The death of the hypercar?

Now, it is true Ti didn’t exist just over a decade ago when these cars’ predecessors, the P1 and LaFerrari, made their way onto the world stage, so I can’t do a compare and contrast, but nor do I really need to. Because I remember the shock and awe that went with them, the sound of jaws falling onto floors at the motor shows where they were first shown, the undignified scramble among my colleagues to be first to drive them and the admiration and green-eyed envy we felt for Chris Harris who was first to put ‘the holy trinity’ on a race track together (including the Porsche 918 Spyder). I even went out and bought an entire other Porsche just so I could drive the 918, but that’s another story.

Yet out there in the Ti community and in here in the car hack bubble, I just don’t get the same vibe with these cars. Nor anything close. And neither P1 nor LaFerrari had 1000bhp. But they did break new ground. Their successors do not. EV hypercars are far more powerful, and I’d be surprised if either could get around a track faster than the Aston Martin Valkyrie, a car announced seven years ago. For all their bamboozling outputs, they don’t appear to be expanding the envelope of road car ability in any direction, and that’s even before you’ve considered whether that is any more even a desirable outcome.

Today I see four-figure power outputs in almost entirely negative terms, largely because of the almost inevitable weight penalty that comes with them. You might be interested to know that the Veyron, for all its immense output, had an inferior power-to-weight ratio to the McLaren F1 with less than two thirds of its power. And while I admire those like McLaren which strain every sinew to minimise the acquisition of avoirdupois, big power requires a big powertrain, which then needs big brakes, heavy duty suspension and, increasingly, the addition of even more trick bits to help keep it under control.

I refer here to the next inevitable stage of ‘hypercar’ development. If power is deemed – let it please the heavens – to have reached its practical peak then some new avenue of enquiry must replace it. And this is downforce. Both the Ferrari and McLaren come to market claiming to have a tonne of the stuff. Literally. And in a street car that is almost entirely pointless. On the road you won’t even feel it, other than perhaps through a seriously degraded ride quality because springs capable of supporting such enormous loads have had to be fitted, though there are clever ways of circumventing that.

On the circuit, yes, if you are a gutsy, quick and experienced track driver you’ll be amazed by how quickly such a car can be hustled through a fast corner, but you’ll spend far more time in slow corners where the grip level on even the most serious of road-legal track day tyres will feel pathetic by comparison. The car I recall that most clearly illustrated this point was the McLaren Senna which felt like a caged lion on Pirelli Trofeo R rubber. Only when I drove the track-only GTR on slicks did it fulfil its enormous but hitherto unrealised promise. It felt like a car released from its shackles, because that’s exactly what it was.

It never used to be like this. People will argue over the definition of ‘hypercar’ and which was the first in the same way they’ve argued for decades about the word ‘supercar’, but for me it’s actually quite easy. Forty years ago Ferrari produced a new GTO, latterly dubbed ‘288 GTO’, a limited edition car, unrelated to any other in the range despite appearances, with power and performance beyond that of any road car it had produced up until that time.

We didn’t call it a hypercar because that hateful term didn’t exist back then, but when you look at it today, that’s clearly what it was and, esoterica aside (remember Jerry Wiegert’s Vector?) it was the first and we won’t let the inconvenient truth that it wasn’t very good delay us here. Porsche replied with the 959, Ferrari with the F40, then came the others from Bugatti, Jaguar, McLaren and within a seven-year period an entire new category of car was up and running.

But back then these cars broke ground in a way they simply don’t any more. The F40 was the first road car that really would do 200mph, the Jaguar XJ220 had a higher top speed than anything that had been seen before and the McLaren F1? Well I’ve gone on record before to say nothing I have driven has ever broadened further the abilities of what a car entitled to wear a number plate could do.

But that was all 30 years ago and more. And the point then was that this was ground worth breaking because we were still – just – within the realm of what could actually be used by most drivers at least some of the time. And we had not yet progressed to a world where the most accessible and therefore most likely to be used aspect of a hypercar’s performance had become actively unpleasant to experience. Show me someone who says they actually enjoy accelerating from rest to 60mph in two and a bit seconds in a road car (which, as I’ve said before, places the same strain on your body as doing a full bore emergency stop, but in reverse) and I’ll show you someone either whose inner ear isn’t working properly or, more likely, someone talking out their hat.

McLaren says every one of its 399 W1s has already been allocated, sale agreed, and I understand Ferrari has already shifted all 799 F80s – a massive production run for this kind of car – despite a £3m price tag, but I still think the time has come to hit the reset button with these cars, because by the time the next cycle comes around in another 10 to a dozen years’ time, where are they to go? The Mercedes-AMG One has already lapped the Nürburgring in a time that would have qualified it in third place for the last 1000km race held on the Nordschleife in 1983, with just two works Rothmans Porsche 956s with full ground effect bodywork and massive slick tyres driven by Stefan Bellof and Jacky Ickx ahead of it.

It’s why I think Gordon Murray has got it right with the GMA T.50 and, indeed, got it right with McLaren F1 before that. Yes, the F1 did things no other car had done before, but that was merely a corollary of what it set out to do, namely to be the most enjoyable driver’s car ever created, because back then there was still useful progress to be made in areas such as acceleration and grip. But really its performance was a byproduct of his at times obsessive drive for lightness, not power. Remember the F1 engine only had 85bhp more than that of a Jaguar XJ220, but the car itself was probably 300kg lighter than a car which was itself far lighter than today’s Ferrari F80. The result was a level of deployable performance beyond the imaginings of the already blisteringly fast Jag.

And that is what I’d like the next Ferrari and McLaren hypercars to be: less powerful, smaller and far, far lighter with jewel-like naturally aspirated V12 engines, manual gearboxes, triple digit kerb weights and enough downforce to keep them stable, and not one kilo more. They’ll probably be slower than those of today, but they’ll come at a time by which everyone will have finally realised there is no commodity more overrated than performance that can’t be used most of the time and which is entirely hateful on those rare occasions it can.

But for such cars to even be a possibility in that timeframe requires a change of heart and law in legislatures around the world and the rapid development of the sustainable fuels upon which they’ll have to run. Otherwise we’ll be looking at EV hypercars, a breed of machine which, if the rumours of sales of those that already exist are even close to being true, even the likes of Ferrari would likely find very hard to shift.

Does this foretell the death of the hypercar, half a century after its birth? I doubt it because I have limitless confidence in mankind’s ability to innovate its way out of undesirable situations, but something’s got to give. As Frank-Steffen Walliser, the man until recently in charge of all Porsche road car development and now occupying the top seat at Bentley said to me, ‘the goal is not EV, but zero emissions’. For those who want to see a new generation of superlight, ultra-involving hypercars – to my mind the only kind with a viable future – the campaign starts here. Let’s hope others see it the same way too.