Car UK May 2019

he odds are long but that doesn’t change the fact that it

happened. Smiling already (because if sliding aboard a

McLaren like a modern, road-legal Group C racer doesn’t

make you smile, it’s probably time to give up), I slide under

the 570’s featherlight door, into its near-perfect cockpit (into

the fabulous little pocket on the front of the seat goes my

phone – iPhone storage, Colin Chapman-style) and go to leave the layby

also occupied by a brand new 911 and an R8 – only to have to pause for a

flying fireball-orange Lexus RC F (that’s the £61k, 470bhp V8 coupe that’s

not the very pretty one, should you not speak fluent Lexus).

We’re clearly headed the same way, and for the same stretch of testing,

undulating rural B-road. Through the 40mph limit he’s bang-on; love

that. And when it’s done, he doesn’t hesitate – down through gears,

rear squats and... bang, his big V8 gets busy bending the physics. The

McLaren, still in fifth, bogs so badly when I jump on the throttle pedal I

fear it might be broken; the same unsettling lack of any drive whatsoever

that Toyota’s Le Mans drivers are having years of counselling to get over.

The Lexus steals a lead. The McLaren, perhaps bewildered by my

very un-McLaren lack of intelligence or precision, patiently waits

for me to click down to something like the right gear. What happens

next is a graphic demonstration of the difference between a fast car

and a supercar; between one conceived to be a car first and fast second,

and one engineered from the tyres up to be a fast car.

With the best part of 500bhp, the Lexus is quick: 0-62mph in 4.5sec

and 168mph where conditions permit. But the McLaren (ahem, driven

properly...) reels in the RC like an F1 frontrunner lapping a Williams –

with 562bhp pushing just 1452kg (to the RC F’s 1765kg...), the space and

time between the two cars simply collapses before my eyes.

But it’s what happens next that’s really interesting. We both know the

road, and he’s trying, but as contests go it’s about as fair as a Sopwith

Camel fending off an X-Wing. Held back by an excess of mass, a lack of

feedback and the truth that, unfortunately, he’s sitting in the wrong part

of the car – way too high, and behind his engine rather than ahead of

it – he must brake for every curve and feed the machine in, managing the

change of direction with the kid gloves of a bomb diffuser. By contrast, I

feel superhuman. I can change direction or gain and lose speed in a heart-

beat, and with such bewildering accuracy and confidence that I would

never, ever get bored in this thing. (Though I’m already bored of the

optional sports exhaust’s blare: don’t do it.) In the 570S you’re hard-wired

in, and it’s the combination of outlandish performance with absolutely

no slack, doubt or confusion to dull your speed that re-writes the rules

of the game in your favour. In the McLaren, fast is not something you

persuade or cajole the car to do. Fast is what it exists to do.

And so that lead vanishes to nothing, and still I’ve so much in reserve I

McLaren 570S

As the driven snow

T

98 CARMAGAZINE.CO.UK | May 2019

Giant test: Porsche 911