McLaren 570S Spider 2017 Review

There was a time when a convertible at this rarefied air meant either a 911 Turbo of some sort or a junior Ferrari, with some kind of Aston Martin hanging around noisily in the periphery.

Now it’s getting crowded. Audi goes au naturelle with its R8 Plus, but McLaren doesn’t.

Unusually, every major aspect of the winning 570S Coupe, launched 18 months or so ago to be the brand’s entry point, is transferred across in to the 570S Spider.

That means there’s not a trace of additional bracing beneath the body to keep it stiff in corners and over bumps and that means it’s probably the lightest step-change from a coupe to a convertible in recent memory.

No comprise
Going topless has cost the 570S just 46kg of additional mass, but that figure is even more significant than it seems.

It’s not just that the folding bits, storage engineering and powered systems that drive the 15-second electric roof are light, but they are light where it counts the most for a sports car. They are light way up high, at the roofline, obviously.

Sports car engineers love to keep the weight low, to help the cars handle better and corner with more enthusiasm. Folding roof systems normally lift a car’s entire roll centre, along with reducing the rigidity, and that’s what makes them less agile than their hard-hatted cousins.

Taking the roof off an Audi R8, for context, adds 228kg. Decapitating a Lamborghini Hurucan costs it 183kg, while doing the same thing to a 911 Turbo S adds 166kg.

That all means McLaren has managed to make its roof work on less than a third of the weight cost of the Porsche, around a quarter of the Hurucan’s roof weight and just 20 per cent of the Audi’s.

McLaren claims the coupe weighs 1313kg dry, while the Spider is just 1359kg, or 1486kg on the DIN scale, which adds all the fluids and 90 per cent of the fuel capacity.

As a car, it loses more or less nothing to the coupe. Well, almost nothing. It shares the same 328km/h top speed as the hard top, when it’s acting as a hard top. It runs to a lesser 315km/h when the roof is folded down.

The handling package is almost the same, in both structure and the way it feels, and so is the powertrain package. That means the Spider delivers McLaren’s unique blend of controllable lunacy all wrapped up in a bundle that can be, in different times, genteel, sophisticated and easy to handle.

It’s easy to handle largely because of the stiffness of the chassis, the unending communication from the hydraulic steering system and a chassis layout that throws back to anti-roll bars instead of the fancy interconnected hydraulic versions.

The body itself reverts, like the coupe, to aluminium instead of the carbon-fibre you get in the 720S and there’s none of the active aero tricks. This is the entry-level (Sports Series) McLaren, not the la-de-dah Super Series.

What’s in a name?
It’s dubbed the 570S because its M838TE engine delivers 570 English horses, or 419kW of power, and that’s enough to make it mighty fast indeed.

The Spider rips to 100km/h in the same 3.2 seconds as the Coupe, tears past 200km/h only 6.4 seconds later (a mere 10th of a second off the Coupe’s time) and runs a standing quarter-mile in 11 seconds flat. Whatever way you slice it, the 570S Spider is a very fast car.

For all its power and fury, the engine still gives McLaren a problem, though the muffled turbocharged exhaust note thing has become almost the norm in the class (apart from Lamborghini and Audi) because it was a muffled twin-turbo V8 living in a world of free-revving, sweet-spinning, intoxicatingly endearing naturally-aspirated engines.

Now, though, the world has come to McLaren, with Ferrari turbocharging its 488 family while the closest Porsche to the 570S has always been turbocharged.

McLaren has worked hard on the engine note of the 570S and it’s sort-of paid off. You’re never going to mistake it for a 488 GTB’s turbocharged engine note, though, much less an atmo R8 V10.

The expensive, optional sports exhaust makes it louder without making it remotely more charming and it sometimes feels as though the engine note is more impressive to people outside the car, rather than those writing cheques to sit in it.

A simple blast through a tunnel confirms that, and it’s so shockingly impressive that it forces you to reconfirm it five or 10 times through the same tunnel.

There’s nothing remotely harsh about it, but there’s never a trace of sweetness to it, either, and it doesn’t build timbre or character as its revs rise, but it does build noise.

Lots and lots of noise, and the topless variant of the 570S makes it even louder inside, especially if you lower the small glass window that sits between the two buttresses behind the head restraints.

The engine is so intuitively fast that you rarely need to push to the 7400rpm power peak or go anywhere near the 8500rpm redline. On the Catalunya roads, it was usually safer and no slower to short shift it back into the thicker parts of its 600Nm torque curve, between 5000 and 6500rpm.

It’s a hugely flexible motor, giving urge from as little as 2000rpm, and that makes it a playful companion in the real world. While it’s usually quiet at highway speeds, a constant-throttle setting can drone annoyingly in Sport mode and our car had a slight powertrain harmonic at 110km/h.

