McLaren GT

The October 2019 market launch of this week’s road test subject, the McLaren GT, must seem like an awfully long time ago for anyone reading this at the firm’s Woking headquarters.

From taking its creditors to court, to putting its factory and office headquarters up for sale, McLaren has had to resort to extraordinary measures just to survive as the Covid crisis closed its production lines and dried up so much of the business of the wider McLaren Group last year. A time of expansive thinking, when the outfit was reaching into new niches and imagining new roles for its cars, must be very hard to recall.

And yet that kind of mood brought us what was claimed to be the most usable, most aerodynamically efficient and in some ways most innovative new model that McLaren has put into normal series production at any time during its short history.

Whether those claims are true of the £165,230, 612bhp McLaren GT is what this road test must ascertain. This car’s design concept, which we’ll detail shortly, is clearly not as wildly free-thinking as that of the £2 million limited-run McLaren Speedtail – but McLaren says the GT was inspired and influenced by that Ultimate Series creation. Fundamentally, this is a mid-engined, carbonfibre-tubbed, turbo V8-powered McLaren like every other of the current era – but it’s one with very different aims and priorities from a McLaren 720S, a 600LT or a McLaren Senna, one whose major ingredients may sound familiar but have been mixed quite differently.