Of all the manufacturers out there making cars in the world, you'd think that McLaren, a mainstay name in Formula 1, one part of the "holy trinity", maker of arguably the best car ever made and of some of the best drivers' cars today, would be the least interested in playing pretend with a Vision Gran Turismo car. But lo and behold, the power of peacocking compels, and the McLaren VGT bowed in late 2017 right before the release of Gran Turismo Sport.
Oh, I'm sorry, the McLaren Ultimate Vision Gran Turismo. (Christ...)
Things certainly look plenty exciting in the reveal trailer! The McVGT strikes an impeccable balance between fantasy and reality, with a design that is outlandish with a clear divide from the norm, but not improbable. There's of course the inboard, yet exposed brakes, but most striking to me is the driving position of the car, which has the driver prone on their stomach, which not only allows for greater and more direct visibility to the front wheels, but also allows the bodywork to have minimal frontial area to reduce drag.
I never drive in cockpit view because Gran Turismo Sport doesn't allow for Field of Vision adjustment in the cockpit, but if you were to ask me to race one car in cockpit view only, the McVGT is the car that has given me the most comfortable and natural view of all the cars I've driven in the game thus far. In fact, I would even go as far as to say the McVGT gives the Ultimate view out of any cockpit, on par with that of open wheelers! Being able to see the insides of the front tyre housings through the bare carbon slats that form the structure of the cockpit just feels so natural, just so "right", I can't describe it, and the whole cockpit is set so low to the ground, making me feel like I were truly laying on the road! I imagine if I had the car in real life, I could just trot it up an unfamiliar road at snail's pace just to really study the road surface before an all–out run. The HUD, visible as a mirrored image from the outside, is not only hugely convenient and informative, but is also such a cool touch as well! I think this is the first time a VGT has ever tickled that imaginitive 10–year–old inside me, which may or may not be the obvious point of these cars that I've become way too jaded a person to see.
Nitpicks? Of course I have some—this is a VGT car, after all. I've no idea what the point of having a track map is on the HUD. It's not like I'm consulting it to know the layout of the course as though Suzuka is a rallycross stage, am I? I could think of a few, much more useful tidbits of information I'd rather have, such as... oh I dunno, a mirror or camera, perhaps? Maybe the Ultimate VGT is too Ultimate to worry about having other non–Ultimates behind it, I dunno. I also like my endurance racers to measure fuel in litres to two decimal places, like real GT3 cars do. Hard to ascertain exactly how much fuel I'm using per lap and ration out the remainder with just a tiny bar to the right, you know?
The McLaren Ultimate VGT comes in three paint schemes: Performance, Noir de Noir, and Ulterior Future (what, not Ultimate Future?). Even if you're the creative type that wants to try their hand at decorating the heinously complex structure of the car, you'll want to choose a base colour that closely represents the design you have in mind for the car, as each base colour comes with its own corresponding driver outfit, which to my knowledge, cannot be changed. It's a really neat detail to have three seperate suit designs for the car, when most VGTs don't even bother with a rendered interior.
On the flipside of that futuristic skin of bare carbon however, the Ultimate VGT is surprisingly modern, perhaps too much so. Despite being named otherwise, the twin–turbocharged V8 unit in the Ultimate VGT sounds distinctively like the M838T engine that has been in every McLaren road car since 2010, and you'll hear the distinct whines and wheezes of a MP4-12C and a 650S when you wring out the McVGT. That means that you can still make bad and largely false jokes about how the Ultimate VGT still has the heart of a 20–year–old Nissan despite claiming to envision a future 20 years ahead. Where it differentiates itself from currently existing McLarens you can order is that the McVGT's engine not only has its displacement increased to 3,998cc, but it also has been hooked up to a hybrid KERS system, resulting in a peak combined output of a staggering 1,134HP (846kW), which us laymen can only refer to as Ultimate Power*.
