84 TOPCAR.CO.ZA|January 2016
STORIL CIRCUIT, PORTUGAL.Today they
meet as rivals, McLaren and Porsch e, 570S and
911 Turbo. Britain’s newest sports car and
Germany’s longest lived, prowling through the
sopping wet paddock of a storied circuit once a
mainstay of the Grand Prixcalend ar, now a mere
footnote inits history. But almost exactly 31 years
ago on this verytarmac, it was a different story. A story ab out
the collective might of German an d British motorsport brains
working together to produce a car that decimated the
opposition. A story ab out the closest F1 championsh ip inthe
history of the sport.
By October 1984, and the last raceof the year, McLaren’s
Porsch e-engined MP2/3 had dominated the season, the
constructors’ championsh ip already firmly inthe bagfollo wing
a 1-2 win at Zandvoort three ro unds earlier. But the real
excitement was inthe drivers’ championsh ip. Veteran
champion NikiLauda, lured out of retiremen t by McLaren for
the 1982 se ason but so far unable to claim his third drivers’
title, was paired with rising Frenchstar Alain Prost, chomping
at the bit to get his first.
There’s an analogy inthere somewhere. Although it’s four
years since McLaren Automotive launched its first car, and the
quality, ab ility and capacityof those cars to thrillhas improved
with every year, this is stilla young company. Like Prost in’84,
it’s stilllearning, and it’s stilllooking for its first decisive
comparison test victory inthis magazine.
Porsch e meanwhile, the wise old man of sports cars, has been
making 911s for 52 years; Turbos for over 40. Straddling the
line between pure sports cars and laid-backGTs, the 911 isn’t
mere ly a great ba ckroad scratcher, it’s an everyday proposition
with spac e for junk, visibilityand reliability. Little wonder it’s
the default choice, and was always the car inthe 570
development team’s crosshairs.
‘We had 911s inthe studio during the process
to make sure our car was at least as good,’
McLaren’s designchief, Fr ank Stephenson had
told me earlier. ‘The idea was to make it do
everything the 911 can do but better. It’s almost
like we started from the inside out. We looked
at visibility, comfort, storage capabiliti es,
everything like that had to be the first priority.
Whenyou look at the pyramid, the ba se was
usability.’
Over the next couple of days we’ll be putting
that to the test, piling on motorway miles, slicing
through citytraffic and carving up some fast
open roads up and downthe length of Portugal.
And since these aren’t fair-weather sports cars
we’ll be taking inal l sorts of weather conditions,
from torrential rainto even torrentialler rain.
That we’d be bringing a 911 to the Faro launch
was a given. But which 911? A Top-Trumps-style
investigation reveals the Turbo S to be as bang on the money
as it is on the power, which is why James Taylor is joining us in
one as we make our way north from Faro inthe McLaren.
Bringing an extra 29kW to the table for a R451000premium
over its non-S brother, the 911 Turbo S costs from R2.89-
million and delivers 412kW. McLaren’s 570S makes 419kW
and willset you ba ck an estimated R3.25m. Not much inthat,
you’llagree, and though the Porsch e’s flat-sixgives its four
driveshafts a 750Nm Chinese burn, and the McLaren inflicts a
comparativel y limp-wristed 600Nm attack on its two, the
German weighs inat 1680kg, or 250kg morethan the Brit.Our man Chilton
atEstoril, aplace
richwithracing
heritage.Mostof
histimewas spent
inthe fillingstation,
however
On-paper figures put the Porsch e a tenth ahead to 100kph, at
3.1sec, but its 319kph top speed falls 9kph shor t. That’s close
enough to be inconsequential, but my shove-in-the-back -o-
meter is telling me that the McLaren is a decisively more
savage accelerator. Not quite as savage as the 478kW 650S, but
quick enough to pres s me deep into the bucket seat when the
blowers start boosting. It likes to rev too, pulling to 8500rpm,
long after the 911 has given up. Later, a morethorough dig
through the 570 technical info turns up 0-200kph figures that
bear this out. Porsch e: 10.3sec, McLaren: 9.5sec. Lamborghini’s
far moreexpensive Huracan, by the way, needs 9.9...
The leveller today though is the weather. That and the
Porsch e’s four-whe el-drive system. Aswe cruise downthe
sopping wet IC15 heading for Lisbon, Portugal’s shabby chic
capital, I radio James telling himto pullalongside for a ro lling
drag race. Whenthe hammers drop, so does the 570S, by a
couple of car lengths as the all-wheel-drive Porsch e storms
ahead leaving the McLaren struggling for purchase on the
slimy bitumen.
Four-whe el drive is but one of the ways these
cars differ from one another. Un der dramatically
disparate skins they’re every bit as different as
they look, a shared 3.8-litr e capacityand use of
twin turbochargers about the only common
connections. A two-plus-two with its engine
slung unfashionably far beyond the rear axle, the
911 is constructed around an aluminium-
intensive steel structure. A pumped up version of
the regular 991, it looks too similar at the front,
but the way the rear tyres tuck into those huge
arches is exquisite. Swollen? Blistered?
Anaphylactic shock, morelike.
But even a bootylike that isn’t enough to
garner it much attention as we pick our way
through streets that mix tiled facades like a 1970s
kitchen, and peeling paint. All eyes are on the
McLaren. I doubtmost of those eyes know this is
the babyMcLaren, and many probably don’t
know what it is at all. They almost ce rtainly
won’t know that it’s built around a carbon fibre
chassis tub and flat-plane-crankV8 that can
trace its parentage to the mightyP1 hyperca r.
They might have noticed that the softer rear end
styling, with its wraparound super formed
aluminiumpanels and coquet tish lamps, seems
surpri singly non-threatening – a deliberate
attempt to target female customers. But all they
really know, or think they do, is that the green
car, with its Ferrari-esque styling, its better-tha n-
Ferrari dihedral doors and its growly engine, is
both faster and significantly moreexpensive.
Only we know that they cost similar money.
Looking like a million dollars when you’ve spen t
a third of that has undeniable appeal, but driving
cars like the 570 intownhas its problems,
particularly ina countr y so deprived of tasty
metal as Portugal. Thumbs-ups and camera
phones I can live with, but when you’ve got
people banging on the windowlike you’re some
kind of scab breaking through a picket line,
demanding you blip the throttle intr affic, you
start to wonder whether the 911’s seat isn’t the
more appealing.
And that’s no reflection onthe strides McLaren