McLaren 540C - the perfect daily supercar?

What’s more, the 540C closely resembles the 570S in styling. Only experts and the car’s actual creators are likely to spot the small differences in front splitter design, especially as the 540C isn’t identified by any exterior badge. Ironically, as we were soon repeatedly to discover, a decent proportion of the people who recognised our car as a McLaren were inclined to confuse it with the P1 costing nine times more…

McLaren’s own purpose in launching the lower-priced car is based entirely on financial logic. In places like Singapore, where supercar taxes run at around 100%, the price difference between the 540C and 570S swells to £40,000. Back in Blighty, where personal contract purchase is big business, this ‘most attainable’ McLaren is on offer to a 10,000-miles-a-year buyer over three years for less than £1000 a month (after a £35,000 deposit). The deal is keener than you’d get on an equivalent Audi R8, Woking’s people insist, because their cars’ residual values are well ahead of the Audi’s.

But is the 540C any good? One quick way of finding out, we decided, was to take a brisk one-day tour of well-known, inspirational roads in the lower Cotswolds, a 300-mile tour that would take in a wide variety of road types, corners and surfaces. This would be a short, enjoyable grand tour, if that term can still be used with validity away from the Haunted Fishtank.

In a car of the 540C’s potential, full-noise driving isn’t necessary or even possible on public roads. We set out to drive the 540C as an owner would – discreetly sprinting where it was possible and feeling the car out on favourite corners and back roads. Down the M3 we’d go, turning north-west on rolling English roads to Marlborough, then up an unspoiled secondary route to Swindon’s outskirts, before zipping up to the east of Cirencester to visit a friend, Vic Norman, whose Breitling-sponsored biplanes can be seen at all the big airshows of the UK summer, usually with a daredevil girl on the top wing. Norman’s preference is for Porsches these days. Maybe we could change his mind.

I’ve driven most of the current McLarens in recent months, but my major experience still flows from the 12C long-term test car we ran three or four years ago. Step into a 540C and the familiarity is instant, followed by the realisation a second later that everything – everything – has been developed, improved, refined or tuned. The door aperture is bigger, the doors open wider and there’s more room in the cabin and better adjustment for the steering column. You see the instruments better. The pedal area seems roomier, too, and the infotainment system, almost laughably incapable in our 12C, is quicker to repond and hugely better.

That’s just the start of the story. The car feels more sophisticated now. The steering wheel turns the car more quickly and the effort is more appropriate and consistent from lock to lock. When you thumb the button, the engine starts with the same neighbour-disturbing blip and settles into the same disappointingly farty idle, but when you move off, the clutch’s take-up is perfectly predictable in a way it never was. Left to its own devices, the sevenspeed dual-clutch automatic gearbox changes smoothly and chooses its ratios with perfect precision, but the manual change (one of several things selectable via still-confusing rotary switches on the lower fascia) is such superb fun that I drove most of our 300 miles changing my own gears.

What else? Even without the Super Series’ hydraulic anti-roll system, the ride is flat and beautifully damped; one of my conceits on this trip was following decent cars and watching how much more their bodies were affected by dips and humps than my own. Now and again, severe bumps do crash right through, though. Likewise, you occasionally hear a rumble-rattle typical of cars with carbonfibre structures. But if you know what’s beneath, it’s almost a badge of honour.

Are you noticing anything? Truth is there’s precious little to criticise about the 540C that hasn’t already been said about the 570S. Sure, the cheaper car has iron brakes, not the carbon-ceramic variety used on more expensive McLarens, but you hardly notice the difference on the road. Perhaps the carbon rotors’ rate of retardation is a shade more predictable, but they’re also noisier, more expensive and not as effective when cold and wet. And yes, the 540C’s cabin decor is less ornate than that of its pricier siblings, but we actually enjoyed the simplicity, which did nothing to disguise the abiding impression of quality.

The most telling comment came from a man shepherding two little boys into a service station, where we’d stopped for fuel. “That’s the McLaren P1, boys,” said the seen-it-all dad. “It’s worth over a million pounds.” As the kids stared at us like we were superheroes, I tried to smile an ordinary smile. Correcting their dad would only have put him down. But his comment stood for the impression of several we encountered: this was a McLaren, which made it very, very special. I felt a pang of triumphant sorrow, if such a thing exists, for the many dozens of car owners we must have passed in a day’s driving who had spent £126,000 on vehicles of less impact.