As a junior road tester I used to love the art of figuring cars. I’d spend half my life up at Millbrook, trying to work out how best to get cars off the line with just the right amount of wheelspin or, more often than not, with no wheelspin at all.
And between myself and my fellow road testers on the other magazines, there was always an unspoken rule about competition – to see who could generate the best numbers, often out of the exact same test cars.
Nowadays, though, with launch control systems fitted to any performance car worth its salt, and paddle-shift gearboxes that deliver perfect upshifts, there isn’t much of an art to figuring a car. You just press a load of buttons in the correct order, bend the floorboards with both feet, then release the brakes and away you go.
And that includes cars like the McLaren P1, whose performance figures seem to have upset one or two commentators because, well, the ones we have recorded aren’t quite as phenomenal as those published by an American magazine.
There are a couple of reasons why this could be so. Perhaps the American magazine figured their P1 with less weight on board than we did – we always figure cars with half a tank of fuel and two people in situ: driver and passenger. Read more about how we figure test cars in Matt Prior's blog here.
Or the P1 we tested wasn’t performing quite as it should on the day, although this scenario isn’t possible really because there were several McLaren technicians present when we figured our car, all of whom were happy things were as they should be.
American magazines have a habit of producing unusually rapid figures on cars, after all; always have done, always will do. Call it the unfair advantage, call it what you will, but for a long time it’s been an unwritten rule of road testing that the US mags tend to record faster times on their cars than everyone else.
Maybe their test gear is calibrated differently to everyone else's, Maybe the average American road tester is forced to eat nothing but lettuce for the three months leading up to a figuring session if the editor knows they are in the chair to extract the numbers from the next big thing. Perhaps time simply passes that little bit more quickly in the land of the free. Or maybe they use 106 octane fuel.
In any case, surely a more relevant question is – does it really matter if an American magazine figures a P1 two-tenths of a second faster to 150mph than anyone else?
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So, still not as fast as an Ultima then....
People who prefer this sort of 'super(?) car' ought to stick to computer games and simulators, oh, and the vicissitudes of F1.
Bemoaning the lack of skill required to produce figures.
You of all people should have been complaining longest and loudest about this, as you have always written with such passion about extracting the most from any car.
And yet you appear consistently resigned, and indeed encouraging of, the invasion of electronic systems in cars.
Take your current Huracan review, in which you say in most respects it is a tremendous leap forward. Tremendous? Really? In what important way? Would you really prefer to have/drive one to a RWD Gallardo 550/2? I don't believe you would, and I certainly wouldn't.
That is why the McLaren F1 is still in so many ways the king. It is massively fast, but asks ultimate questions of the driver that none of these newer offerings ever will.
This is also why cars as sources of pleasure balanced with ownership have long since peaked (some time between 1995 and 2005 I reckon). Cars since have become academically faster, but consistently more intrusive and less fun.
I am absolutely sure that if Lamborghini said they would build you a manual, RWD Huracan, with electronics restricted to ABS, starter, headlights and essential interior functions, you would choose it in an instant. But that prospect is an amazingly long way from where it is now, and where it is heading.
Make noise about this in your actual car reviews please, even though it is clearly too late for most.
DRS
What about the drs button? Did you use it or not?