Yahoo News McLaren 570S Spider: why you should buy one now
A little quiz for the day: where does the term “spider” come from, as a description for a convertible? Like all good automotive stuff, it’s British, and has its origins in the Spider Phaeton, a late 18th century, light horse-drawn carriage with a folding black roof which some wag once remarked looked like a spider. It was the ideal vehicle for a fashionable young gadfly to trot around town in.
Three hundred years later, I give you the McLaren 570S Spider, ideal for fashionable young gadflies around town… McLaren Automotive describes its 570S Spider as a “no-compromise convertible”, which is hardly surprising, coming from the most driver-focused, least lifestyle-orientated sports car company out there today.
While Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini bow to the inevitable and start building SUVs, McLaren holds firm with an adamant “not us”. Its 570GT, meant to show the softer side of the brand, is just a hardcore sports car with a side-hinged rear window for a small overnight bag.
Bless them: you either embrace McLaren wholeheartedly, or you buy a Ferrari California, Audi R8 or Aston Martin DB11.
Plenty of people clearly love the Woking stance, because this company is in its fourth consecutive year of profitability and sold out of some recent models as soon as it announced them.
The 570S Spider sits in McLaren’s Sports Series range: the Super Series has just been completely refreshed and has the new 720S only, and the Ultimate Series is waiting for the new BP23 which replaces the P1 hypercar, which means the Sports Series is surely nearing the end of its life cycle.
All of which is a long way of saying, if you like the 570S coupé and 570GT but have yet to buy, you might want to snap up the Spider before the range is replaced.
It used to be that when you lopped the top off a car, lots of bad things happened. It started wobbling like a butterscotch Angel Delight, it got heavier because of extra chassis stiffening and the folding roof had lots of moving parts, it was more expensive and you lost all street-cred for driving a girly car.
Nowadays, men in white coats have engineered car chassis out of high-strength, lightweight materials which means “scuttle shake”, as the industry terms the wobble, is largely a thing of the past. The same men have created sound-deadening materials for roof linings, which means the cabin is as quiet as that of a coupé on the move, and weight gain is also reduced. In other words, there are precious few reasons you wouldn’t choose a 570S Spider over the coupé.
McLaren’s carbon-fibre tub eliminates the need for torsional strengthening, the composite hardtop adds just 46kg to the weight, which still leaves it 200kg lighter than an Audi R8, and actually the design is more handsome to my eyes than the coupé’s, with buttresses behind the rear seats adding drama to the silhouette.
There’s a glazed rear screen that acts as a wind deflector with the roof down, or leave it down with the roof raised to catch that metallic, gruff engine note.
The performance figures from the 562bhp, 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 are almost identical: 0-60mph in 3.1 seconds and top speed of 204mph (a whole 8mph slower with the roof down). It costs another £7,000 more than the GT and £15,000 more than the coupé. But if you’re buying a car that starts at £164,000, that’s probably not going to worry you.
I’d say this might just be the cream of the Sports Series crop; hurry, while stocks last.
THE FACTS
TESTED 3,799cc twin-turbo V8 petrol, seven-speed automatic gearbox, rear-wheel drive
PRICE/ON SALE £164,750/now
POWER/TORQUE 562bhp@7,500rpm/443lb ft@5,000rpm
TOP SPEED 204mph
ACCELERATION 0-60mph in 3.1sec
FUEL ECONOMY 26mpg (EU Combined)
CO2 EMISSIONS 249g/km
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