McLaren Artura review

The interior seems familiar too. There’s a screen ahead of you with too-small spidery numerals and an enlarged centre touchscreen to your left, which I’d still prefer to have in landscape rather than portrait configuration. The nav is still poor, but there’s CarPlay and Android Auto as standard so you just use that. There’s no glovebox, but decent door bins, good cup holders and slim recesses perfect for holding a telephone in place make this a far more practical cabin. Why the volume dial has to be rotated anti-clockwise to increase the sound level of whatever you’re listening to completely defeats me, though.

It always starts in electric mode, which is good, and with the lane departure warning defaulted to off, which is better. As it retains hydraulic steering, there is no lane keep assist system at all, which is best. All round visibility is as impressive as we now expect from McLaren.

You ease away in silence and notice at once the ride and the steering. The former is stiffer than that of a 570S, said to be equivalent to a 600LT, but while it’s a little lumpy at very low speeds, it smooths out beautifully, still firm but never harsh. The latter is breathtakingly good, so good in fact you’re reminded instantly of what we’ve been missing thanks to the almost wholesale adoption of electrically assisted racks. The wheel writhes gently in your hands, a direct line into the road surface, involving you and helping inspire the confidence without which no supercar is worth driving. It is outstanding.

The powertrain – you can’t just say ‘engine’ any more – is absolutely monstrous. All by itself the 3-litre V6 has 577bhp, more than the 3.8-litre V8 in the 570S, to which the e-motor adds a further 94bhp despite weighing just 15.4kg, which is quite something when you think about it. The small 7.4kWh battery nevertheless adds a further 88kg, the entire hybrid system accounting for 130kg of weight. Even so the power-to-weight ratio is better with than without the hybrid whereas in McLaren’s first hybrid, the P1, the additional power was almost exactly offset by its increased weight. Which we call progress. Bear in mind also that this is just the starting point for this new McLaren powertrain and its output will be raised far beyond even these levels for future models.

There are four powertrain modes – Electric, Comfort, Sport and Track – and three for the chassis with the same names minus electric. Comfort will run the car up to around 40mph on electricity (over 80mph is possible in electric mode) when the charge level allows, while in Sport and Track the ICE is always on. A curious but not unpleasant quirk is that when the engine is stone cold and the car started in Comfort mode, it fires up to warm its catalysts, but does not drive the car, so for around 40 seconds you drive the car on electricity alone with no gearshifts, but with the disconnected engine growling away behind you. It didn’t trouble me at all.

Even without the combustion motor warming through, it sounds unlike any other EV I’ve driven. You are very aware of the sound of the e-motor, whose noise as you accelerate is not at all unlike that made by two pairs of Rolls-Royce RB211s winding up to take-off thrust, and I rather liked that too. I liked less trying to pull onto busy roundabouts in Comfort in a 94bhp McLaren. You can instruct the engine never to switch off, but only by telling it to charge the battery. There should be an ‘engine always on’ setting somewhere.

But enough of such idle chat. When the road clears and you let that twin-turbo, hybrid-boosted 120deg V6 do its thing, any notion that downsizing is a bad thing in this application quickly flees the mind. It’s not just that it is magnificently, knee-tremblingly rapid, which it is, but that the oft criticised lag of the old V8 simply doesn’t exist. In a 570S or 720S you have to wait until past 5000rpm before the powertrain will deliver maximum torque. The Artura? Just 2250rpm. Better than that, it uses the torque of the e-motor to fill the gap between your foot hitting the throttle and the ICE responding, so throttle response is near instantaneous too. I even like the noise, which is not beautiful, but certainly more tuneful than the flat-plane V8.

Complaints? I’d have programmed in a steeper torque curve because there’s insufficient sense of building urgency as the revs rise: it’s going like a mad man at 2500rpm and still is 4000rpm further around the dial. I’d prefer more of a crescendo, as if it were mimicking a highly stressed naturally aspirated engine. Ferrari does it with its turbo engines, and it works. And, ludicrous though it might sound, at times the gearbox is so good and simpatico with the hybrid system the gearshifts are utterly seamless, which is highly impressive, but in Sport mode I’d like just a little interruption – a small bang in the back – just for the sense of occasion.

It’s such a small, counter-intuitive niggle it might seem mean to mention it, but this is such an important car, it deserves a comprehensive examination. The car I drove also came with a £4200 sports exhaust, which is too loud and introduces a notable boom at 1800rpm on part throttle. McLaren is aware of it and I am assured that cars with standard pipes are unafflicted. I’d definitely save the money.

But I struggle to find even the most small-minded grumble to make about the chassis. With double wishbones at the front with an all new multi-link rear axle and, at last, an electronically controlled limited-slip differential, it combines the front end feel of a 600LT (not surprising, because that’s essentially what it has) with a level of traction and stability unknown to any previous series production McLaren. And that’s on the standard Pirelli P Zero tyre: there’s the option of a Corsa but unless you’re planning on doing extensive track work, the car absolutely does not need it. Grip is stupendous.

Talking of which, I must qualify my comments to say I have not yet driven the Artura on the track. Given the choice of being the first journalist in the world to drive the car and to do so on roads I’ve known for 30 years that will test it in ways you won’t find in Europe, or go to the official launch in Spain where I could drive it on the track, I opted for home advantage. So it might do terrible things when pushed past its limits, but somehow I doubt it.

How, then, to describe how it makes you feel when driven fast on a decent road? I think ‘at home’ covers it best. If you’re lucky your home is the only place in the world that is at once utterly familiar, where you can relax completely, yet still feels uniquely special. And that’s what the Artura does for you. No one else makes a better power steering system and, yes, I’ve driven the Emira. At times the deftness of the primary ride over my most difficult body control road made me laugh out loud. If I’ve felt more at ease driving a car of this potential at that level of effort on a public road, I cannot remember when it was or what I was in. And I would.

As by now you will have realised, the Artura is not a car without flaws. Actually the list of areas in which it could, and perhaps should have done better, is quite long. But that’s not what lives on in your mind a few hours after making its acquaintance. Indeed its failings are dwarfed by its abilities. It shows that even in this downsized, plugged-in, hybridised age, it is still possible to create a truly thrilling yet thoroughly modern supercar. It may have a small engine and be capable of being connected to the mains, but the Artura is a driver’s car right down to its Pirellis, and a proper McLaren to boot.

It feels a more complete car too, one that suggests strongly that McLaren Automotive has come of age. Having done this job for so long, I’m quite good at walking away from even expensive, exotic and exciting cars without much of a backward glance, but driving home in the Artura having burned the best part of a tank of fuel in the mountains, there was no part of me that was glad to leave it and move onto the next job.

I know the car is late and there will be plenty of potential customers who will want to wait to be sure it’s as satisfying to own as it is to drive, and I understand that completely. All I can do is tell you what the car I drove was like, on the roads and on the day that I drove it. And that, there and then, it was superb.

Photography by Rich Pearce