First drive: McLaren 570S Coupe challenges Porsche 911

McLaren has incredible communicative steering and excellent cornering abilities

McLaren 570S
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Year: 2015
Fuel: Petrol

There was one simple reason why McLaren had to go looking for new suppliers when it decided to do the 570S. It had never put vanity mirrors in a car before. Or cup holders.

Not once had it occurred to McLaren that a driver or passenger might want to look at their hair or make-up or have a drink while they were sitting inside the carbon-fibre monocoques of their biturbo V8 beasties. And that says something about McLaren.

It says something else about McLaren that they understood that an everyday car that would make up half their volumes, and would take on the benchmark Porsche 911 Turbo, would need some ideas in it that were well outside Woking's comfort zone. Like vanity mirrors.

It also says a lot about the kind of supercar company McLaren has quickly matured into that it has made a car that’s more comfortable than anything it’s ever built before without feeling demonstrably slower. They call it their “sports car” but it doesn’t feel demonstrably different to their “super car” options.

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It’s called “570S” because that’s its power output in horsepower. While it’s obviously a detuned version of the 650S’s 3.8-litre, twin-turbo V8, it’s hard to take that as a negative. For most people, on most days, in most scenarios, 600Nm of torque will be plenty. Especially when it only weighs 1,313kg.

There are other significant differences, too, including the switch from carbon-fibre to a largely aluminium body shell and, significantly, scrapping the fancy interconnected hydraulic anti-roll bars for good, old-fashioned mechanical ones. Gone, too, are the trick active aerodynamics and the air brake, replaced with a fixed wing and a flatter look. It’s about slipperiness, not ultimate track-bashing down force. You won’t see its carbon-fibre core from the cabin because it’s richly trimmed in leather and carpet and alcantara, though it comes across as a bit patchwork and it’s not the highlight it might have been.

Most of the tactile and visual shortcomings are down to the custom-made switchgear and multimedia screen setup, which feel at least a shade less than premium. The indicator and wiper levers, in particular, look like they’d be more at home in a Renault Twingo, while the multimedia buttons are hard and have more lateral movement in them than you’d get in an Audi. They just don’t feel precise to use, nor precisely honed.

By way of compensation it gets the fully digital instrument cluster out of the P1 hypercar, which changes its layout and design depending on the mode you’ve selected. Go to the Track mode and you’ve got a full-width horizontal rev counter, complete with shift lights.

Multimedia systems

The newer switchgear for the chassis, skid-control and powertrain settings live down on the centre console and feel a lot more precise than the carry-over buttons for the climate control and the multimedia systems.

The seats are brilliantly supportive and comfortable, with a range of widths and the option of the lighter manual or the heavier electronic controls, and McLaren makes much of the usefulness of the flat shelf behind the seats as a stowage option. The nose’s luggage area is 144 litres and there are handy holes in the door armrests and centre console, but it’s nothing like the ability to chuck a gym bag on to the back seat of a Porsche.

The exterior design hasn’t warmed up some people, with its organically aero-looking shape that feels like it was mostly cooked up in a wind tunnel. There are highlights, including the razor-sharp, 4mm-thick LED tail lights that surround a heat-extracting grille, but there are downsides, too.

The 570S bodywork is all about fold, crease and folding creases and it largely works well. However, look at it from the wrong angle, like one of those 3D sidewalk chalk drawings, and you can see things you’re clearly not supposed to see, like where McLaren has chosen to fold the long aluminium side panel over the shorter carbon panel above the engine. And, in a decision that initially seems bewildering, McLaren hasn’t given 570S buyers the option of a clear engine cover.

For all its power and fury, McLaren once had a problem with this engine because it was a muffled twin-turbo V8 living in a world of free revving, sweet spinning, intoxicatingly endearing naturally aspirated engines. McLaren has worked hard on the engine note of the 570S and it’s sort of paid off. You’re never going to mistake it for a Ferrari 458 Speciale, but you’re never going to mistake the sound of a 488 GTB for a 458 Speciale, either.

