Review: 2019 McLaren 600LT Spider

We put the 600LT coupe through its paces at the Hungaroring outside Budapest last year, but weren’t allowed to drive it on Hungarian roads. A joy, then, to be given free reign with a 600LT Spider for the day, on both road and track, to see if this weekend warrior is in fact the complete McLaren.

A quick recap on where the 600LT sits in the Woking canon. It is the fifth Long Tail derivative from the marque, and follows the outgoing 675LT, which sat in the Super Series. The 600LT, however, is the Long Tail version of the 570S coupe, which sits in the Sports Series. The next LT for the Super Series will be the 720S version. Got it?

It’s testament to McLaren’s engineering and focus on lightweight design that the convertible version of the 600LT feels no different to drive than the coupe version, other than that glorious wind-in-your-hair feeling (difficult to discern when wearing a helmet, admittedly). It delivers the same 600 horsepower from the 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 (the 720S Spider, which we also drove on location, uses the full four litres of the V8), and hits 62mph in exactly the same time as the 720S Spider - 2.9 seconds. It goes on to a top speed of 201mph. Rest assured, you will never explore the upper echelons of the 600LT Spider’s capabilities on a public road. That sort of acceleration is blood curdling and breath-taking in a way only a track session begins to expose, although what you actually need to expose the rev band’s brutal realities is a drag strip.

But where a convertible’s handling would normally be exposed, in the cornering and vibrations from the road surface, the 600LT Spider’s carbon-fibre shell stays as torsionally strong as the coupe’s. It used to be that if you lopped the top off a box you’d get what the industry loved to call “scuttle shake” – i.e. the car’s shell would wobble like a blancmange. Nowadays, it’s largely a thing of the past, especially in the luxury performance sector.

The Spider feels utterly composed and unruffled through the apexes, the wheels riding the curbs well. With the small steering wheel spinning in your hands, roof down, you can hear the high exhausts churning and gurgling behind your ears.

It’s a luxury to have a top-down experience of a performance vehicle. Sounds strange to say it, but the experience is not dissimilar to driving the Land Rover Evoque convertible - it feels like a rarefied thrill to drive something which has a serious engineering purpose, but is designed with pure pleasure in mind. It’s the little luxuries of life that put a smile on one’s face, and driving at speed round a track with the roof down feels very good indeed.

The question lingered in Hungary last year, however, of how the pared-back 600LT would perform on the road. Would the changes for track compromise the on-road drive? Would one need to trailer the 600LT to a trackday, or could you feasibly drive it? Would it stay garaged when not at the track, or could you commute in it, too?

It turns out that the 600LT Spider is a perfectly usable track day weapon, even away from the track. In Normal mode, the suspension is soft enough for UK roads, and although the race seats don’t have the lower-back support I’d wish for, they are padded with soft leather. What you can’t do very easily on the road, or indeed at all, is see out of the rear. But if you’re in a purple supercar, we’d humbly suggest the onus automatically shifts to everyone else to get out of your way.

Stat attack

Price from: £201,500

Engine: 3.8-litre, twin-turbo V8

Transmission: 7-speed double-clutch, rear-wheel-drive

Power/torque: 600PS @ 7,500rpm/620Nm (457lb ft) 5,500-6,500rpm

0-62mph: 2.9 seconds

Top speed: 201mph

Economy: 17.3mpg

Kerbweight: 1,356kg

Option we’d tick: McLaren Track Telemetry (MTT) with lap time function and three cameras: £1,370