A McLaren Artura Spider Is Its Own Spring Break Plan

My kids’ spring break is timed to coincide with Easter. This means that the dates vary wildly from year to year, because so does Easter (it’s the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, if you need a refresher on your moon-based holidays). This year, Easter was late—mid-April—which is about the time you might expect some decent weather in North Carolina, where we live. And so I made a bold decision for our spring break plans, which is that there would be no spring break plans. Well, except for one: drive the McLaren Artura Spider. Get your hands on an Artura, and the plans make themselves. A school pickup becomes an event that’s Snapchatted across the county. A trip to the grocery store is an epic journey. And a drive to the beach might lead to sublime sensory immersion the likes of which prompted Coleridge to write Kubla Khan, but this time without the opium. Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverThe Artura is McLaren’s hybrid V-6 model, and it spits out a total of 690 horsepower via a turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 and an electric motor. Cleverness abounds: The eight-speed dual-clutch transmission has no reverse gear, with that job handled by the electric motor spinning backward. The engine is mounted so low, it sits beneath the tops of the wheels. You can get it with Pirelli Cyber tires that report their temperatures and take note when you’re driving faster than 167 mph, so you can adjust pressures accordingly. The Artura is also arguably the most beautiful contemporary McLaren, with its graceful buttresses and one-piece rear clamshell, and that’s saying something.Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverThat’s a pretty car.With the weather forecast looking decent, we decided to head for the coast, which means a slog across the flatlands of Route 74. Typically that’s a boring stretch of road, but not long into the drive, a battle erupted in the skies above, sunshine and thunderstorms fighting for the upper hand and spraying rainbows down across the farmland. The view ahead, swept clear by the McLaren’s single wiper blade, was like the world turned into a Lucky Charms box. Through the rearview mirror, I watched geysers of spray hang in the sunshine and burst into yet more rainbows. The Ventura Orange of the car played its own part in this explosion of color, and a normally dreary drive turned into, dare I say, a profound experience.Beach Days Beach towns can be automotively haughty. A car like an Artura would blend with the scenery in Malibu, and Cape Cod is the land of the six-figure old-school Jeep Wagoneer. Holden Beach, North Carolina, isn’t like that. The general store sells bait, the best restaurants are open to the elements, and a street-legal side-by-side is the preferred vehicular flex. It’s apparent that the people who might have Artura money—this car wore a window sticker of $325,258—choose to deploy their financial resources on boats. You don’t see cars like this.Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverSo it wasn’t a huge surprise when I got a knock on the door and it was about the Artura. A high-school freshman named Oliver had a camera in hand and wanted to know if it was okay to take photos of the car. I told him to go for it, of course, because that’s exactly what I would have done at his age if I stumbled across a McLaren in my neighborhood. After he got his shots I gave him a ride home, which was only two blocks away down a 35-mph road, but at least now he can say he rode in a McLaren. Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverOver the next few days, I made excuses to drive the Artura—I felt it was my responsibility to the general public. Grocery runs, bait procurement, and pizza pickup were all dispatched in style. One day I was big-upped at the hardware store by a V-12 Lincoln Zephyr wearing a hand-written For Sale sign taped to the window: respect. I should note that all of these errands were accomplished with the Artura in Sport mode, not because I was doing anything particularly sporty, but because Sport mode forces the 120-degree V-6 to fire up, and your audience demands to hear it. This car had the $5100 sports exhaust system, which issues a properly exotic caterwaul that harmonizes with the rush of the turbos as you approach the 7500-rpm horsepower peak. The Artura will keep the engine running if you want to charge the battery (it’s EPA rated at 11 miles of electric range), with one exception: the “engine conditioning” wait period immediately after you start the car.Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverUpstaged by a V-12 at the hardware store.You can climb into the Artura and start driving immediately, but the engine won’t fire up until it’s done pre-warming the catalysts, which only takes about seven seconds but can sometimes seem like an eternity. Like, for instance, when I was leaving the driveway and a mom and two little boys stopped in their tracks on the sidewalk to watch the McLaren depart, and I whirred away with a 94-hp electric hum. Hopefully they kept looking long enough to hear the V-6 bark to life—this car makes sounds, I promise.Now, as much as I wanted to use the Artura for every chore possible, we’re a family of four, and not every task is McLaren-appropriate. Like, for instance, buying some outdoor furniture. That’s a truck trip, so the McLaren stayed parked—out of sight but not, evidently, out of mind, because when we got home we realized that the furniture that struck our fancy was almost the same shade of orange as the Artura. It probably doesn’t require much psychoanalysis to deduce what happened there. Someday, when the kids ask why we have orange rocking chairs, I’ll say, “Remember that Artura Spider?”Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverNo idea why the orange furniture seemed appealing.The morning the Artura was to be picked up, I felt a keen sense of impending loss, so I went for a two-hour morning drive with my younger son, Finn. We did a few launch-control starts out in the boonies, visited a gas station on the far end of a fun, curvy road, and stopped by a place called Fort Apache that really deserves its own story. Fort Apache’s proprietor, Dale, wasn’t around, but we grabbed a few photos in front of the Crackhead Express, a city bus that used to have a huge crack pipe on the roof. At some point, Dale replaced that with a shark eating a water-skier, as one does, and added rows of toilets all around the vicinity. This is why you stop by Fort Apache now and then—you’ve got to keep up with the happenings.Ezra Dyer|Car and DriverEzra Dyer|Car and DriverOnce the Artura was cruelly wrenched from my clutches, I was forced to contemplate my return to life without 690 horsepower and flying buttresses. And in ginning up a pep talk for myself, I think I actually stumbled upon a truth that should have been obvious: All of these pointless little fun trips that I took in the McLaren would also have been fun in my Daihatsu Rocky, or our Gladiator. Maybe not so much in the Pacifica, but you get the idea. You don’t need a $325,000 McLaren convertible to enjoy an aimless drive. But it sure helps.More from Ezra DyerEzra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He’s now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.
Source: caranddriver.com