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AUTOMO
B
ILE
MAG.CO
M@automobilemagEDITOR’S LETTERVOLUME 34, NO.
JUNE 2019THERE IT IS. A perfect stretch. It’s flat, straight, and
long. I bury the pedal, the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 roars
with approval, and its furious sonic detonations burrow
into the back of my skull as the car hurtles forward. The
speedo is in kilometers, so I’m not exactly sure how fast
we’re going: 250 kph ... 260 ... What little traffic exists
retreats wisely to the right two lanes. It seems as if it’s
almost stopped as our gold 720S streaks by.
By the time we hit those magnificent miles of unrestricted
German autobahn, we’re already a couple of countries deep
from our starting point at McLaren Automotive’s gleaming
glass headquarters in Woking, England. Des-
tination: Geneva. Our pack of 720S Spiders,
570S Spiders, and 600LTs first shot over from
Woking to the Channel Tunnel, aka the Chun-
nel, to get to the European continent.
As we waited to load the cars onto the train
to France, it quickly became a scene. People
appeared like moths drawn to our Techni-
colored, mid-engine British supercar flames.
Photos were taken, questions asked. It’s rare
enough to see one McLaren in the wild, let
alone half a dozen. A similar scenario played
out wherever we stopped; one woman was so
jubilant at being able to take a photo with a
car at a gas station that she gave my startled
driving partner a big hug.
We took the long way to the land of watches
and chocolate, traversing six countries in all.
One thing we learned hopping from McLaren to McLaren
was that multiple-hour runs along the restricted-speed
highways weren’t that much of a burden to endure. In fact,
miles passed by in relative comfort; the Bowers & Wilkins
stereos proved sufficient, the navigation setup acceptable.
But we all know what McLarens are made to do, and
when it was our day to play in the 600LT, one of our 2019M
IK
E(^) F
LO
Y
D
All-Stars, we got after it with a vengeance over a delightfully
twisted asphalt playground in Germany’s Black Forest.
Then as we approached Geneva after a long, tedious Swiss
highway run, we were tipped off to another fabulous
mountain pass. With dusk descending, flames puffed from
the Longtail’s massive tailpipes. It’s a magical sight.
More magic awaited us at the Geneva
show after we reluctantly handed back the
keys. We marveled at what is arguably the
ultimate McLaren, the Speedtail, which we
previewed in our February issue. It’s even
more breathtaking in person, a stunning
carbon-fiber Ultimate Series realization
of how far McLaren has stretched the tal-
ents of its engineering and design teams.
McLaren folks we talked with at the show are confident the
Speedtail will do what the company’s devastating F1 did
some 20 years ago—set records. Duck and cover, Bugatti.
Speaking of Bugatti, Geneva never disappoints as a
showcase for astonishing supercars like Bugatti’s latest,
the one-off, Chiron-based La Voiture Noire (“the Black Car”
in French), which one gazillionaire—reportedly former
Volkswagen Group chairman Ferdinand Piëch—bought
for somewhere north of $12 million. All-electric mega-
machines are also becoming more common, Pininfarina’s
$2.6 million Battista being the most extreme example.
Ferrari’s longtime design partner says its first ground-up
creation will be good for roughly 1,900 horsepower. No, that
is not a typo. Pininfarina claims it will be the most powerful
street-legal production car of all time.
Outside of the certifiably insane Battista, EVs of all
shapes, sizes, and prices continue to proliferate at shows
like Geneva, cars like the Polestar 2, which
Robert Cumberford has a go at in this month’s
“By Design” column. The Volvo-associated
Polestar is just one of a slew of marques that
are planning to flood the market with all-
electric offerings in the next year or two.
The Volkswagen Group, especially, is elec-
trifying so fast it may have to change its logo
to a charging plug. At Geneva, it showed off
one of its most expressive offerings to date,
called the ID Buggy. Based on VW’s new small-
car electric platform known as MEB, the dune-
buggy-style vehicle has no doors or roof, and it
nods to the famed Meyers Manx and vehicles
like it, which originally used Volkswagen air-
cooled engines to provide their power.
We got a walk-around of the Buggy with
VW design chief Klaus Bischoff, who broadly
hinted that it would be built by a third-party automaker as a
specialty vehicle of sorts as soon as two years from now. He
called it “pure driving fun.” That’s exactly what we want to
see and hear when it comes to EVs, cars created for the joy of
driving, cars like the amazing McLarens I had the privilege
of piloting to Geneva in order to catch another glimpse of
what the future of the automobile holds. AM
TO
GENEVA,
THE LONGTA IL
WAY