In pictures: A road trip in the new McLaren Senna

Road trip in a McLaren Senna? Yes please.

We took a McLaren Senna on an 812-mile trip to a Pure McLaren track event at Paul Ricard circuit, near Marseille, to fully experience this car on the road, and then for a weekend on the circuit. On with the show:

Facts

First, some facts about the car.

The standard car costs £750,000, and around US$960,000 in America, although it can cost comfortably more than this with little effort; a Bugatti Veyron L'Or Blanc-style paint job and a few well-chosen options, including a £150,000 Richard Mille watch, helped one car hit £1 million (US$1.3 million). 

As standard, 789bhp comes from the car's 4.0-litre engine. A feathery kerb weight of 1198kg — that's about as much as a Ford Fiesta with a person in it —  combines with this power output to give a power-to-weight ratio of 660bhp per tonne. 

The 0-62mph sprint takes 2.8sec and the car will continue all the way to its top speed of 211mph.

PICTURE: Our Senna convoy leaves the McLaren HQ near Woking in southern England.

Race car for the road?

Woking to Paul Ricard: that’s plenty enough public road to judge the credentials of the Senna. Try this route in most cars developed solely with a track focus — but armed with numberplates — and you’ll end up with ringing in your ears for weeks and a loyalty card to the local chiropractor. In the Senna? Keep reading to find out. 

Convoy

On our road trip, chassis 001 is accompanied by three pre-001 Senna prototypes (which, while unsaleable, will later join the Pure McLaren fleet or development fleet), a prototype 600LT, a production 720S and some support cars for the luggage and whatnot. 

Crew

Variously, they’re crewed by the people who’ve developed them. And Bruno Senna, Ayrton’s nephew.

Numbers

Attention — and particularly online attention — follows a Senna around like flies to summer wildlife. There are those on ‘social meeja’ who want to collect all of the chassis numbers that go with limited-production cars.

Which, for companies that might be inclined to produce more than they say they will, could prove awkward later. McLaren isn't one of them, by the way. I suppose it’s train or plane-spotting for a new generation: look round the back of Harrods. Collect the set. 

Integrity

The integrity of the engineering is obvious. You can feel it on the Senna. Sense it. Integrity oozes from it, as it always has on a McLaren, even back in the early days of the MP4-12C, with its weird flat seats and mild understeer followed by holy-moly oversteer. Beneath it all was the justification for the price. As somebody who knew the build price of a McLaren and a key rival once told me: "Our cars are just expensive to build."

Inside

The Senna’s cabin is stripped, but not raw. Perfectly woven fibres feature across the dashboard and interior surfaces, but less flamboyantly than they did in the P1, sadly – because that car’s interior is one of the finest of all time. It still feels beautifully put together, though.

Equipment

The doors swoosh open like McLarens’ always do, but the extra girth of the Senna and the tiny rear-view panel is compensated for a bit by the glass panels – the ones in the lower door are particularly helpful for placing the Senna’s wide extremities during parking manoeuvres.

They’re so popular that 90% of owners have specified them. There are other comforts, too: navigation, a stereo, an air-con system that only one Senna has been ordered without (by McLaren’s press department).

Track

Carpets make a bit of a difference to the yellow car I’m driving, but be in no doubt: this is a track car. Sure, the driving position is pure McLaren road car – long, low, straight and wickedly adjustable, with a terrific round wheel – but it makes a right old racket on bad surfaces.

Noise

Strong, hollow sections such as the carbonfibre tubs are, as you’ll know if you ride an aluminium or CFRP bicycle, stiff and noisy. On concrete stretches of road, there’s a proper echo chamber thing going on, and the Senna also doesn’t use sound-deadening tyres – there’s foam inside the tyre rim – as most McLarens do.

Ride

But it rides — acceptably enough, anyway. It retains three modes for ride and keeps the linked hydraulic suspension system that’s the mark of Ultimate and Super Series cars, and it's sufficiently complicated that I have to be reminded how it works every time I think about it. 

Suspension

There are helper springs to retain a static ride height. For everything else, hydraulic springing and electronically controlled dampers do the job. 

Settings

Andy Palmer, McLaren’s Ultimate Series director, a man who has made rather more of his University of Hertfordshire engineering degree than I have, is at least on the same wavelength as me when it comes to the settings on the road; he leaves the dampers in their softest setting and turns up the powertrain a bit.

Gears

It’s a boosty engine. This car has a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 and makes 789bhp at 7250rpm. Of course it boosts a bit. It shifts gear with rapid precision, too, if you control gearshifts yourself. But leave it in too low a powertrain setting, and in auto mode, and it’s rather keen on lugging things out at low revs, sending resonance through the cabin and through the fixed-back, thinly padded carbonfibre seat as it does so.

Steering

Beyond all this, the Senna’s steering remains consistent, retaining — as McLaren has — a hydraulically assisted rack that manages to be around the same number of turns lock to lock as a Ferrari (at two) but considerably less hyperactive. Straight-line stability is great, but so is cornering stability. Not that you’ll feel a lot of corners on a journey like this.

Downforce

Unsurprisingly, motorway slip roads completely unflap a car that makes peak downforce of 800kg. 

Aero

That aero is the thing that, above all else, marks out the Senna’s behaviour as different from other McLarens, such as a 675LT, on a circuit. On the road, it’s the ambient noise and girth. Next up, in both conditions, the speed. And, at rest, the interior finish and the appearance. Is that enough? 

Reward

Over a 720S, the Senna is not, for example, as marked a difference as the P1 was over a 12C, and there is the risk of criticism that McLarens come and go too quickly and are too indistinct: all V8s, all turbocharged, with many differences unseen.

Ultimately, whatever cars McLaren matures into making, the integrity seems to be there, as it’ll have to be, because people who are obsessed with making enough money to buy Sennas are not those who give it away lightly. Their reward is a track car with intense levels of pace and solidity.