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Our Cars: McLaren Artura
2 years ago
McLaren took Frankel's Artura and left him with a 750S for a week
In the meantime and for the week the Artura was away, it was my lucky lot to get to live with the 750S as my daily.
And I have to say that it at once felt a lot more senior which was both good and bad. So used am I for the Artura to wake up and move away in absolute silence (it defaults to electric mode) that I was a little startled by the raw and rude blast of the 740bhp V8 as it fired up. Now that it has close to the same cabin as the Artura and the same non-revolving instrument pack, the differences inside weren’t that great, but once I got going, I was properly surprised.
I knew from the maths it was going to be quicker: a 1389kg kerbweight and a 740bhp motor gives a staggering power to weight ratio of 533bhp per tonne – about the same as a Bugatti Veyron if you’d like that put in perspective. Weighing 1495kg and producing 670bhp, the Artura manages just 448bhp per tonne, though that’s still in a different postcode to anything any Porsche 911 Turbo S can manage and about the same as a Ferrari 488 GTB. So not exactly a sluggard then. But still: the 750S was going to feel considerably quicker.
"By the time I’d driven the 750S to North Wales, spent two days with it locked in mortal combat with a Ferrari and driven it home again, I was quite looking forward to the return of the Artura. Soft-bottomed, middle-aged bloke than I am, I’d almost had enough of the 750S and its no-prisoners approach to absolutely everything"
Except it didn’t: it felt wildly faster, an entire category of performance faster, far faster, even, than the raw arithmetic ever suggested. I was slightly crestfallen. Dan had mentioned to me that the Artura, for all its strengths, didn’t have quite the runaway train performance he’d been expecting and I knew what he meant. I know McLaren well enough to know they’d never fiddle their figures, but I know what I felt and there was no ready explanation for it.
But actually, by the time I’d driven the 750S to North Wales, spent two days with it locked in mortal combat with a Ferrari and driven it home again, I was quite looking forward to the return of the Artura. Soft-bottomed, middle-aged bloke than I am, I’d almost had enough of the 750S and its no-prisoners approach to absolutely everything.
So back we swapped, the Artura returning to me not only cupboard dry, but wearing a brand new set of boots. Actually swapping the Pirelli Sotto Zeros for standard P Zeros at this time of year was always part of the plan and I looked forward to discovering what they did for the car. In the meantime I appreciated at once how much better was the Artura’s ride, how much quieter was its cabin at all speeds and how much better was the sound of its 3-litre V6 motor than the 4-litre V8 of its big brother. To drive I’d have the 750S every time, but to live with? Actually I’d have the Artura, which is just as well, as the 750S is far more likely to end up in a collection of many cars to be used as a purely recreational device, while the Artura is the most user-friendly, daily driver-suitable McLaren made to date.
“I had a theory. The car knew it was on winter tyres because its top speed is limited to 120mph while so shod. Very sensible. So I called McLaren and proudly presented my line of thinking. To which the technical department replied ‘cobblers’”
All of which I could have guessed. What I could not have foreseen is that its straight line performance had been transformed too. I had asked if the 20bhp power upgrade that comes with the 2025 model year (and which will be retrofitted free of charge to older Artura) could be made available to this car a little early but I was told that it was sadly not possible. But it was so much faster that clearly something had changed, and all I had to point to were those tyres.
And I had a theory. The car knew it was on winter tyres because its top speed is limited to 120mph while so shod. Very sensible. Even if it didn’t, I knew the sensors in the Pirellis telling the car their pressure and temperature would let it know what kind of rubber it was wearing. It therefore followed that if the car restricted its top speed on winters, would it not also mete out the torque more carefully to make sure you didn’t come unstuck? It made sense to me, so I called McLaren and proudly presented my line of thinking. To which the technical department replied ‘cobblers’. It was all rubbish: limited top speed aside, the powertrain software does not differentiate between summer and winter tyres in any way.
Which can only mean one thing: even the Artura is so damn fast that with the reduced grip of the winter tyres and the usually wet roads on which it has been driven, longitudinal grip has been so limited that the car’s performance had been perpetually held back by the traction control at all speeds I cared to go in such conditions. But now, on summer rubber and finally dry roads, the car feels like it has another hundred horsepower or, put another way, the same amount of horsepower that’s always been claimed for it. So it still lacks that 750S maniacal thrust right at the very top but as I’ve said before, that’s actually of very limited use unless you’re on a race track. What matters is that even the Artura is now comfortably faster than any sane person would ever want a road car to go on a public road.
The other benefits brought by the new rubber are more predictable: there’s more grip and a more neutral attitude when it starts to be relinquished, better feel to the already sublime steering and, most noticeable of all, a much sharper bite into the apex of the corner. Seriously, this tyre is now so good, you should never even think about going for something more extreme like a P Zero Corsa unless you were planning serious track work. Which, thankfully, I am not.
Photography by Olgun Kordal
