing about something with a young-looking Piero Ferrari in the Fiorano pitlane. Over an espresso so strong it nearly fells even Dean’s towering frame, we point and chat over Ferraris and cars, Gigi dismissing local rivals Lamborghini against his beloved reds. This is the real Ferrari, not the naff global merchandising and ‘celebrity’ association; it’s warm, vibrant, like the people and the weather. It feels good to be here.
The challenging surfaces of the ‘short’ Ferrari test route help explain why the modern Ferrari rides so well in the UK. But we want to end this part of our journey at Sant’agata Bolognese, or to be more precise, Lamborghini Automobili SPA, Via Modena, 12. And there’s just time to go there via a photographer’s favourite, the one they all head for on a Ferrari launch when the clock is ticking…
You’ll probably have seen it many times in print: a seemingly endless sequence of hairpins, the road rising steeply and in dark shadows through overhanging trees. I decide that in the name of science, and to get the irrelevant but beloved ‘sideways shot’, it’s time to switch all ESP and traction systems off. What I had not perceived up to this point is just how clever those systems are on the 720S, because they must be working away like mad in the background. Unshackled, you really do understand what it means to have more than 700bhp at your disposal in a relatively light car.
I have never walked a tiger by its tail, but that seems akin to the situation I now find myself in. Oddly, it isn’t scary, by and large. Completely absorbing, frighteningly intense, life-affirming, but not inherently scary – not if you listen to what the car is saying. I say this without any wish whatsoever to play the hero, but for one simple reason: everything the car does is defined by absolute precision. Every twitch of the steering wheel, movement of the chassis, application of power is finely, precisely attributable to either an input or a reaction. The message is starkly clear: one wrong move, however small, and you will pay, expensively, potentially painfully, but clever brains and hands have been here before, and you can rely on the transparency of communication between car and driver.
Nevertheless, as I teleport between hairpins, the back of my shirt is uncomfortably clammy despite the air con’s best efforts, so I drop both windows – and in doing so discover the 720’s real voice. There’s that gritty, industrial, rabid note of the V8, overlaid with something else: a ghostly sigh, like a P51 Mustang entering into a dive – the sound of massive turbos ebbing and flowing with air, accompanied by a flutter like a bird in a cage as the boost is bled away when I lift the throttle. Extending the 720S all the way to 8000rpm in such close confines of scenery is a form of insanity. It’s an electrifying experience that instantly recalls Group B rally footage in my head. Time after time the carbon- ceramic brakes haul the car to a virtual standstill to make it around the next downhill hairpin. It’s almost overwhelming. And then that 488 GTB mule appears...
I don’t say much on the way to Lamborghini, or while we’re there, in truth because I feel mentally exhausted. I don’t want to drive like that again today, but I’m glad I’ve experienced it. It’s four in the afternoon, and in the immortal words of Raf Vallone, eeza a long way to England, and eeza that-a-way. It’s a tedious 1000 miles home, with the seat still doing tortuous things to my spine, but I’ve fallen for the 720S in a big way. At every fuel stop I walk around the car, still drinking in the details, still tingling with excitement. It looks like nothing else and is instantly identifiable as a Mclaren – a colossal achievement for a company so young. Like many, I wasn’t convinced the first time I saw it, but I am now.
What kind of car is this 720S? Emotion is a huge part of both the Ferrari myth and its cars, but it’s not the only characteristic. Precision is, for me, the 720S’s defining characteristic, but by no means its only one. If Mclaren were trying to read from the Great Book of Italian Supercar Manufacture, this may all be a problem, but I don’t feel it is. Mclaren has become Ferrari’s great new foil and, we hope, will drive the Italians to create ever greater work. Meanwhile, be in no doubt that Mclaren really is now part of the supercar establishment. Even in Ferrari’s back yard.
‘It looks like nothing else and is instantly identifiable as a Mclaren – a colossal achievement for a company so young’