The McLaren 570GT: Top Gear's best everyday supercar

There is no such thing as a “practical supercar”. It’s a contradiction in terms on the same intellectual level as “moderate terrorist” or “diet cake”. The point of a supercar is to be impractical. Whimsical, even. Fantastical to look at, and with a poisonously narrow go-faster brief that means it’s about as useful in real life as male nipples, or those cheap spanners you can buy made from metallic softwood. Yes, you can get searingly fast cars that are also practical – the Porsche 911 Turbo being one – but is that really a supercar? It’s got four seats, for goodness’ sake. And there are approximately seven hundred lesser models which all – bar a few extra bits of bodywork – look exactly the same. The Audi R8 comes close – it looks suitably unsuitable, has the engine in the right place and goes very fast indeed. But it’s an Audi. And Audi also makes the A4 2.0-litre TDI. And it has normal doors. And as we all know, a supercar needs ridiculous doors. Even a practical one. Step forward, then, the McLaren 570GT. 

Photography: John Wycherley

This feature was originally published in issue 290 of Top Gear magazine

McLaren does not make city cars, small cars, saloon cars or cars that you can walk past without looking at. It makes – exclusively – supercars. And while all the other practical fast things mentioned previously are perched at the top of their respective family trees (or at the expensive bottom end of the brochure), the 570GT is one of McLaren’s more “affordable” models. Not for normal people, obviously – the GT starts at just over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds – but for the gilded rich, this is basically the financial equivalent of a VW Up on nice rims. And while it has the same carbon tub, 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 and grand-entrance beetle-wing doors as the P1 hyper-hybrid or 650S, it also gets a… hatchback. A panoramic glass roof and soft-close doors. And softer suspension. And a quieter exhaust. And generally less white-knuckled, let’s-take-the-Tesla-to-the-shops intensity. 

This is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. A bewinged and dive-planed racetrack-refugee like a 675LT might have the car-park kudos, but to be honest, you never really get to drive one hard on the road past third gear. A P1 might get all the plaudits, but it is essentially a fairly single-minded, pretty little psychopath, ruthless in its pursuit of speed. The 570GT purports to offer the look and a more accessible experience without the unceasing daily drama. And so, to test the hypothesis that the McLaren 570GT really is a universe-bending paradox, we have decided to do something perilously impractical in McLaren’s most practical car. We’re having a little road trip. 

Now, when I say “little”, obviously I mean “fairly large”, and when I say “perilously impractical”, I just mean “perilous”. Because I’m going to load up the 570GT with everything it can take, and then try and drive every decent road in the United Arab Emirates – and slightly beyond – in a couple of days. This means filling the front boot with photographer John Wycherley’s camera kit, the rear, side-opening hatch with my increasingly disturbing bag of laundry and several other unidentified items, and hitting the road. First up: city driving, Abu Dhabi style.

Ah. Slight wince. The 570GT looks pretty much like all the other face-bending McLarens – you post yourself low and through those doors like every other version – but when you fire it up, it doesn’t flare to life quite as verbally or excitingly as the rest. A more considered, thoughtful tone. 

And there’s something just not right about putting that much kit into a car like this – you keep thinking you’ve pushed bags out the other side by accident. And yet. And yet, when you pull out into traffic and encounter one of the UAE’s random selection of surprise speed bumps, the GT stoutly refuses to smash its own face off. You can see out of it – useful when the locals seem inordinately keen on approaching at speed from every conceivable angle, and when you accidentally and unavoidably lob a wheel into a pothole that would violently incapacitate most other cars, the GT thumps and keeps going. It’s soft, and relatively quiet. Several hours on an arrow-straight E65 motorway later, and I’m liking this feather-edged vibe. It makes you less tense. 

It does not, however, bode well for our first destination: the Empty Quarter. Head south out of Abu Dhabi, down towards Hamim, and you can turn right up towards the oasis town of Liwa. Head south again, and you will encounter the edge of the Empty Quarter and a road that spears off into the dunes towards Tal Mireb, or “Horrifying Hill”. 

Now, this massive 300-metre high dune on the Moreeb Dune road is where locals do a kind of vertical, sandy drag racing, which looks as dangerous as it sounds. But the road to get there is essentially a dead end that winds serpentine through the kind of desert panorama you see in nature films. Or Star Wars. When there are no events planned, it’s pretty much empty. Cue furious stabbing of buttons and twiddling of dials to get the 570 into Track mode, and the sound of silence being torn apart by a low-flying luggage trolley. 

Two things become immediately apparent: one, this is still a McLaren, and even a “detuned” version of that 3.8 is still 562 perfectly shouty horsepower, and two: you really must secure the luggage in the rear hatch before you start to chuck the thing about. Or you’ll be nearly decapitated by a bag full of your own dirty underwear. The feeling that the GT might be a bit too conservative evaporates. Because this is not soothing. Flip the requisite dials to Track, and the GT will still hit 62mph in 3.4secs, 124 in 9.8 and smash 204mph. The standing quarter-mile matches (or beats, depending on who you talk to) that of the F1, at 11.1secs. You don’t get the active rear airbrake from the faster cars, and the GT moves around quite a lot more, but, hell yes, you can still pin your ears back if you need to. 

More than that, you’re going at speeds at which your mind can cope. There’s more body roll and more pitching front-to-back than something like a 675LT, and consequently palpably slower cornering speeds, but somehow, there’s a bit more information about where the limits are. And here, the limits are something of a movable feast. 

The thing with the Moreeb Dune road is that even though the tarmac looks sticky and black in the 43°C heat, the 570 is actually sucking the sand up out of it as it moves across. The margins are gently bitten away by the encroaching dunes, and one over-cut corner or ambitious sandy edge, and you’re looking at dune-bashing in all the wrong contexts. This might be one of the most spectacular roads in the UAE, but it’s actually not the best for driving. Time to move on.

