It might seem impolite to question the sanity of someone who has just handed you the keys to their $5m hyper car and invited you to see if you can hit 300km/h on a race track they have generously hired for the occasion, but sometimes words - prompted by entirely rational fears - just leap out of you.
The McLaren W1 is first and foremost a masterclass in aerodynamics and physics. Ferrari, the only company that makes a vehicle that comes anywhere close to the wild W1, has stated that it is impossible, or irresponsible, to give a car anything more than 1,000 horsepower without making it all-wheel drive (its fierce F80, launched last year, has 1,184 horsepower - an F1 car is limited to 1,000).
McLaren, however, thought it would be more fun, more pure, and perhaps better bragging rights to send all of the W1’s 1,250 horses (that’s 938kW, in case you’re wondering) to the rear wheels alone, and sanity be damned.
Before I agreed to be shoved into the W1, I had to know - why? The answers were varied, and unconvincing in parts, but apparently not sending motive force to the front wheels with electric motors, as Ferrari and others do, meant the car would be lighter, and could be fitted with traditional, and excellent, hydraulic steering.
I still thought they were mad, and that I might die, but hey, I’d flown all the way to Italy, one of only 13 journalists in the world invited to the launch of this all-conquering McLaren, so it seemed churlish to back out.
So, what’s the story behind the McLaren W1?
McLaren pretty much invented the whole hyper car thing with the original, and legendary, McLaren F1 - you know the one; driver’s seat in the middle of the car, gold plated engine bay, still the fastest naturally aspirated car in history (it hit 386km/h back in 1998).
Since then, it has had just one more go, the crazy McLaren P1 mega hybrid, which Jeremy Clarkson drove and described as “The Widow Maker”.
The W1, then, is the third instalment in what you might call the Large Testicles Trilogy.
Who’s the buyer?
The W1 takes so much technology from McLaren’s F1 cars that it might just be the perfect fantasy machine for someone who’s obsessed with Drive to Survive, and has too much money.
Only 399 will be made, ever, and “a handful” will be coming to Australia. I have it on good authority that some of those will never be driven and will be hidden away and kept as investments, which made me very sad.
First impressions?
Well, the spec sheet scared me quite a bit before I’d even left Australia, because the numbers are simply bonkers - zero to 200km/h in 5.8 seconds? That’s how long it took the original and lovely Ferrari Testarossa to hit 100km/h.
It can also, as I can attest, hit 300km/h with ease, or from a standing start in “less than 12.7 seconds”. It has more power than three Porsche 911s strapped together.
Then there is the look of the McLaren W1, which his best described as “showing off’. The doors might look like butterflied bat wings, but they’re called “anhedral doors”, and they had to be like that so they could keep the passenger cell narrow (putting the hinges up top saved space), but it’s also quite likely they’re like that to add a sense of theatre.
Everything about the exterior screams function over form - it’s more about radical aerodynamics than beauty, and yet it still looks bloody good anyway. The interior is also quite lovely, and unexpectedly posh. It even has a proper stereo, although you’d never hear it over the burping, barking bellows of the engine.
And the seats aren’t really seats, they’re bits of padding stuck to the carbon fibre tub, so you can’t adjust them - you pull or push the pedal box and steering wheel to where you want them instead. Classy. Racy.
Give us the top line on performance and efficiency. What’s it like todrive?
Sorry, efficiency? Is “who cares” an answer?
It’s hard to define the performance of the McLaren W1 as anything other than punishing, but it might be more succinct to say that this is, quite simply, the most insanely intense, impressive car I've ever driven, and, by some margin, the fastest.
It seems a almost incomprehensible that you can legally drive a McLaren W1 on public roads, and sure enough it’s actually set up so that you can’t use its more obscene Race settings unless you are actually at a track - the car’s GPS knows where you are and simply won’t let you deploy them.
In the real world, you have access to Comfort and Sport settings and it’s actually nowhere near as back-breakingly firm as you might expect on the road, where the aero provides an impressive 200kg of downforce to keep you stuck to the ground, which is way below the 1000kg you get in Race mode, when the hydraulic Long Tail deploys to actually change the shape of the car (it also lowers its front skirts and its whole body, providing ground-effect trickiness).
It is, however, absurdly fast and other cars seem to throw themselves at you, as do corners. But the way it turns in, the steering, the sheer joy of it, I can see that you could enjoy it in day-to-day driving, as long as you were careful with your right foot.
On the track, however, with all of the settings turned to Go On, I Dare You, it is a visceral experience and everything you might think a car with 938kW sent to the rear wheels would be. It is scary, but thrilling. It is unique, and it somehow gets all that power to the ground without feeling like a hairy-handed handful.
It is, in fact, nothing short of miraculous, and hugely memorable. I will certainly never forget it, nor the feeling of exceeding 300km/h, over and over again.
Oh, and fortunately the brakes are also epic.
And the lowdown on safety?
Is anything this fast safe? I’m sure it has airbags, I’m glad I didn’t find out.
One thing you should know before a test drive?
Good luck, they’re already sold.
And what’s the price?
“More than you car afford, pal”.
Officially, the price is £2m, which is $3.8 million Aussie, but buyers have typically spent an extra $1.1m per car on personal touches - so don’t expect much change out of AUD$5m
