McLaren Artura Is Dual-Power Magnificence

• The McLaren Artura is the hybrid stepping stone to our electric future.

• At 3443 pounds it's ridiculously light for a hybrid, even with its 7.4-kWh battery. It's 257 pounds lighter than the Ferrari 296 GTB, which otherwise shares its basic specs.

• Pricing is an entirely reasonable $237,500, about 85 grand less than the Ferrari.

It seems that somewhere in the not-too-distant future all of our supercars will be electric. Consider the Pininfarina Battista, Rimac Nevera, and even the Tesla Model S Plaid. All those and those to come replace the roar of a V8 or V12 internal-combustion engine with the robotic whirrs and clicks of pure electric juice.

They are quicker and to an extent faster than the traditional roaring gasoline-fed howlers of horsepower that defined supercar power since the first Mercedes/Duesenberg/Takeyerpick car ever got the “super” prefix slapped on its front end.

But not everything’s going to be all-electric. At least not right away. So when McLaren realized the mortality of the gasoline-fed combustion engine, it didn’t want to shock us (get it?) by dropping gas altogether and going to batteries. Instead, it straddled both sciences and went with a hybrid.

Behold, the Artura, the best of both worlds.

The Artura drops down from McLaren’s traditional V8 by two cylinders and slaps a pancake-flat electric motor where the missing cylinders used to be. The resulting hybrid powerplant makes 671 certified horsepower, 531 lb-ft of torque and relatively few emissions.

But I know what you’re thinking…

Comparisons to the Ferrari 296 GTB are inevitable: Both have electrified hybridized 120-degree 3.0-liter V6s sitting amidships and driving the rear wheels. Both look extraordinarily cool, and both are about as thrilling to drive as almost anything you have ever driven, guaranteed. Indeed, for a while it looked like McLaren would beat Ferrari to market, but electronic gremlins (the ghost of Lucas Electrics?!) meant a delay in delivering the Artura (and possibly caused the ouster of McLaren’s affable CEO Mike Flewitt).

So how do the two compare? The Ferrari also has 3.0 liters of displacement mated to an electric motor but manages to make 818 hp to the Artura’s 671. The Ferrari weighs 3700 pounds to the McLaren’s 3443. So the Ferrari’s just barely slower—2.9 vs. 2.6 seconds to 60 mph. Yet, the 296 feels just a little more edgy, a little more brutale, a little more like a true track car.

I drove the Ferrari a year ago on both a racetrack and on country roads in Spain. The McLaren I drove last week on my favorite two-lane twisty highway above Los Angeles. In the rain. There was mud on some patches of road, and snow at the top where the road had washed out. So these were less than ideal conditions. And it rained a little in a winter where it rained a lot.