Driving a McLaren P1 on the road
We all know the P1 is stellar on track, but what's it like during Friday morning on the A907 near Dunfermline?
2012 concept is the actual birthday boy
The cynical might suggest that McLaren would also like to remind the world, what with potentially holy-trinity eclipsing hypercars from Mercedes and Aston forthcoming, that it has been in the hybrid hypercar game for a while now. That's your pretext then but, quite frankly, the most tenuous of justifications would have sufficed - if a P1 drive is offered, in any context, you drop everything.
To add to the excitement, and trepidation, it's a drive in P1 OOV - AKA The P1. A prototype that became the press car, driven by the great, the good - and the not so - of the industry, it has covered nearly 23,000 miles in the process. It's Amethyst Black, and remains the car you think of (if not a blue Impreza) when 'P1' is mentioned.
Climb aboard, get comfy...
To actually drive though? The P1 is bloody terrifying - and that's the polite phrase - on first acquaintance. I mean really, really scary. Part of that is knowing its value, part of it is knowing that two M3's worth of power is going to two tyres not much bigger than those on a single M3, and part is the sheer drama of everything you're faced with.
Seated on the left and positioned what feels like almost horizontally, it's a tight cabin; driver and passenger pushed to the centre due to the space demanded by the MonoCage structure. The vast view out, the 'Powertrain' and 'Handling' dials plus the steering wheel - albeit here with 'DRS' and 'IPAS' buttons sitting like forbidden fruit - will be familiar to McLaren drivers. But this is not a humble, accommodating, relaxed 21st century kind of hypercar. Stones flick off the carbon underbelly so loudly it feels like you might leave with gravel rash, the twin-turbo V8 expels all manner of angry coughs, sneezes and whooshes and the tub almost seems to resonate with the road.
Don't forget to raise the nose on the way out
Begin to assert yourself - or at least give yourself the impression of assertion - and the P1 is capable of things you won't have believed possible. The acceleration is feral, wild and unhinged. And utterly, utterly addictive. Full throttle was never reached but it didn't matter, the intensity of (nearly) 916hp and 723lb ft in less than 1,500kg of car is so gloriously, crazily, brilliantly brutal. The electric motor fills in where that 3.8-litre V8 is normally spooling up, but then there's more torque too, resulting in a ferocious, insatiable rush of performance from very few revs, accompanied by a cacophony of sound: perhaps not truly musical, instead a fascinating amalgam of seriously aggressive V8, turbo whistle and a faint electric whirr.
Agile, nimble, delicate, really sodding fast...
Here's the joy of the P1, however: you don't actually have to be travelling fast to enjoy it. In fact, with so much going on, the car almost encourages a more relaxed pace. The sounds from the engine, the noise from the road and the sense of the scenery blurring through the screen will convince you of a greater velocity when in fact you're only doing 70. You just got there quite quickly, quite dramatically and quite violently.
It means the P1 is still enjoyable on typical British A- and B-roads. Seriously. The steering is beyond reproach, delicate and feelsome while being really precise too. The Akebono brakes are fantastic: firm, accurate and with a beautifully positioned pedal. The ride, while stiffer than other McLarens, is still possessed of a level of fluency and poise that makes it really usable and comfortable in the UK.
It's fun on a normal road at normal speeds. Honest
Tell you what the McLaren P1 feels like on the road, and it's meant sincerely and entirely as a compliment to both brands: it feels like a 220mph Lotus. Get over the intimidation factor and it feels about Evora-sized, with the same sort of gorgeous feedback and response a driver would expect from a Hethel product. The P1 is a beautifully honed and immensely rewarding sports car whatever the scenario, and that's the most pleasing discovery of the whole endeavour. That it has four times the power of a supercharged Elise is not simply the icing on the £2m cake - that would be absurd - though hopefully you're seeing the point. Which is that eventually the shock value of all that power subsides, to reveal something perhaps even more satisfying.
Maybe not a whole new thing now, but it is fabulous
There's a distinct possibility that P1 OOV might not be driven a great deal again, it's simply worth too much. But if getting into another McLaren P1 takes £2m then it doesn't feel like a penny would be wasted. And if this is what the future of sports cars feels like, be they with 900hp or considerably less than half that, then bring it on.
Reading this it sounds like a very intoxicating and exciting machine indeed, definitely top 10 euromillions stuff.
In fairness, the origination of that expression was also one of the videos which changed how we consume motoring content. Chris Harris's video on the P1 is legendary - the long version, where he talks to Chris Goodwin about all the fine details etc. etc. - that was a whole new thing in itself, a video about a supercar which wasn't just a grinning rich idiot saying "look at my new car guys".
Let's face it, most of us mere mortals will never see one, much less drive one. Therefore, articles on cars like this are really acts of escapism, about imagining how one must feel if one were lucky enough to get the keys. This article does that without resorting to clichés and only a modicum of hyperbole where it's required. Well done.
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