McLaren P1 isn’t so scary after all
It hits 300km/h, but it gets there with civility
Dunsfold Aerodrome, England — Jeremy Clarkson lied to us. He really did. I can’t be sure if his fibbing was of the innocent white lies variety or if his heart is indeed black, but we have been deceived nonetheless.
The sacred trust so many of us have placed in Top Gear has been misplaced, perhaps the veracity of all his supercar tests needs to be questioned. At the very least, he’s guilty of gross exaggeration or rampant hyperbole.
The case, er, road test in point is Clarkson’s recent evaluation of McLaren’s new hyper-hybrid, the P1. Top Gear’s top presenter made it clear, in fairly histrionic terms, that said supercar was all but unmanageable.
Clarkson was intimidated, went the storyline, lesser souls had better be prepared to poop their pants every time they depress the throttle, was the implication. The P1’s Race mode, the top of four such selectable engine/transmission/ suspension settings, was impossible for mere mortals to fathom, every take for the TV telecast ruined because not one solitary Clarkson bon mot could be framed without a “f&%^$*^g hell” or some equally offensive expletive too-dramatic-to-be-deleted interjection. I lay in fear — this is Jeremy Clarkson, after all — that McLaren also might ask me to drive this fearsome beast.
Imagine my surprise then when, after my first few laps of the famed Dunsfold circuit — famed because it is where Top Gear does all its timed track testing — I was left essentially nonplussed.
Oh, the P1 was mondo rapid, but here I was in the full bloom of spring — in other words, it was cold and damp — running full throttle on what has to be the most diabolically indecipherable little racing circuit in the world and, well, to be frank, I was anything but intimidated.
Having prepared myself for the race car of doom, I was driving what felt like an MP4-12C with a few extra ponies. Extremely fast to be sure, but there was no soiling of trousers or drooling of mouth. Indeed, I might have mentioned to my racecar-driving minder that I was less than whelmed with what I had thought would be an out-of-body experience.
So, he reached over to the centre console and flipped the little mode selector switch to the aforementioned Race mode which, in a 28-second electro-mechanical pas de deux, lowers the P1 50 millimetres, elevates its ginormous rear wing some 300 millimetres and recalibrates the suspension for race car stiffness. Most important of all, it awakens the hitherto dormant 176-horsepower electric motor that McLaren has attached to the 3.8-litre, twice-turbocharged V-8, transforming the up-untilthen mild-mannered supercar into a horsepower-belching Le Mans racer.
Indeed, this is where it gets a little complicated. The P1, you see, has four driving modes — Normal, Sport, Track and Race — but only the last liberates every last little dollop of available power from the P1’s hybrid system. In the first three, one is motivated primarily by the 727-horsepower twin-turbo V-8, manly in and of itself, but not otherworldly. Oh, the electric motor is always on at least partial duty, programmed to fill in the hole in the bottom end of the powerband left because the 3.8’s upgrade from the MP412C’s 616-h.p. to the P1’s 727 is the result of a pair of humongous, turbo-lag generating turbochargers.
And said powerband, thanks to the low-end torque of the 260 pound-foot electric motor, is smooth and broad. But in the first three modes, maximum horsepower remains the 3.8L’s 727-h.p., the electric motor adding nothing to the P1’s peak power.
One can, if one is in track mode, hit a little red IPAS (Instant Power Assist System) button on the steering wheel and get more of the electric motor’s boost. For the truly gluttonous, though, this seems an unnecessary complication when one can just hold down the Race button for five seconds and have all of the power, all of the time.
All the power, in case of the P1, is 903 brake horsepower; more than Porsche’s 918, more than the stillborn Jaguar C-X75, but less than the 949 Ferrari’s LaFerrari is reputed to possess.
But, perhaps more importantly, the P1 sounds the part: it barks and spits like an angry Rottweiler. The exhaust note on the way up the rev range is electric with crispness, even as it revs past 8,500 r.p.m. The steam blowing off when the turbochargers’ wastegates dump unneeded boost is an almost Bugatti-like sigh of relief.
The P1 bludgeons its way to 100 km/h in just 2.8 seconds. Four more will take you to 200 and, if you hang on for a total of 16.5 seconds, you’ll see an amazing 300 km/h.
That’s quicker than anything save the Veyron Super Sport, though it must be noted that the Porsche 918 is quicker to 100, thanks to its all-wheel-drive system.
The amazing thing about all this Sturm und Drang — and where Clarkson got it so colossally wrong — is that it’s really not all that terrifying. Indeed, the amazing thing about the McLaren is not that it sounds as though it wants to break the sound barrier or that it can accelerate to 300 km/h, but that it can do so with such relative civility. What makes this even more amazing is that McLaren’s hyper hybrid puts all its power — gas-fuelled and electric — to the rear wheels. Logic would dictate that 903 rockin’, rollin’ horsepower would be a bit much to be contained by just two tires, the enormous grip offered by the 315/30ZR20 Pirelli PZero Corsa tires notwithstanding.
Au contraire, other than the sheer immediacy of always being pointed in precisely the direction you want to travel (because you’re going to be there very soon!), the miracle of the P1 is how little drama there is to driving fast, even on the bumpy, slippery and indecipherable Dunsfold circuit. Credit the huge rear wing deployed in Race mode that adds a whopping 600 kilograms of downforce, a similarly customizable front splitter that aerodynamically pushes down the front end and, most important, the inherent balance of the McLaren chassis.
Acceleration in EV mode is a little more lackadaisical than in the Porsche or the C-X75, but it does help the P1 achieve an absolutely stellar 8.3L/100 km fuel economy rating.
Chief design engineer Dan Parry-Williams is particularly proud of how efficiently the entire electric drive package is melded into the P1’s platform. The 96 kilogram Lithium-ion battery, for instance, is completely unobtrusive, hidden in the rear bulkhead.
I should probably also point out that the P1’s interior — with the exception of the non-adjustable race style seats — is a model of comfort and civility and that the suspension, in its Normal mode, has far more compliance than one would expect of a 903-horsepower supercar.
The front trunk holds 120 litres of cargo, enough for two helmets. All P1s will be constructed with left-hand drive.
The P1 costs $1.15 million US . Only 375 will be made. All have been sold.