But in the GTR, it’s no kind of challenge at all. So I start by driving at the same rate as I had earlier in the P1 road car, a pace beyond what almost anyone could imagine a car based on a street-legal design could manage. But I can’t just sit here wondering why lunch is fighting back, because there’s work to be done. Only now do you realise just how well and unobtrusively the normal P1’s traction systems work. It’s not the extra power and torque that catch you out so much as what a set of soft slicks can do with it, namely dump the whole lot onto the hot Qatari asphalt. It’s what happens when your inner ear finds itself on the receiving end of something entirely unexpected. So I kick my foot to the floor and feel instantly, physically sick. How do you deal with what must come next? I’d like to ease myself into the experience, but today McLaren is introducing the GTR to potential customers and apparently if you have two million quid to spend on one, that makes you more important than me. You drive the P1 GTR as you might any dual-clutch automatic car: tug a paddle, press a pedal and ease out into the unknown. The door folds down and I am alone in a carbonfibre cocoon, hoping that shaking sensation is the car and not me. I stab it with my thumb and a small bomb goes off behind my right ear as the twin-turbocharged 3.8-litre motor spits flame through its new and unsilenced titanium and Inconel exhausts. That said, the steering wheel breaks McLaren road car rule number one and comes slathered in buttons, not just to control the extant ‘push to pass’ and DRS systems carried over from the road car, but also the radio, flasher, pit lane speed limiter and engine starter button. Chief engineer Dan Parry-Williams says that for all the car’s science fiction performance, he wanted people still to be able to relate the GTR to their P1 road cars and be reassured by that. Imagine a stripped-out, powered-up, downforce-optimised P1 on slicks, because in the simplest terms, that is what the GTR is. Imagine, then, a tyre freed from such constraints with a need to last mere minutes at maximum attack. However good a job Pirelli did – and by all accounts it was superb – it still had to provide a tyre good enough to work in all weather conditions, for some thousands of miles over a lifespan certainly measurable in months and years. Goodwin describes the rubber on the road-going P1 as the car’s fuse, the weak link in its design, and you can see why. The increase in downforce is a significant help, but the night-and-day difference is the tyres. Given that McLaren chief test driver Chris Goodwin reckons the GTR is between five and 10 seconds a lap swifter than a P1 around Losail, that the Nordschleife lap is four times the length of Losail and that the P1 has already gone under seven minutes there, you don’t need a calculator to realise the genuinely terrifying potential within those pumped-up, drawn-down lines.īut the truth is that but a small fraction of that additional raw speed comes from the extra power and 50kg weight loss. You could take it to the Nürburgring, too. I don’t imagine too many will be turning up at a ‘run what you brung’ day at Mallory Park, but if they wanted to, they could. Like Ferrari, it will lay on events at key tracks all over the world, train its drivers in fitness and nutrition and provide one-to-one trackside tuition for those who want it.īut owners will also be able to take their cars home and do with them as they will. It offered P1 GTRs to existing P1 owners only and snapped shut the order book when an expected sales figure of a little over 30 units breached 40 cars. As business plans go, it must have seemed unlikely, but Ferrari went for it anyway.Īs has McLaren. As you will know, the P1 GTR is a car conceived to do much the same job as the Ferrari FXX and its descendants, and doubtless somewhere deep in the Woking lair, there are those who are grudgingly grateful to Maranello for proving the concept of the million-pound motor car that can neither race nor be used on the road.
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