Back north this time, and more motorway. Dead straight, mind-numbing motorway, all of it apparently under the UAE’s constant upgrade plan. But even though the 570 gets less carbon in its construction and a less outré cabin architecture than the big brothers to keep costs down, the wider, more comfortable seats and simplified centre console all work without flaw. It’s even got a thumpingly decent Bowers&Wilkins 12-speaker stereo – an £1,800 option – which keeps us company all the way to the Jebel Hafeet Mountain road some four hours up and east away – voted one of the world’s greatest driving roads, and 7.4 miles and 60 corners of hillclimb brilliance. 

It’s good – of that there is no doubt. Two lanes up, one down, lightly trafficked and beautifully surfaced. At the top there’s a hotel, a small palace and a few other buildings, and a viewing point that looks across the whole Al Ain area in 360° magnificence. We’re there as the sun goes down, and without Moreeb’s sandy sketchiness, the GT finally manages to work its steel brakes to the fullest. And work they do. This road is all about gears two to four, a dance between the paddles operating the brilliant seven-speed SSG ’box, the accelerator and the brake. Heavy on the brakes. The little McLaren finds extra grip from the front, and proves hilariously rapid – even though the fact that the rear end is all but unstickable under power can be a bit frustrating. As can the fact that when forced to do so, the lack of a proper rear differential means that you can’t hold onto a slide. At my skill level, at least. We stay until the night wraps its velvety arms around the hill, and Hafeet’s lights flicker on. And then it just feels like the world’s most awesome video game. But we’ve lingered too long, and we must get to our hotel – there’s more in the morning.

Before that, though, a few more hours of commuting to a seaside resort called Ras Al Khaimah up in the north of the country. Boring commuting, with bad roads and dull speed limits, rigorously enforced. In any other car, this would be frustrating. But once down out of the speedy cornering goodness of Hafeet, the GT immediately calms back into an easy lope. We’ve done more than 1,000km according to the tripmeter, and I’ve not even got backache. Yet.

Next morning, we rise before the dawn and head up to the UAE’s highest mountain, and a road only opened a couple of years ago: Jebel al Jais. Now, this one is fairly hard to find, seeing as though there aren’t really signposts and the road doesn’t actually go anywhere. Eventually, there will be a hotel and ski resort at the top, but right now, the Jebel al Jais road is infrastructure-to-nothing; the tarmac just stops. As we drive up, it’s pitch black – no street lights – and even though the road itself is absolutely fantastic, there’s an ominous sense to the blackness. So we camp out with some random goats at the top, and wait for dawn. 

Turns out we camped at the gates of heaven. 

Look down. Look down, and out, and across what must be the most perfect stretch of public road anywhere on the planet. Again, two lanes up, one down. Twenty-five kilometres of flawless ribbon, that winds from long, well-sighted straights through a gorge at the bottom, dives through the technical sweeps of the mid section to wide 180° hairpins nearer the top. And it is, bar the occasional slow-moving lorry or tourist hire car, deserted. Stelvio Pass? This makes it look like a goat track. The Grossglockner looks like rush hour commuting in comparison. The Palms to Pines road outside LA? The Nürburgring? Sorry, but no. This isn’t a road. It’s a pilgrimage. 

And it’s here that I should regret the 570GT. Wish for something more, something reliably singular. But I don’t. Why? Because this road isn’t a laptime kind of road. It’s an experience. The rest of the Hajar Mountains scrape at the sky, the colours bleeding from grey to brown to red as the sun rises. The road pulses like a heartbeat. And if you go too fast, you might miss it, that rhythm, or that view. Which is not to say that we didn’t go quite fast, but that the GT allows you more room for other things, not just the consumption of corners. Even full to the brim with random luggage, it feels light, and responsive and connected. It makes all the right noises, both from the exhaust and the tyres lightly hooting at the abusive gravity of a hairpin. But it’s not feral or fiercely dominant like most other supercars. It moves under braking, squirrels around, understeers a bit. Don’t get me wrong – you’d have to actually be in one of its upper-echelon contemporaries to stand a chance against it, but as far as something that looks like this, there’s more road trip than pitlane in the character. We spent all day on the Jebel al Jais. I’m not sure I blinked once.

It was hard to leave such an almost religious experience, but there’s one more place we need to visit before we’re done: the Al Khasab road on the Musandam Peninsula. So we reluctantly pack up, and head north again. Now, the Khasab road is a coastal road that runs around the top of the headland at the very northern end of the UAE, but it actually sits within an enclave of Oman. An enclave that borders the Strait of Hormuz between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, and looks directly at Iran some 30 miles away. The border crossing involves many hours of patient form-filling and papery passage-making, but eventually we make it out the other side, and into another wonder. 

The strait glitters on one side as the mountains collapse into the sea in geological slow motion. The road scythes across the lower edge of the country, looping around turquoise bays and a gorgeous mosque, and the Al Khasab road proves to be yet another gem in the crown of the Middle East. But (and it’s a big but) the road is busy. Heavy with tourists and locals alike, throbbing with commerce. The GT feels hemmed, constricted, castrated. We marvel at the view, and rue the population. So it’s only a day before we’re heading back out, and south. Tantalisingly towards the new icon in my personal liturgy that is Jebel al Jais. By the end we’ll have covered well over 2,000km, gone fast, and slow, spectacular and spectacularly dull. Driven through towns and cities, through night and day, and never regretted the choice of the 570GT as a companion. And when we eventually arrive back in Abu Dhabi, I decide that the McLaren 570GT really is the world’s most practical supercar. And that we might just have found the world’s greatest road to prove it.