Towards the end of my time with the McLaren Artura Spider I drove it back to where it was born. Designed by Sir Norman Foster, the Surrey headquarters of McLaren’s Formula 1 and road car divisions interlocks with the lake that cools it, forming a vast yin-yang symbol. I was there to interview the new CEO Nick Collins as he marked 100 days in office. As a guest of the boss I had the rare privilege of driving the Artura all the way around the lake and parking directly outside the entrance, next to Collins’s all-black Land Rover Defender, a model he created in his previous job at Jaguar Land Rover.
I know which he’d rather have driven home in. “I’ve spent a lot of time in that car,” he said, motioning towards the Tanzanite blue Spider. “And I mean that exact car. Brilliant, isn’t it? I think it’s the best car we make.”
Clearly, reviews from the CEO lack independence and don’t count. And Collins was only comparing the Artura Spider to the other cars in his range. But he’s right. The more powerful, more expensive, more extreme McLaren 750S is sensational but requires more effort and concentration and compromise as a result, and the entry-level GTS hasn’t quite ignited the imagination of supercar buyers the way the other two have, despite the junior sibling often being the sweet-spot of a supercar maker’s range.
And it’s range that is central to the Artura Spider’s appeal. Not the range that EV drivers obsess over, but range as in bandwidth and breadth of ability. Here is a car which, on paper, ought to be terrifying. It claims to hit 60mph in three seconds dead but Car and Driver, a US magazine, independently tested a previous, lower-powered version of the fixed-roof Artura coupe at 2.6 seconds to 60mph, and 5.5 seconds to 100mph. That’s really, really fast: faster than is comfortable or than most mortal drivers can cope with. The 691bhp of this revised version comes from a supposedly downsized 597bhp 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged V6 engine aided by a 94bhp super-compact axial flux electric motor from British firm YASA, which pioneered this new technology and also supplies Ferrari and Lamborghini.
The e-motor can dump all its torque on the tarmac instantly, helping that mad acceleration time. But it can also power the Artura silently and tailpipe emissions free for up to 11 miles and at up to 81mph, which meant that I could leave home early for that meeting with Collins without waking the kids with the ignition bark of some supercars. Same with the chassis. The steering is quick, accurate and feelsome, and the tight body control allows you to deploy that power confidently on open roads or racetracks. But on highway commutes it morphs into an easy, supple ride that smooths imperfections away rather than amplifying them.
Two manettino-style rotary controlers on either side of the instrument binnacle allow you to switch the powertrain and chassis between comfort, sport and track modes independently, and encourage you do so with their perfect ergonomic placement: there’s no rooting around in touch-screen submenus here. Play with those combinations and you can make the Artura feel very different, but just right for the road you’re on. There’s also the option of ‘spinning wheel pull-away’ mode which allows you to trigger a rolling burnout: a surprisingly exuberant feature from the usually serious-minded McLaren.
Given the option, a fixed-roof coupe is usually seen as the choice of those who prioritise driving over posing and tanning. One of the joys of the open version of the Artura is that there is no discernable penalty for being able to retract the roof. The F1-style carbon tub around which the car is built doesn’t rely on the roof for stiffness, so it can be removed without detriment to the handling. Detail-obsessed McLaren hasn’t even altered the suspension settings for the Spider. There’s a 62kg (around 137 lbs) weight penalty for the mechanism which takes just 11 seconds to let the sunshine in, and if you can discern the difference you’re a better driver than me.
Criticisms? Very few. There’s a hole in the base of optional clubsport seats fitted to my car, down which keys frequently disappeared: using the pouch sewn into the leading edge of the seat for that purpose might become a habit if you owned one.
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More significantly, I wondered about the aural quality of that hybrid V6. The Artura’s recent revision gave it an extra 20bhp which it really didn’t need and is most apparent at the top end of the rev range, in terms of both noise and urge. But despite the modest capacity and cylinder count, the combustion and electric motors together provide so much grunt that you don’t need to be working them particularly hard to generate licence-losing speeds on public roads. The V6 does make a great noise: you just don’t get to hear it often enough. You can drop the wind baffle between the seats to hear it better, and the optional sports exhaust combines with the Bowers and Wilkins audio system to pipe it into the cabin, but still the one thing this astonishingly capable car is lacking is a properly electrifying soundtrack from its electrified drivetrain.
McLaren is about to get a major revision and expansion of its range, as Elite Traveler has previously reported. Its existing cars will be revised and it will expand into new sectors. Nick Collins is responsible for that transformation. But having spent a few of his first hundred days in the Artura Spider, he’ll know that not everything needs to change.