GENES POOLED
In its ride and handling, the mighty Mclaren 720S owes a clear debt to the Elise, as
MENTION LOTUS CARS TO MCLAREN HIGH-UPS and, in an official capacity at least, you’re unlikely to hear how former Lotus employees and Lotus chassis tuning DNA run like a thread through the company. Which rather goes against anecdotal evidence and the career back-stories of a number of key engineers. One thing is for sure: drive a Mclaren and you can’t help but have those five letters – L, O, T, U and S – drift to the forefront of your mind.
Why exactly is that, though? Today I’m at the wheel of a very orange, explosively powerful 720S Spyder. Am I really trying to draw a parallel between it and a tiny lightweight sports car launched 25 years ago with just 118bhp?
Of course, there are the obvious similarities in layout: the 720S is a low, mid-engined car, of monocoque ‘tub’ construction with just two seats, and, as this is the Spyder, the roof lifts off, too. But such a layout is hardly unusual, and there are multitudes of mid-engined sports cars that feel nothing like a Lotus Elise once you’re behind the wheel. They can also feel ponderous, heavy and decidedly spiteful, and neither the Elise or 720S possess any of those traits.
Nevertheless, there are some obvious physical elements to the 720S that do relate to the Elise. When the venerable Lotus was launched, a tub construction was still relatively unusual, at least in the low-volume specialist sports car business. By adopting said method, Lotus ensured not only a stiffer core structure over spaceframe-based rivals, but also a much improved level of occupant safety in the advent of a shunt – just as happened in F1 during the late ’60s/early ’70s. The masterstroke of the Elise was to bond the aluminium together rather than physically fix it in place with welds and ironmongery, thereby reducing the weight of the overall car significantly.
Naturally, the Mclaren is carbonfibre, a technology that replaced aluminium monocoques in F1 and other top-flight racing disciplines in the early-to-mid 1980s, but when you sit in the 720S the parallels are there, from the obvious chunky sills of a tub to that feeling of sitting in an all-encompassing cocoon that will protect you in the advent of a nasty side
impact. That same sense of minimalist interior surfaces is present, too. The Mclaren’s dramatically sculpted doors, pared-back dashboard and thin centre console feel as though the surfaces have been drawn tight by drawstrings, this visual and physical lack of interior ‘real estate’ echoing the Elise’s narrow shelf of a dashboard and tiny instrument binnacle. It’s a clear message that you’re sitting in a car where weight has been viewed as the enemy.
The pursuit of shaving off the kilograms is, of course, a key tenet of both brands. The 720S is nothing like as light as an Elise, naturally, but we’ve become used to Mclarens undercutting the kerb weights of their supercar rivals, with that composite tub as a centrepiece but an attention to saving even mere grams running throughout the car. Take the new Artura, which despite an influx of heavy hybrid technology manages to weigh only 50kg more than the outgoing and conventionally powered 570S. It might not sound like much of a result when you read it on the page, but in engineering terms it’s glorious ‘back of the net’ stuff.
The philosophical inheritance from the Elise is only fully revealed once the 720’s wheels are rotating, and it starts with the steering. The Elise, of course, has an unassisted setup, which even by Hethel’s admission becomes very difficult to do once past 1100kg and 205-section front tyres. Yet the Mclaren has equally exceptional steering, in part perhaps because the firm refuses to budge from a hydraulic set-up to fully electric assistance, despite the tiny improvement in fuel consumption the latter brings. Even the electrified Artura retains its hydraulic system, purely because Mclaren won’t compromise on steering feedback.
The precision and delicacy of the 720’s rack bears all the hallmarks of great Lotus assisted steering systems found in cars such as the Esprit: it’s neither too heavy or too light, neither too fast or slow. Its ratio is linear, and the biggest compliment you can pay is that after the first mile you no longer give it a second thought, instead feeling that you’re actually connected to the car in some physical way. You turn, the car turns. It’s as primeval as that.
Accuracy and precision are steering qualities that rival firm Porsche also imbues in its cars, particularly those from the GT department, but Mclaren allows more ‘noise’ back into the car via the wheel, giving a truer picture of what’s happening down at the front wheels, if not to quite the same extent of loudness as the Elise.
The strongest legacy of the Elise surfaces in Mclaren’s ride and handling doctrine, and I think back to driving the Senna on the North Coast 500 (evo 252). On hearing about that drive, most people’s reaction was: ‘That must have been uncomfortable, verging on unusable on those roads. Madness…’ The reality was completely opposite: the Senna was perfectly useable – often even in the more aggressive damper settings. At one point, travelling at unprintable speed, we hit a remote stretch of road that had virtually disintegrated for over a mile and I physically braced myself for the carnage and potential damage that was about to happen to a very expensive motor car. Yet the result was near silence, the Senna gliding over the road like a swan, the suspension hidden below the surface working furiously but sublimely to counteract the forces being put into it. I recall my mouth hanging loosely open in shock: I don’t think I’ve ever experienced suspension control quite like it.
The 720S Spyder shares the same Proactive Chassis Control 2 with its interlinked hydraulics and hideously complicated algorithms, but any Mclaren, even those with a more conventional set-up, has never been afraid to use its springs and dampers to work with the road, rather than against it. It’s why the 720S could be a perfectly useable everyday supercar, its ride quality shaming some luxury cars in the way it parries bumps and holes. And it was the Elise that showed how, in the finest Lotus tradition, a stiff set-up didn’t necessarily make a car go faster. The featherweight Elise didn’t need overly firm spring-rates to control its mass because that mass simply wasn’t there. Instead it could be made to breathe with the road while retaining ruthless body control.
It’s that sense of flow that encapsulates driving an Elise even to this day, and it’s the principal quality that shines out when pedalling the Mclaren, too. An economy of effort, a willingness to adapt to the texture of the road, to allow enough body roll to telegraph the limits, yet with enough control to keep momentum in check. It’s one reason why testers say that the 720S – a physically big car – ‘shrinks’ around them at speed. Driving it quickly it feels nimble, agile and malleable, and you find yourself exclaiming: ‘This feels like a giant, massively powerful… Elise!’ Truth is, a car that feels like it’s on your side, rather than something wild to be tamed, very quickly becomes a car to be exploited rather than feared, and that holds true even for a 700bhp supercar.
It’s often said that Mclaren successfully created its own design language, but it’s also achieved the same from a dynamics perspective, meaning you’d instantly know when you were driving a Mclaren even if being subjected to various sensory deprivation techniques. To achieve that takes clear goals carried through by engineers with priceless skills and experience. But the principles laid out in that internal handbook very much have their roots in Norfolk, and they’re all the better for it.
‘THE ELISE’S SENSE OF FLOW SHINES OUT WHEN PEDALLING THE MCLAREN TOO’