Prior Convictions: The Need for Speed
With nowhere for customers to actually reach it, is the top speed of Woking's next hypercar irrelevant?
And that is an issue, isn't it? It's different from making a hypercar - like the Aston Martin Valkyrie, say - which has all of the on-track performance of an F1 car. Sure, your buyers might not be able to extract the full potential from it, but that's only down to their talent. With the right training, or a 'hand' on board, somebody would be able to get the best from it.
But the upcoming BP23 three-seat hypercar will probably go to 250mph and, at the moment, McLaren hasn't figured out where it can demonstrate it.
Then there are the world's big high speed bowls like, say at Nardo - but given that knocked 10mph off of the F1's top speed in the 90s, you can see why the corner scrub of a constant radius bowl is too much for a modern hypercar to bear.
Which leaves a few options, but none are optimal. There are long runways - the kind of things the space shuttle was ready to use in an emergency. But the surface of these isn't always terrific. They're usually concrete and not always perfectly surfaced because a) the shuttle doesn't use them any more and b) military jets only use part of the strip. And besides, while they're long enough to get to a high speed, few, if any, are long enough to sit there for very long.
Then there are road events, or closed road sections, like Koenigsegg used last year. But you can close a road for as long as you like, it's still a public highway, whose surface, iffy run-off and wildlife you're still left at the mercy of. There are, obviously, companies that don't mind the increased risk of a nasty accident happening on a high-speed run, but I don't think McLaren is one of them.
Besides, proving your own top speed is one thing: after that, how do you let your owners do the same? There's the argument, which I totally buy, that it's fine if an owner doesn't use all of a car's performance, because they know it's technically possible to do so: one day they could drive a Land Rover over rock moguls, or lap a Caterham 620R as fast as a track will allow.
But how difficult does it have to be to access a car's limits, before they really do become pointless?
You could argue that a particularly gifted marketer could spearhead a public mindset change and manage to make a different attribute into the status symbol - very tough though because speed and performance are sexy and that’s pretty much biologically hardwired.
There must be a specific word, a polite one, for describing people who are willing and able to buy things whose capabilities are so far beyond what is possible in our environment that they can't even be tested.
The word would be the antithesis of the philosophy behind the Citroen Cactus which was designed never to have a high powered variant and needs nothing more than drum brakes on the rear wheels.
It is really a non-problem for the vast majority of people, after all how many of us will ever own one? Let's say instead someone produced a superb to drive sports car that would hit 120mph in less than seven seconds, but topped out at 150mph. Would anyone pay the price of a 720S for it?
After all it would get overtaken by a diesel on the autobahn.
Nowadays people are grumbling about it. What happened? Why are so many miserable about this sort of stuff these days?
Now is this because this market has changed or is just me being a bit older and boring? It does cause me some concern that I find the UP! GTI far more interesting than anything McLaren are up to!
Now is this because this market has changed or is just me being a bit older and boring? It does cause me some concern that I find the UP! GTI far more interesting than anything McLaren are up to!
The market has not changed (except that perhaps that Grinches can point to more congested roads compared to years past as an additional reason for supercars being even more irrelevant now). I was obsessed with the GBU in the back of Car and knew all the top speeds and 0-60 times (and the snarky comments). This obsession among the young and the desire for status symbols among the old will continue.
Doesn't the Up GTI look fantastic though?
My dream car now is a Morgan 3-Wheeler...
Now is this because this market has changed or is just me being a bit older and boring? It does cause me some concern that I find the UP! GTI far more interesting than anything McLaren are up to!
The market has not changed (except that perhaps that Grinches can point to more congested roads compared to years past as an additional reason for supercars being even more irrelevant now). I was obsessed with the GBU in the back of Car and knew all the top speeds and 0-60 times (and the snarky comments). This obsession among the young and the desire for status symbols among the old will continue.
Doesn't the Up GTI look fantastic though?
My dream car now is a Morgan 3-Wheeler...
I currently have a hankering for an original Fiat 500. But just to prove I've not quite given up on life, it would have to be the 650cc 'performance' version.
They aren't dictating the market, customers (and safety / emissions standards) are.
As has been alluded to already, it would take some pretty good marketing to change worldwide opinion on what is desirable in a car.
Further to this, many people don't care that much about cars. They're complicated things and we like to use simple numbers to compare them.
When you buy a washing machine or a fridge, you compare the arbitrary numbers given to you by the manufacturers. If you could get a washing machine with a 3000rpm spin cycle that was still energy efficient, would you not see that as better than an 1800rpm spin cycle? Do you know, or care, how useful that extra rpm is or whether it's even necessary? No, and people buy these cars in the same way. They want the object with bigger numbers than the other person on Instagram, because bigger numbers are better and so they win
For me, the B-segment hot-hatches have the best balance of performance and fun. So, for the newer stuff, around 1200 kilos and 200 bhp, give or take.
For me, the B-segment hot-hatches have the best balance of performance and fun. So, for the newer stuff, around 1200 kilos and 200 bhp, give or take.
Pretty much all the B-segment hot-hatches are about that. You're talking about the C-segment ones, i.e. Focus RS, etc.
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