Yahoo Autos Modern McLarens Are Love Letters to Talented Drivers
"SHOULDN'T IT BE ORANGE?"
My friend Zach Bowman looked at the car. Not disappointed. Curious.
"I mean–I just kind of figured it'd be orange?"
Zach s a writer. He used to work at this magazine, which should tell you something about his lack of character. We met for lunch last fall, in the Cascade mountains, half by accident. I was testing a McLaren 5700GT on a loop from my house in Seattle, and Zach was on his way to the Pacific, living in a pickup camper for a year as an experiment. When your house is a truck, you head for the coast, because you can. When you borrow a McLaren, you run to the hills, as Iron Maiden said, because you have a pulse.
The 570 was heartbreakingly pretty. Metallic gray. I looked at it and sighed, maybe a little dreamily.
"Yeah. Should be orange."
When it comes to McLarens-and with all respect to Ron Dennis, the brand's recently ousted CEO/mastermind-I think of two people: Bruce McLaren himself, and Gordon Murray. Bruce built the company's early days, won his first grand prix at 22. Murray designed the 627-hp McLaren F1 street car, an epoch-defining masterpiece and the only machine I've ever wanted to legally wed. Bruce died in a Can-Am car in 1970, just 32, but his legacy rooted. In 2017, his name is on an engineering firm, a Formula 1 team, a line of production cars that melt your face off when you drop the throttle.
And, as Zach pointed out, the color orange. More proof that you never control the stuff that scars you. In the late 1960s, someone at McLaren decided that the factory team cars needed to look like radioactive valencias. As my wife once told me, obnoxious orange paint works exceedingly well on a race car, almost inversely proportional to how it works in, say, the master bathroom of an adult house. (Lost that one. We eventually settled on Indigo Ink, color HDC-CL-26A from the Home Depot Home Decorators Collection and the good people at Behr. Which is fine, I guess, if you're into that sort of thing, but Behr never won 182 F1 races and also their website says bubkes about carbon-fiber tubs.)
Prior to the 570, my McLaren experience lay in just one car. A few years ago, I was somehow lucky enough to drive an F1. The car was silver, but that didn't matter, because it was an F1 and I lost my mind anyway. The 570 test was a sort of bookend, a short-term loan that McLaren PR offered for perspective. An introduction to the modern Bruce.
Not to discount my winning and wholly juvenile personality, but that loan almost certainly happened because McLaren is in a time of flux. After decades of motorsport focus, the firm is branching into full-line cracking–a stark change from the 1990s, when they built 106 F1s and little else. This country can now choose from 17 McLaren dealers and nine models, from the 562-hp 570 line to the 986-hp P1 GTR. Each of those cars uses a turbocharged V-8, a carbon chassis, and a silhouette that somehow manages to seem both new and reverent of Murray's work.
Before that trip to the mountains, I was emailing with R&T writer Jack Baruth. In addition to being a club racer who looks like a lumberjack Jimmy Page, Jack is the only person on the masthead to have track-tested every current McLaren. He's always spoken highly of the cars, so I asked why.
That's rare stuff, and maybe aligned with the man's life: solving problems most folks don't realize exist.
There was gushing, and Jack does not gush. "They always feel light," he wrote, "like they have enough power, like there's enough brake underfoot. Even forward visibility is brilliant. We're rapidly running out of road for the gasoline-powered supercar-if there was ever a time to do something great, it's now. And the McLarens are legitimately great: a love letter to the talented tenth of their drivers who will use them."
He also noted that the cars are durable as dirt in hard lapping and intolerant of fools at the limit. Rare stuff in a modern supercar. And maybe aligned with Bruce McLaren's life. If the books are any guide, the man's short time on earth seems to have been centered on quietly solving problems that most folks don't realize exist. Plus ferocious racecraft and that odd quality that makes people reflexively want to give you their best, even if they can't explain why.
The 570GT isn't an F1. This should be obvious-the latter cost almost a million dollars new, and the former is priced like a 911 Turbo S. The newer McLaren is less art statement and more commodity, as it has to be. But there's a weird, immutable thread between the two, an almost manicured calm to the violence. You know that trope where the guy who talks the least is always the smartest dude in the room? For better or worse, you don't get that in a Ferrari.
By the time I said goodbye to Zach and got back on the road, it was late afternoon. Hours from my driveway, and almost dark. If anyone raps on my front door in the middle of the night and asks where I went that evening, I'll tell the truth: straight home, where I fell asleep binge-watching C-Span. Because I sure as hell wasn't ripping through unpopulated mountains like a man who had never been arrested and kind of wanted to try it.
Forests darker than pitch. Cloudspackled moonlight. Ribbons of pavement in a car good enough to make your skin cavitate.
Is, er, probably what it's like, when you're off being irresponsible.
Before heading home, I put my address into the 570's nav system. The screen spit out an estimated arrival time, so I texted my wife to let her know. When I hit the house, I strolled into the kitchen and cracked a beer. Maybe 45 minutes before the GPS said I would.
My wife walked into the room. "You're early. That text said 8:30?"
"Yeah," I said, closing the fridge.
"Must be the nav's fault. Maybe something wrong with the car."
Or not.
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