A few days with McLaren

How a successful day begins: When the morning view through the floor-to-ceiling window at the Four Seasons Hotel Hampshire is lost in a vast landscape of grass and hills and a slender rider on a wiry steed emerges from the right. For his early morning ride, he has chosen a scarlet tippet that stands out magnificently against the flaxen autumn grass. As if cast for a knights and swords film, he gallops up the hill on his black horse, needless to say the tippet flutters like a British Red Ensign flag to windward. You have capitulated to the opulence of the breakfast buffet and return to your table with a single croissant for coffee. What you were initially prepared to accept as high fog turns out to be a pale blue promise over the northern Cotswolds between Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. Pay attention to the correct pronunciation! The purple-coloured super sports car enters your life all the more powerfully. The circumstances that led to this are negligible. Everyone gets lucky now and again, some have to be pushed into it, some stumble into it. A thousand times the morning light refracts in raindrops that have hung in the night. The formula for happiness probably lies in the sentence that McLaren spokesperson Andrea Bermúdez, Director Brand & Client, gave us the evening before: "Artura - the supercar that steps into your everyday life." The picturesque Cotswolds, rolling hills, crumbling stone facades, dark red brick chimneys, it's that area where it always seems to be autumn. Everything is so romantic here, but not dilapidated, but well-kept, trimmed, clean, right down to the whitewashed door and window frames of the picturesque stone cottages. Er, nice, now what? What am I doing here?

McLaren Cars, the non-racing part of the company in Woking, invited us to the Artura Drive. McLaren is highly regarded by us because they were actually prepared to go the extra mile to make the Artura super sports car a reality, even though there were massive, unspecified problems (due to a lack of chips) on the way to delayed production readiness, which called for a significant cash injection. McLaren's 60 per cent majority shareholder, Mumtalakat Holding, acquired historic museum vehicles for $123 million. McLaren's company museum comprises 54 Formula 1 rarities and several F1 road cars. Obviously, the Mumtalakats have allowed the vehicles to remain on display in Woking, otherwise we would be walking through empty halls.

The one-off facility, opened in 2005 as a technology centre and in 2010 as a production facility, was designed by Norman Foster at a reported cost of half a billion USD. It was the Heydays with Mercedes, money was obviously no object, but Gordon Murray was pissed off with the SLR-McLaren-Mercedes, which he left no doubt about when I visited him here for a book project. Ron Dennis himself gave the tour back then. He showed us the engineering departments, the state-of-the-art wind tunnel with the Rolling Road, a steel track rotating at 260 km/h (essential for the wheel aerodynamics of Formula 1 cars), but what I remember most is how we passed a glass chimney full of people standing close together. "Our smokers," was all Ron Dennis said, and no, you didn't want to be one of them.

Today, strangely enough, the plant, which is sunk five storeys into the ground, looks even more futuristic than it did back then, perhaps due to the numerous films and TV series that have been shot here in the meantime, so that the inner workings of Woking have unconsciously entered human memory as a symbol of universal futurism.

Today we are being led into a secret room, so nothing less happens than a wall opens silently to reveal the W1, The Real Supercar as the legitimate successor to the P1, fuelled by the new biturbo MHP V8 as a mid-engine (flat bench, flat crankshaft, up to 9200 rpm), a Power Dense E-module including control unit and a total boost output of 1275 hp. Maximum torque of 1340 Nm. The 8-speed DCG has no reverse gear, reversing is handled by the electric motor. Forwards it only manages two kilometres, the 1.4 kW plug-in battery does not allow more.

The carbon athlete with Aerocell Groundeffect monocoque is only one metre and twelve centimetres high, but the length varies by 30 centimetres thanks to the extendable aero tail. Dry weight under 1.4 tonnes, but rises dramatically when the aerodynamics kick in: 350 kg downforce at the front, up to 650 kg at the rear. The rear wing can perform DRS (Drag Reduction System by folding away) or airbrake by maximising its position. In addition, you could theoretically open the gullwing doors, as they are also extremely aerodynamic. Even the exterior mirror replacement sensors have aerodynamic functions.

The seating position is "heels higher than hip", the driver is practically inserted into the seat at the factory and the high pedals are fine-tuned. If the headrests are folded forward, 117 litres of luggage space are freed up behind them.

399 units will be built, the price for the first one delivered to "Customer #1" this year: from 2.2 million euros.

No need to break down the rest of the museum tour: Solus GT, developed for the video game, 20 built in real life, more fighter jet than car, good for lateral forces of 5-6 g. Next to it is the P1 from 2013, the car that I was allowed to drive here on a rainy winter evening on its last journey, don't ask why, but it wasn't funny in the left-hand roundabouts in the dark and rain. The fact that I was allowed to drive Gordon Murray's personal F1, one of 69 civilian examples of which is also parked here (of course covered with the obligatory 24-carat gold foil as exhaust pipe panelling and heat shield), seems more surreal to me today than ever. With 620 hp, its BMW 6.0 V12 was the fastest non-turbo of its time and the most expensive production car ever. Incidentally, the driver's position is centred and a CD by Murray's friend (and early F1 customer) George Harrison was stuck in the door pocket of Gordon's private F1.

Enough of the museal: in the factory, where only one robot works, nine models are produced per day in an average process lasting 29 days: Artura, GT/GTS, 750S - and even more elaborately the W1. 60,000 litres of water are sprayed over and under the cars in the Monsoon tunnel to ensure they are completely watertight. The English already know what they are doing.

Our event here is intended to show how suitable and comfortable a supercar like the McLaren Artura can be for everyday use. I could have told them that, but not in selected marketing terms like: "Multi-layered driving experience." "Intelligent and emotive." "How we are everything from performance to luxury." "Bringing together people who care." ("Not just cars, also thinking.")

Thanks, guys, we get it. Supercars don't have to be constantly fast, risky and on the verge of driving licence withdrawal. They have qualities of aesthetics, robustness, orientation and uncompromising behaviour that start with the car standing still.

The Artura immediately makes you feel at home. However, one dogma has been abandoned: You can only see the front wheel arches to some extent. McLaren has always emphasised and implemented the fact that the driver must be able to visually assess the car. At least I can't see the colour of the Artura assigned to me: purple.

The seats are great. Electrically adjustable, but above all they have adopted the Lotus concept, whereby the body is evenly supported as if in a hammock. This ensures a relaxed, precisely customised rest in the body. You become one with the car, which female passengers also appreciate.

On the way back from the Hyll Hotel and lunch at Daylesford Organic, where colleagues and I were instructed in upscale lifestyle ("Sleep as you felt guilty about" as an infallible sleep method), I am assigned an imposing lady who I thought was some kind of cop. It soon transpires that she is a Supercar Driver Experience Coach at McLaren and would be interviewing the World Champion (i.e. Lando Norris) on the last GP weekend.

While I give her a mansplain-typical demonstration of how Derek Bell commented on my steering wheel position in the Bentley Continental GT Speed, she reaches into the wheel as a matter of course because (typical continental behaviour in left-hand traffic) I have come quite close to the edge of the road. With a nonchalance practised a thousand times over, without emphasising it further, she impressed me with a sample of her skills without making a big deal of it.

By the way, eighty per cent of all road-going McLaren are right-hand drive.