Gallery: Europe in a 207mph McLaren 12C

You’ll have heard about the 70-odd miles between Digne-les-Bains and Grasse, towards the southeast corner of France. It’s a fantasy of a road, a near-ceaseless battery of corners and snakiness, the tarmac wide and blissfully empty, rising and plunging through giant folds of mountainous vista that make your eyes widen and your heart sing. It’s part of what’s called the Route Napoléon, because he came back that way from Elba.

Words: Paul Horrell

Pictures: Lee Brimble

This article first appeared in the March 2013 edition of Top Gear magazine 

Never mind him, history fans, enjoy 8,500rpm and 625bhp in the McLaren V8. A couple of seconds ago, coming through a second-gear 90-degree left doing only about 4,000rpm, the turbos were already spooled up and tipping me back in the seat with the torque. The road is sun- dried but February-cold, wearing a thin coat of slightly greasy salt against the impending snow flurries, and the rear tyres soon break through its possibilities of traction in the bend. Sure, the surprisingly supple suspension ekes out the very most of it, but a little stabilising intervention from the electronics chips in. Then the road goes straight, the tyres get purchase and the big, red needle swings past the vertical, the point at 6,000-odd where it becomes a new kind of engine – far faster and louder, grasping greedily towards 8,500 and wired with a narcotic jolt of hysterical, caffeinated edginess.

An edginess it lacked when the MP4-12C was first released, but this new version, the result of McLaren’s Formula One attitude to continuous improvement, is blessed with an extra 25bhp that you hardly feel because there were so many horses before, and a better noise and cleaner responses that you absolutely do feel.

The landscape, emptied by the winter’s chill of colour and free from humanity, is rent asunder by this blazing streak of orangeness and roaring noise, a sudden firework that’s gone almost before it came. But there are long-term resonances, because this road (and others like it all across the continent) is one of the reasons why, in an issue of Top Gear devoted to the seven continents, only Europe could be the continent of the supercar. Manufacturers here defined the genre.

Of course, Europe isn’t the only continent with twisting hill roads, but Europe’s mountains form natural barriers to commerce between great countries and ancient population centres, so Europeans have been maintaining those roads since well before the era of motor travel. When the supercar came along, it had to be able to make sense of the corners.

That chimed with European motorsport venues too. Nowhere else had the road races, or had built so many circuits to simulate roads with corners. What we simply call circuits, Americans call street circuits so as to distinguish them from the ovals or drag strips that make up so much of their motorsport. So if supercars have to pay homage to motorsport, then for Europe that means an ability to negotiate corners at a pace.

Not just the pace, but the feel. It means handling, not just grip, and braking, not just acceleration. Most of all, it’s about conveying the subtleties of motion to the driver, through precision and connection in the steering, brakes and transmission. These are things that, even though paradoxically you can’t actually measure them, truly are the measure of a great car for driving. A supercar has to oblige.

Pouring the McLaren into another of these bends, one that throws a challenge by tightening part-way round, shows how it does. The suspension is quite soft – that’s how it rides so well at low speeds, and how when you floor the throttle you get a rather exciting confirmation of the thrust by feeling the nose breathe upwards a little. But softness doesn’t mean roll, because there’s active chassis trickery to quell that. So you get proportionate answers to any motions of your hands on the wheel. And if there’s a little understeer at the point the bend tightens, well, you’re told of it through the wheel, but you need lift the throttle only a fraction because at the same time the car drags a brake on the inside rear tyre to cancel out the pushing outer-front tyre, and it’s pivoted round again on the huge steady-state lateral grip, and then engages the turbos for another catapulting departure.

It’s not perfect, by the way: the steering could be sharper in its very smallest motions, as the Ferrari 458’s is. And sometimes the dampers get out of phase with this road and set up a repeated, vertical hop. But the Ferrari has a different way of getting upset by similar bumps, and I still suspect the McLaren is the faster and more secure through this sort of territory.