Strength

The 570S blurs the line between sports and supercars, and it seems the only logical reason they’re not calling it a supercar is that McLaren doesn’t want to. It crunches into 100km/h in 3.2 seconds, blasts beyond 200km/h only 6.3 seconds later (a mere tenth of a second off the legendary F1’s time) and whips across the quarter mile in 10.9 seconds, at 220km/h. Left with a long enough road, McLaren says it will run out of strength to push aside the air at 328km/h.

As for the foes, the 911 Turbo is line-ball on all but top speed, as is Audi’s new R8 V10 Plus and the more expensive Lamborghini Huracán isn’t far away, either. One major difference to those three supercar options is that they’re all-wheel drive and the McLaren isn’t. And it was right not to bother. The handling of the 570S is an unexpected, unadulterated, relentless flood of delight and clarity.

McLaren has swapped out the variable power steering system, shied away from electro-mechanical units and developed a new fixed-rate rack that lets drivers revel in an uninterrupted stream of vital information without ever being overbearing.

It’s brilliant, and the front end of the 570S is the most-trustworthy friend you’ll find in supercar land. We tried it on the road, on freeways, on the track and it is never anything other than a shining jewel, capable of making the nose of the McLaren heave harder than you think possible, all while telling you exactly how much grip remains and whether anything happening below deck might alter that.

Cars that yaw as hard and fast as the 570S usually pay a price for it, and that price is more often than not that the back end of the car feeling nervous and twitchy. Not here.

Arrive too hot at a slow corner and the steering will tell you, in detail, as you begin to turn that there’s still too much speed for the perfect line. It will start to slide the nose briefly before it gets bite, snapping in to the apex.

Instead of continuing the snap by breaking loose in a pendulum, the back end grabs ever harder at the tarmac. Nail the throttle and, even with the lack of active aero and the weight pulled off it, the steering still tells you everything there is to know about what’s about to happen and it makes the breakaway slide almost a sleepwalk correction.

And, scarily, it’s the same at any speed. There’s more understeer at higher cornering speeds, but it’s so communicative from both ends of the car, with so little roll and so little feeling of weight-shifting nervousness, that it gives its drivers confidence to pick it up and throw it at corners.

Well balanced

For a mid-engined car to hold long slides in second gear shouldn’t be a big challenge. The 570S can do it in fourth or even fifth gear without its driver raising a sweat. Its electronic traction aids help, but the core of the car is so well balanced and thought through that it’s no harder to drive with them switched off.

And the engine becomes so intuitively fast that you rarely need to run it out to its 7400rpm power peak or its 8500rpm redline. Both on the road and in the trickier parts of the Portimao racetrack, it’s safer and no slower to short shift it back into the thicker parts of its torque curve, between 5000 and 6500rpm.

It’s a hugely flexible motor, giving urge from as little as 2000rpm, and that makes it a playful companion in the real world as well as the racetrack. It’s also quiet at highway speeds, though a constant throttle can drone annoyingly in Sport mode.

Fortunately, McLaren has separated the powertrain and chassis settings, so you can have the engine, transmission and exhaust notes in Normal while the chassis is in Sport and you get the “quiet” version. Its gearbox, too, lends the car a character all its own, becoming ferociously quick through each gearshift in the Track mode, delivering a little sharp shock on the way, yet being docile and smooth on the default Normal mode.

Perhaps engineering the sports car to behave like a supercar wasn’t the challenge for McLaren. Maybe it was engineering it to behave like a proper car on the road, which is what it has done.

There has clearly been a lot of work done on filtering out wind and road noise before it gets to the cabin and the ride quality is, for this kind of car, exceptional.

McLaren aimed to make a sports car out of the 570S. It overshot. It made an epic sports car, with engineering brilliance shining through in every situation and with on-road exclusivity built in.

Next up is the lower-priced, slightly slower 540S. The only question for the 570S is: would anybody really miss 30 horsepower? Time for Porsche to start paying more attention to the goings-on at Woking. Lowdown: McLaren 570S Coupe Engine: 3.8-litre, V8 petrol, twin-turbocharged

Output: 562bhp and 600Nm of torque

Transmission: seven-speed dual-clutch, rear-wheel drive

Fuel: 10.7 litres/100km (26.4mpg)

CO2 (motor tax): 249 g/km (€2,350 per year)

Price: £143,250 before Irish taxes (540S will start at £126,000 )