McLaren 750S Spider navigating a scenic mountain road surrounded by trees, shot at speed with slight motion blur.” width=”970″ height=”546″ data-caption=’The 2025 McLaren 750S Spider is not a mortal car—or for mere mortals. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy McLaren/Beadyeye</span>’>
The McLaren 750S Spider was making its way around town last month, and I begged myself into the seat. The fact that I’m still around to write this is less a testament to my incredible skills as a driver than it is to the fact that I only got to drive the 750S for three days. My bone density is still good, my teeth are still intact, and whatever hair I have left is gone forever to the Texas Hill Country wind. The car shook me to the core, and my thighs are still vibrating.
This 750S is a supercar—one of the most super supercars anyone could possibly own short of having a stake in an actual Formula 1 vehicle. Its segment includes the Lamborghini Revuelto and various Ferraris, including the $2 million-plus Ferrari Daytona SP3. The version I drove, fully tricked-out including a $1,000 “Gas Guzzler tax,” topped out at $444,180. This car is the mortgage, the life’s savings. It devours worlds.
It replaces McLaren’s 720S, gone and, I guess, forgotten, given the specs on the 750S, with a twin-turbocharged and intercooled 32-valve V8 engine that yields an absolutely ridiculous 740 horsepower and 590 pound-feet of torque. The car goes from zero to 60 in less than two and a half seconds, which has got to be close to a land speed record for a consumer car. It can reach a top speed of 206 miles per hour, which I didn’t reach, given that, as I said before, I’m still alive. You can get close to that level of performance in “Comfort” mode. If you press a “Launch” button and jack it into Track mode, the engine roars angrily, the cockpit seems to swirl orange around, and you hang on to the dual clutch paddles, hoping you don’t make a mistake.
Before I describe what it was actually like to drive this car (dangerous but fun), a few words on the design. “Gorgeous” cannot suffice, like saying that an actor at the height of their beauty “stuns on the red carpet.” It has, the spec sheet says, a “Carbon Fibre Monocage chassis with rear extruded aluminum subframe” with “Twin Hinge Dihedral Doors” that open in the gull-wing style. This means the car is low to the ground—extremely low, like sheet-of-paper low, basically flat. When I walked out the front door in the morning, I had to look over to my regular vehicle to make sure the McLaren was still there. It hugs the ground in plain sight.
The color was “Elite Belize Blue,” so arresting and snazzy that it turned heads wherever I took it. People were stopping in front of my house to take photos all week. At least, that’s what I assume they were doing—I don’t think they were snapping the crumbling concrete blocks in front of my home. Everyone wanted to have a look at this magnificent thing. The two-seat interior is more spare, almost like a race-car cockpit. McLaren made this flagship for people to admire on the runway.
The 750S generates pure, raw, aerodynamic power. Driving it isn’t easy. It rips down the road aggressively, almost disdainfully, as though it’s trying to tell you it belongs in a race, not on the path to the grocery store. While I had to admire the purity of the ride, it was like admiring a fighter jet, with a retractable roof, in full flight. This is not a mortal car, or a car for mortals.
Along those lines, there’s basically no storage space. The “frunk” is barely big enough to hold a travel backpack. And there’s no space for anything else. The car is so low that if you go over a speed bump, or attempt a parking lot driveway with any kind of an incline, you have to press a button to raise the chassis, or the chassis will scrape.
Spoiler alert: You will forget to raise it sometimes, and you will scrape the chassis. The chassis was scraped when I got the car, and I scraped it at least twice while I had it, and, believe me, I wasn’t being reckless with this $400,000-plus car. The scrapes weren’t visible, but I could feel underneath the front bumper, barely high enough for a snake to slither under. When I informed McLaren I’d scraped the chassis, they told me not to worry about it. It’s been scraped before, they said, and someone will scrape it again. That’s the nature of this car, though. This is a car for scraping. It gets into scrapes.
The 750S is not a daily driver, unless you never have any passengers, don’t need to haul anything more than a plastic bag from a convenience store, and like getting 15 mpg from the city. Anyone who owns this will garage it and then occasionally drive it on hot-shot nights out, tossing the keys insouciantly to the valet, and then buy some track time when the mood strikes. The 750S comes from a maker with a racing pedigree. It longs for the track, it craves the track. If you own one, your life will be a track.
