McLaren 750s is the last of its V8 supercars and what a ride it is

Talk about going out with a bang. McLaren’s final V8 is a 331km/h heartstarter that makes a hell of a lot of noise but ... where’s the door handle?

The Clarkson review: McLaren 750S — 0 to 62mph in 2.8 seconds

A bastard has been in the night. He broke a padlocked gate and fly-tipped a small mountain of household waste in one of my fields. Hubcaps, an old trampoline, assorted bin bags and various soft porn DVDs. You know the sort of thing. And it’s so annoying. If he’d dumped it at the side of the road it would have been the council’s job to sit around thinking of excuses for not clearing it up. But he didn’t. He dumped it on my land, so the responsibility was mine.

At first I thought about moving it to the side of the road myself but then, in the eyes of the law, I’d be fly-tipping. So I had to hire a skip – which cost a not inconsiderable £250 ($485) – and head over to the newly polluted field in my JCB telehandler to spend a morning doing outdoor housework.

And then something strange happened. I hadn’t even had the chance to start the job when a ­couple in their late fifties arrived on the scene, stepped out of their brown Skoda and started taking pictures through huge telephoto lenses. When one of the girls on the Clarkson’s Farm TV production team went over to ask what they were doing, they were rude and evasive. So I went over too, and while the husband called me a ­bell-end and a dick, his wife carried on snapping away.

It was all very puzzling. They looked like the sort of retired couple you see mooching around the garden centre every weekend. So what were they doing in the countryside, aggressively taking pictures of people? Maybe they were the fly-tippers, hanging around the scene of the crime to see what distress it caused.

Two days later, though, when the pictures appeared on the Mail Online, all became clear. They were paps. And that’s odd. If you are a well-known person and you stumble out of the Chiltern Firehouse at 3am with a Love Island starlet on your arm, you can expect to get snapped. But when you’re clearing up someone else’s mess on a farm on a cold February day, you don’t. Anyway, I hope they enjoy the £12.50 they were paid for the ­pictures and that they both get an embarrassing itch in their nether regions very soon.

The next day I was papped again, though this time I was ­expecting it. I parked a top-of-the-range McLaren 750S outside a restaurant in Notting Hill and within hours readers of the Mail Online were told this £260,000 ($505,000) purple supercar was mine. Nearly right. It was blue, it cost £308,000 ($598,000) and it wasn’t.

The next day this amazing(ly ­inaccurate) story was picked up by the Mirror, which said that I also own a Ferrari F355, a Lamborghini Gallardo and an Aston Martin ­Virage. I don’t. In fact these days I prefer my old Range Rover to any supercar. They’re too diffcult to get in and out of, there’s nowhere for the dogs and they’re too powerful. Of course, I know what to do if a car’s rear tyres light up and some oversteer happens, but I’m old now and consequently I’m not completely sure I’d have the ­reflexes to deal with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Joe Biden. I know the difference ­between Egypt and Mexico, and I know President Mitterrand isn’t the prime minister of Germany. But you do need to be on it to sort out a 552kW car when the road’s a bit greasy and you’ve accidentally given it too many beans.

I do still like supercars, though, and I’ll be sad when they’re gone. Which they will be when socialism forces their wailing power units into retirement and replaces them with the motors from the back of a chest freezer. Certainly, this is the last McLaren to have a V8.

So what’s it like? Well, the most intriguing thing is that it’s slower than the car it replaces, the 720S. Actually, it’s not slower than the 720S I drove because that broke down and had to be taken away on the back of a tow truck. But the ­fact is that the top speed has dropped from 341km/h to just 331km/h.

Why? Well, McLaren has ­shortened the final drive ratio and added more downforce, so you get snappier acceleration and more grip in the corners. It has also ­tinkered with the brakes, which are no longer annoying. In fact, it has tinkered with a lot of things – a third of all the ­components are new.

The main focus has been on making the car more useable on a day-to-day basis, and I’ve got to say that it has been extremely ­successful. This is a car that can be parked easily in Notting Hill, and can be used in torrential rain to go to pick up a slightly tipsy Lisa from the railway station. Although she couldn’t find the door handle on the outside and I couldn’t find one on the inside and it was chucking it down, so she didn’t like the 750 as much as I do.

It is very civilised. In comfort mode it rides extremely smoothly, although I noticed that when the fuel tank was nearly empty it did get a bit choppier. And everything is so very easy and simple to use. When you move the steering wheel in and out or up and down, the whole instrument binnacle moves as well, so the dials are ­always visible. And the sat-nav graphics are excellent and the heater is brilliant. And the roof comes off. But not in February in England, thank you very much.

Styling on the front end

In many ways it’s like driving a Golf. Until you put your foot down. It might not have the outright speed of its predecessor but it can still get from 0 to 100km/h in 2.8 seconds. And to 200km/h in a scarcely believable 7.3 seconds. To make everything more bowel ­loosening, when you put your foot down hard it’s very, very loud.

It’s not an especially nice noise. It doesn’t howl like a V10 or scream like a V12. It doesn’t even rumble like a normal V8; the brace of turbochargers sees to that. It’s just noise, and lots of it. And it seems to be at odds somehow with the styling, which is all very detailed and precise. It’s a Swiss watch, then, that sounds like a bombed dam.

It didn’t bother me unduly, though, because once I’d tasted the G-forces and experienced the ­volcano, I went back to being 63. Even when I found myself alongside a ­Porsche 911 Turbo on the M40, I didn’t feel the need to show its driver what’s what. Well, maybe I felt a bit of need. Quite a lot ­actually. But I ­resisted as only an old man can.

Speaking of the opposition, how does it stack up to its rivals from Ferrari and Lamborghini? It’s a tricky one to answer because all three deliver broadly the same kind of experience.

The Ferrari is perhaps more soulful and the Lambo more mad but really it comes down to whether you prefer Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris or the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica.