@wheelsaustralia 105
before you start your working day. As
our editor, Alex Inwood, noted last
month, other people seemed to love
the McLaren too. But here’s the thing.
I’m not going to pretend that actually
running a McLaren 570GT is an entirely
stress-free experience.
You worry about where to park
it when you’re out, you’re always
wondering if somebody’s going to dint
it, you’re hypersensitive to scraping the
nose on bumpy roads, or damaging an
alloy in a pothole, or birdlime damaging
the paint. You get paranoid about sea
salt on wet swim gear going anywhere
near anything made of leather, and
you sometimes take a couple of trips
around the block because you weren’t
sure about the car that was behind you
as you approached your house. Supercar
paranoia. It’s a thing.
Now, none of this is an issue inherent
to the McLaren. I’d doubtless be the
same if I were in a Lamborghini or a
Ferrari, and I’ve realised that the only
real way to alleviate this issue is to
have so much money that you really
don’t care about any of the above. You
just pay an insignificant (to you) sum
to have someone fix it on your behalf
and get on with your life. So, if you can
only just scrape your way into supercar
ownership, I’d counsel against it.
As it stands, a couple of issues would
have sent the McLaren back to the shop
this month in any case. The first to raise
its head was that the sat-nav started
behaving in a deeply odd fashion. It’drecord the car as moving when it was
stationary and then fail to register
the car on the satellite network at all
on other occasions. The second issue
concerned the photochromatic glass
roof. This switched itself to dark mode,
and no amount of button jabbing or
rebooting the car would see it return to
full transparency. Neither were major
issues, but both were a little annoying.
Nor did they take the shine off those
moments when the sun was out, you had
no particular place to go and there was
nobody watching. Would I be a supercar
guy if I had the requisite funds? Let’s
just say that the McLaren 570GT
delivers quite a convincing argument,
and it’s been a wholly memorable
experience. Anybody want to crowdfund
an impecunious journalist?
ANDY ENRIGHTEnright ponders life as a supercar owner, when what he
should be pondering is his choice of footwear