McLaren GT review: A supercar grand tourer – who needs it?

A supercar grand tourer – who needs it?

McLaren GT

I think we must accept that young men will always drive too quickly. Where I live, if you are male and aged between 17 and 24, you are the most at risk of being killed or seriously injured in a crash. You are also the least likely to look at the statistics and imagine that they mean you. Telling young men to slow down is like telling them not to make a mess of their bedsheets at night. It’s a waste of breath. I know this because I was one once.

I drove everywhere flat out. Every other car was either a competitor or a nuisance. The A40 into London wasn’t a trunk road, it was a drag strip, where I could prove to my mate that my Volkswagen Scirocco was faster than his Vauxhall Chevette HS. The powers that be could have imposed a 30km/h limit and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I still would have gone 180.

Only when we accept the fact that teenage boys have no sense of their own mortality can we sit down and calmly decide what’s for the best. Which is to encourage them to drive much better cars. Limited by whopping insurance premiums and a shortage of funds, a teenage boy has to tool around in a rot-box designed long before any of the recent advances in safety. As often as not you, the parents, will buy him a car such as this. Which means you’re putting a person you love, who is genetically programmed to be an idiot, into a car that has the crashworthiness of a carrier bag.

Which brings me to a dreadful case that was in the news recently. An 18-year-old boy crashed his BMW 118d in Buckinghamshire and, sadly, one of his passengers was killed. The judge, who handed the driver a six-month suspended prison sentence, blamed the parents, saying: “The defendant had only just passed his test and the decision to buy him a BMW... for a new driver of his age, was a crass one, to put it mildly.” The newspapers picked up on this, describing the BMW as a “sports car”. But it isn’t a sports car. It’s a diesel hatchback. A G-Wiz is more of a sports car. So is my frying pan. A 118d is exactly the sort of car young men should drive. Modern, so it has all the right safety features; a diesel, so it’s slow and cheap to run; and a BMW, so the young man can get his leg over more often.

Ordinarily I’d now find a neat link from this rather sombre point to the McLaren GT, but there isn’t one, so let’s just plough on. GT stands for grand tourer and this means a car that is capable of driving in sublime comfort, at high speed, across a continent. It’s a lovely idea. All Chanel and headscarves and stopping at the Villa d’Este hotel. But no one actually does it any more. If you want to go to Lake Como now, you charter a jet.

McLaren, however, weirdly believes that grand touring is still a thing and that the people who do it want an alternative to the Bentley Continental GT or Aston Martin DB11. It reckons that, instead of 2+2 seating, a big engine in the front and rear-wheel (or perhaps four-wheel) drive, people want a grand touring supercar. This is niche thinking.

So what it’s done is tinkered with the supercar format and made an engine that isn’t as tall as usual. This means there’s space on top of it, in a compartment between the explosions and the rear window, for some golf clubs or skis. There’s a small trunk at the front for underwear and toothbrushes. Inside there are two seats and a cab that is not daunting at all. Unlike the interior of a Ferrari, which is ridiculous, the McLaren GT feels like… a car.

This is a good thing. It drives like a car too. There are no histrionics. The exhaust doesn’t crackle and pop, you don’t graze the nose every time you run over a pebble and there’s never a sense you’re about to hit a tree. That said, it’s not boring or ordinary. The steering system is about as beautiful as any I’ve experienced and the speed is immense. But then it would be, because this is a car weighing less than 1.5 tonnes with a 456kW twin-turbo V8 behind your left ear.

There is a problem, though. Ever since the template for mid-engine two-seaters was laid down by the Ferrari 308 it’s been nigh-on impossible to make one that is anything less than stunning. Yet, somehow, McLaren has managed it, and got the front end all wrong. It looks limp. There’s an even bigger issue: history has taught us that McLarens do not hold their value terribly well. But, hey, if you want a grand tourer that doesn’t have four seats and that has its engine in the middle rather than the front, and you have a problem with Bentley and Aston Martin, and you still drive every week to the south of France, and you don’t mind a bit of eye-watering depreciation, the GT could be just what you’re after.

McLAREN GT

ENGINE: 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 (456kW/630Nm)

TRANSMISSION: Seven-speed automatic

PRICE: $399,995