2014 McLaren 650S driven

Nick Gibbs tries the new McLaren 650S, a faster, better equipped and better looking version of the already phenomenal 12C supercar

There’s never been a facelift quite like the McLaren 650S. For one thing, the new car costs almost £20,000 more than the model it updates, a whopping 11 percent increase. And you can still buy the old one, if you really want. So how does McLaren justify the price hike? And is it worth it?

The freshman British supercar company is confident the 650S is exactly what new customers of the car formerly known as 12C are looking for. Boss Mike Flewitt told us the 12C has only been kept on for markets like Singapore, where the price hike is tripled by import duties, and that he’s ready to shut down production in a few months’ time if no-one orders one. Since the 650S Coupe and Spider (named for their output in PS) were first shown at Geneva early March, no one has.

The lure is partly that new face, which is taken from McLaren’s highly acclaimed P1 hybrid hypercar. That at once addresses complaints the 12C’s front-end styling wasn’t arresting enough for a supercar. In fact, the Woking engineers and designers have cast more than a sprinkling of the P1’s magic carbon dust on to the 650S Coupe and Spyder, also applying lessons learned to the car’s 3.8-litre twin-turbo engine, now boosted by 25bhp to 641bhp, as well as the clever active dampers.

Taking its cues from 12C customers, who spent on average about £23,000 on options, McLaren has also included certain extras as standard, including carbon ceramic brakes in place of steel jobs, and the satellite-navigation system. Put like that, the increase to £195,250 (£215,250 for the open-topped Spider) doesn’t seem so brazen.

The new car is lighter by 6kg at 1,330kg and you can drop that to 1,301kg if you spec items such as the excellent P1-based carbon fibre bucket seats that wipe off 15kg alone. In spite of this McLaren is at pains to say the 207mph car isn’t a stripped-out track tool in the vein of the Speciale version of Ferrari’s rival 458.

Instead, the car we’re about to drive is “the world’s ultimate luxury sports car”. A car with such a vast breadth of talent it’s as happy rat-running through potholed side streets at the end of a working day as it is nailing Cadwell Park’s notorious Gooseneck corkscrew corner. That’s the pitch anyway. We had the sunnier, but no less broken-up mountain roads of Andalucia in Spain as well as its fiendishly tricky Ascari private track on which to find out.

First, performance. Holy moly is this car fast. The 12C was ballistic enough but hardware changes to the mid-mounted V8 engine such as new pistons and cylinder heads increases not just power but also the torque from 443lb ft to 500lb ft to give it the wallop of Thor’s own hammer right up to the 8,000rpm redline.

The 0-62mph time is bang on 3.0 seconds, down a tenth, and every split-second gearchange from the paddle-controlled seven-speed twin-clutch gearbox is punctuated by a thunderclap followed by a sonorous in-rush of air to the engine forced through by the turbochargers. And when you come off the power, there’s an evocative sigh as the turbos vent unwanted pressure.

McLaren said it has fine tuned rather than reworked the sound, criticized by some as too gentlemanly compared with the raspier 458, but no owner will complain, especially in the coupe where the noise is better directed into the cabin than roof-up in the Spider. And in automatic in seventh gear on the motorway, if all fades to a civilized thrum, just as you’d want.

If the engine is close on perfect then the ride and handling is more than a match. Since the 12C came out in 2011 McLaren has been working with its Japanese damper supplier on the P1 and the combined wisdom has trickled down here to give a wider spread between the compliant Normal setting and well-roped down Track, with Sport in the middle. The comfort of Normal (Normal? Oh, never mind) was such, according to McLaren test driver Chris Goodwin, that they could stiffen the springs without compromising the lovely ride.

The result is amazing – the car goes from giving-mum-a-lift compliance to track-attack turn-in precision and control. The lightweight carbon tub provides the stiffness that remains uncorrupted thanks to hi-tech, kg-cutting tricks such as hydraulic self-levelling in place of roll bars and rear brake-pinching to mirror the traction qualities of a limited slip diff. The steering isn’t as surgical as you’d imagine but only because the rest feels so race-grid ready.

The car isn’t quite perfect. The engine revs rise at odds to ground speed in very low-mph driving, possibly a quirk of the dual-clutch gearbox, and McLaren still has a few foibles to fix in the cabin. The useful reversing camera was slow to project an image on to the otherwise well designed touchscreen for example, and one car we drove had a pretty rattly air con fan.

These aren’t good, but don’t rob the 650S of a star. Its brilliance is to sharpen the 12C’s telescopic vision into the future of enthusiast driving, where the tech serves to make the whole car feel like it revolves around you and your inputs, more like a talented rider is master of a high-performance motorbike and less as though you’re sitting at home with a PlayStation controller in your hand.

Despite the obvious added appeal, McLaren says it’ll clamp sales to match those of the 12C at about 1,500 a year. That should firm up the softening secondhand values (the 12C is down as low as £130,000 now) and help push another finely engineered skewer into the rump of Ferrari.

THE FACTS

McLaren 650S Coupe

Tested: 3,799cc V8 twin-turbo petrol engine, seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox, rear-wheel drive

Price/on sale: £195,250/now

Power/torque: 641bhp @ at 7,250rpm/500lb ft @ 6000rpm

Top speed: 207mph

Acceleration: 0-62mph in 3.0sec

Fuel economy: 24mpg (EU Combined)

CO2 emissions: 275g/km

VED band: M (£1,065 for first year and £490 thereafter)

Verdict: Yes it’s a facelift and an expensive one at that, but it pushes a great car even closer to outright perfection thanks to the application of knowledge gleaned from late nights spent on the P1 project.

Telegraph rating: Five stars out of five

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