Razor-sharp
Charmless-but-impressive noise apart, though, there isn’t much you could think to do off the top of your head to improve the Spider’s driving experience.

That’s largely because the 570S Coupe is razor-sharp, yet rarely uncomfortable, and the Spider is almost astonishingly like its sibling. Even the springs and two-step dampers are the same, tweaked only to manage the weight increase and lifted centre of gravity.

It’s not just fast, either. It’s light-footed, stable and accurate, and one of its major points of difference to the core opponents (topless versions of the 911 Turbo, the R8 Plus and the Huracan) is that the McLaren only comes with rear-wheel drive.

Where its foes prefer the stability of driving all four wheels, McLaren entrusts the power deliver to 285/35 R20 Pirelli P Zero Corsas and the 225/35 R19 front tyres are largely responsible for turning and braking, not driving, too.

Grippy as they are, the Corsas might not be the best option for anybody on a lumpier road or one awash with sharp undulations.

At speed, we found they lead to the nose being tugged around uncomfortably and sometimes suddenly, but only on the worst roads on one 3km stretch of the 300km-plus drive program. The gentler P Zeros, as fitted to the 570 GT, would work better in that narrow window of uncertainty.

On smoother roads, though, the Spider is untouchable in its class. It’s blisteringly fast, adept at either flowing its way through corners thanks to its high static grip levels or being tossed in brutally. Or, indeed, everything in between.

McLaren separates the handling and powertrain functions into different three-stage buttons and we found the Sport handling and Track powertrain settings to be the gun layout, especially with the manual shift function for the seven-speed dual clutch transmission.

(Quirkily, if you snap too hard at an upshift, the paddle can bounce back so hard that the car actually registers a downshift, so it gives you one. For a car company so obsessed with detail, it’s an almost-comical oversight.)

The key is the front-end, which delivers an uninterrupted stream of information you never even realised you’d been missing, yet it takes a phenomenally rough road to make it even remotely over-chatty.

You won’t find a better front-end in the entire supercar world, to the point where holding the perfectly-sized steering wheel, unhindered by parasitic buttons, is like running your hand along the road 50 metres ahead of the car. You know what it’s going to do a long time before it does it.

For how hard the car turns into corners, the rear-end remains incredibly planted and the body control is exquisite. It’s a rare treat to drive a car that feels as happy loaded up as it does moving its damper relentlessly.

Most car suspensions, even in some supercars, feel like they’re in a race to move from one state back to their static positions, but the McLaren revels in the work like it never wants corners to end.

It doesn’t matter whether they are short, tight corners, long sweepers or undulating apexes, it’s a car that just enjoys the energy being shoved through the damper shafts.

Even switching off its skid-control systems doesn’t pierce the bubble of handling brilliance, instead enhancing it with wonderful progression to every breakaway.

Not all roses
But for all that, it’s imperfect at the job it has been sent to do. As a convertible, it’s just too noisy and has too much buffeting inside the cabin.

In part, that’s because it gathers speed so stupidly quickly that the wind noise gets loud before you think it ought to, but it’s mostly because the wind noise actually does get loud before you think it ought to.

It’s lovely and quiet with its roof up, remaining true to the Coupe’s ideas about sliding through the air, but the issues begin when the roof comes down in 19 seconds at the touch of a console button.

You can talk at 110km/h and you can easily talk at city speeds. You can talk, too, at 140km/h, but nobody else in the car is likely to hear you, not without strain.

The glass window behind the car seems to push the air lower, towards the back of your elbow, rather than actually swirl it away from the cabin, while the most effective wind blockers are the side windows.

Another advantage is that, with the roof up, its unemployed hidey-hole can be used as an extra 52-litre storage area (handy, when the nose only takes 150 litres), while the car even boasts two cup-holders.

There are other doses of weird that don’t quite work. The seat controls are endlessly frustrating, forcing the driver to wedge his/her fingers down between the console and the seat to change any angle. Pity, because the driving position is perfect.

The infotainment system isn’t industry leading and it’s slow to change from what it’s doing to what you asked for seconds ago, while the matt infotainment screen still suffers from sun glare.

But it’s the easiest supercar, probably, for a remotely skilled driver to leap up to 8/10ths in and it won’t bite if you go charging towards 10 or even 11.

It’s comfortable, it’s brutally fast and now, at low-speed cruising at least, it’s a brilliant topless wonder.

2018 McLaren 570S Spider pricing and specifications:
Price: TBC
Engine: 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8
Output: 419kW/600Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch
Fuel: 10.7L/100km
CO2: 249g/km
Safety rating: TBC