But after mile upon mile of this progress, bodily muscles humming from the lateral and longitudinal forces, ears singing, synapses tingling, the McLaren swings onto the autoroute, and starts to do something supercars have always been surprisingly adept at. Just sitting there, rock-solid, spitting out in steady rhythm the lane-marking blips for hundreds of miles at a time. Actually, the McLaren is better than any other, because its driving position and ride and refinement are so good.

Yes, fast European motorways were part of the supercar story too. The autobahn, obviously – facilitator of unlimited speed since 1932 – but the French and Italian systems also predate the US Interstate network, and all have always been home to faster-moving cars than the Interstates. The idea of a rapid transcontinental trip has always been most significant in Europe, as exemplified by the band of tally-ho automobilists racing the Blue Train from Calais to the Riviera, back in the Twenties and Thirties. The romance of that sort of ground-covering is one of the reasons Europeans love fast cars at full throttle. The great American road trip is a far more leisurely thing altogether. And, actually, most Americans have long favoured aeroplanes over cars.

So when the modern supercar appeared in the late Sixties, the infrastructural enabler was already in place. Those long, fast, unencumbered continental motorways lay before the Miura and Daytona like a glistening blade into the future. They, in turn, were the perfect cars for the job. They might have had crap visibility and been reluctant to start in the morning, but there was nothing they liked more than arrowing towards the far horizon, their 12 pistons panting for joy.

Mountain roads, motorways, race tracks: to an engineer’s mind, these are the reasons the supercar took root and flowered in Europe. But they’re not the whole story. It’s been shaped by social and cultural matters too. A supercar isn’t necessarily the fastest mode from A to B along an autostrada or over the mountains, nor yet from A to A to A again round a race track. The Chevy Corvette and the Nissan GT-R and the Subaru Impreza are more than fine by those measures.

No, supercars live or die by other factors. A cultural flamboyance, for a start – it’s no coincidence that they come from the countries of Verdi and Wagner and Led Zeppelin. Beyond that, a set of social ideals you might not actually like very much: elitism, snobbishness, a sense of entitlement that rather resembles some remnant of old Europe’s class system.

An example. When the Audi R8 came along, I figured it was a valid entry into the lower stratum of the supercars. It has the looks, the performance, the handling, the engine, the drama. But I found myself in heated argument with a friend, who posited that it’s not a valid supercar at all. Now, intellectually, he’s a man of impeccably egalitarian views, but, temperamentally, he can’t quite shake off the notion that if you’re born with a certain something – blue blood, looks, charm – then you’re entitled to be carried through life on the shoulders of others. With cars as with people, in his world view. Because Audi isn’t a member of the supercar aristocracy, then the R8 somehow has no right to be called one. (Obviously he’d forgotten about Auto Union, but that’s beside he point.) As far as he’s concerned, there is no automotive social mobility – nor need there be.

His view, which is quite widespread, means even if Ferrari or Aston Martin or Lamborghini churn out a clunker – and, oh my, have they, in the shape of the Virage-era Vantage, the Testarossa and the early Diablo – those cars are nevertheless welcomed into the world like they’re the first in line to an earldom. On the other hand, manufacturers new to the supercar game find their perfectly excellent machinery sneered at as somehow arriviste. Ferrari especially, but Lamborghini and the other European grandees too, protect their territory these days not just by building their most wonderful cars to date, but by deploying some of the most calculatedly ferocious brand-building in any field of commerce in any part of the world.

I’m convinced this had something to do with the MP4-12C’s slightly muted reception. There were other reasons, too: the car’s engine wasn’t quite as viscerally edgy as expected, although, gosh – it is now, as today’s magical drive proves. And also the design isn’t as theatrical as the Latins’. But, beyond that, the world didn’t quite go wild for the McLaren because of the old snob-factor. McLaren didn’t have the unbroken supercar history of Ferrari, and even its race success was seen as somehow drab and calculating compared with the image of passion and drama that’s integral to the way the red squad carefully position themselves.

Anyway, this remains mostly a European freehold. America’s deep-seated pragmatism means it isn’t really interested in making supercars. The way they see it, if the new Corvette Stingray can deliver so much for £40k-odd, why pay more? It’s no coincidence the phrase ‘bang for your buck’ is denominated in US currency. This is a country built on migration, where social mobility is a touchstone, and that’s reflected in their attitude to carmakers: the first Viper came from a manufacturer with no relevant genes, but still it was welcomed as a superhero. And if its engine hadn’t been large and mounted in the front, then it would have been castigated as subversively un-American.

And Japan? It has an ancient imperial past, but, from the post-war years to the Eighties, it was a nation of extraordinary cohesion. That put haughty and exclusive supercars off the common agenda. As the country developed its technological leadership in the Eighties, though, eventually a few companies figured they’d bring the might of their boffinry to bear on a candidacy for the supercar club. So were born the NSX and the GT-R and now the LFA. But they came up against the usual snobbery. People said they were too digital, not soulful enough. It was actually just a way of saying they were merely a Honda and a Nissan and a Lexus, so they had no right to be there.

Strangely, the Honda NSX and today’s McLaren got hit with the same insults: engine too small, steering too benign, a general sense that being so accessible and usable precluded sufficient drama. It’s surely no coincidence that when it built the NSX, Honda was McLaren’s F1 engine partner. Porsche was deemed admissible to the club, though: no one ever called the 959 soulless, even though it was the most po-faced technofest ever to issue from the loins of supercardom.

A supercar isn’t about speed, lap times, power or efficiency or anything else that technicians with computers and gauges can catalogue. And heritage is necessary, yet insufficient. A supercar is about being an event.

Why did Bugatti choose 16 cylinders? Why did Gandini put that strange rear wheelarch cut-out onto the Countach? Why did a Ferrari 360 Modena have the most neck-prickling throttle-sensitive exhaust noises ever? Why all those portholes in a Zonda’s cabin? All those slats on a Testarossa? The casual craziness of a Diablo’s proportions, and the calculated craziness of an Aventador’s surfaces? The makers of those cars did those things because they knew they could. None added much to the cars’ actual abilities, but they were a profound augmentation of the drama. The parameters that say that entertainment by shock is absolutely intrinsic to supercars.

McLaren gives you drama too. Look, I just stomped on the brakes. If dustbin-lid discs weren’t enough, I glance in the mirror, and it’s gone orange. An airbrake! How very overblown: I was only doing... well, never mind what speed I was doing, but, you know, it’s single-carriageway speed. Sure the air-flap helps a bit by raising drag and moving downforce onto the rear tyres, but until you’re at autobahn speeds, its principal contribution is theatrical, and, like the orange paint and the exhaust noise and the scissor doors and the carbon-fibre bonnet badge, it’s about taking some small functional advantage and leveraging a whole lot of extra drama out of it.

Even when barely moving, supercars are like a Batcape that makes their drivers feel a hero and bystanders grateful. Their aura illuminates the roads they travel. Men of great wealth and feeble self-confidence (for they are mostly men) tend to believe that driving a supercar will make them the star of the show. It won’t, because everyone looks at the car and no one at the driver.

We take the McLaren to Monte Carlo too, because it’s dense with supercars. Is it the race circuit that attracts them? Of course not: have you seen the traffic jams? This place has a pretty high concentration of the feeble-egoed wealthy. I’ve never been anywhere where you are more openly and mercilessly judged by the price of your possessions. Among the tinselly opulence of high-end luxury-goods shops clustering around the Casino, the McLaren manages to fit in well enough, but it does manage to stop short of vulgarity. The best supercars do. They might be outlandish, but they aren’t flashy or trashy.

European toffs recognise it: in a Monte Carlo square, an old- money Italian gent sidles up to say, “Bella macchina!” Actually, rich or poor, old Italian gents are always up for a chat if you’re in a supercar. “Better looking than a Ferrari,” he opines. “Normally, you only see cars like that on Top Gear.” Well, he won’t be seeing this particular one for long. Life offers nothing finer than what we have ahead of us: the emptier parts of Europe’s road network, a supercar and a full tank of petrol.