*"Ultimate Power" has been nerfed to 936HP, 698kW, in the Gr.1 variant before current BoP takes its 10% cut of that.
The way the hybrid system works in practice is a little convoluted. The electric motors only kick in to propel the car from 3rd gear onwards and only past a certain point in the throttle pedal's travel, and the batteries that power them appear to be rather low in capacity relative to the output of the motors. I say this because the car will completely exhaust a full charge in a single acceleration burst from 3rd to mid 5th. That might sound underwhelming, until you put into context that you just went from 160km/h to 255km/h in just over four seconds (that's 99 to 158mph) on a full charge! The KERS system of course harvests energy on braking, but for some odd reason I can't at all fathom, the batteries not only charge up slowly under braking, but they also seem to charge just as quickly as when off the brakes and on partial throttle, and I don't hear the engine revving higher to both propel the car and charge the batteries simultaneously as one would in a Honda Fit Hybrid, for example. Because of this rather inefficient regen, it's rare to even have half a full charge out of any corner on most circuits we ran, with the outstanding exception being Interlagos—through the twisty and convoluted infield of Interlagos with successive 1st and 2nd gear corners where the car can't stretch its legs, the ICE ends up charging the batteries to full, thereby squandering away charge under braking when the batteries are topped out. It really is a shame that when the car's overall power output was dropped for Gr.1, both the motors and ICE had their power cut by the same percentage, instead of leaving the ICE on full strength and having a much less aggressive setup on the motors to let it preserve its charge more and avoid wasting any regen. That would certainly help it feel more consistent to drive as well.
I say that because, to drive, the McVGT might well be the ultimate disaster.
Usually, my complaints about how a car drives start from when I'm afforded control of it. I mean, how else does one write an opinion piece if he has not experienced it himself, right? As if to answer that rhetorical question however, the McVGT understeered into and smacked the pit wall on the run out of Interlagos' pit lane under Auto Drive as my first experience with the car during race day.. If that's not a surefire sign that I'm in for a torrid time, then I don't know what is. For some context, even the FF Nissan GT-R LM Nismo cleanly avoids the grass that leads to said wall under the same conditions. Admittedly, upon further testing, this wall smacking is far from a 100% occurrence, but I've managed to replicate it nonetheless to get my screenshot proof just by exiting and re–entering the session a few times. Also, you know what they say about first impressions, and this is my first impression of the car.
Despite being puzzlingly listed as an MR in the game, the McVGT has been explicitly stated in its car description to have electric motors that drive the front wheels, making it similar in drivetrain layout to existing LMP1 cars such as the Toyota TS050 and Porsche 919. What this results in is that upon power application, the front wheels can easily become overwhelmed trying to put down all that torque of the electric motors, resulting in the car "locking up" and refusing to turn not unlike the sensation you get when locking up when braking without ABS, only this time on throttle instead of the brakes. As previously mentioned, the electric motors only engage past a certain point in the throttle pedal's travel, meaning that at one moment, you'll only have a fraction of the ICE's power as it's charging the batteries while propelling the car, and the very next moment, you're smacked in the face with the full ICE power plus the shove of the electric motors, resulting in understeer so severe and sudden that even Auto Drive can't deal with. As you can tell, this makes planning a smooth, neat, gradual line out of a corner completely impossible, and you'll find yourself lifting a few times in the acceleration zones out of a corner to mitigate the sudden, explosive understeer that comes with that abrupt jump in power. It really is quite crass. Even FF hatchbacks can trace a neater and more consistent line out of corners.
To get to that point where the motors would cause problems however, would involve braking for a corner and surviving the turn–in, which is quite a tall order even without all the blood rushing to your head from all the longitudinal g forces and the prone driving position. The Ultimate VGT with Ultimate Power also comes with the stopping power to match, granted, but to achieve those stupendously short stopping distances, the ABS in the car spares nothing in the friction circle to let the car turn when using the default (and strongest) ABS setting, with the front tyres chirping loudly under full braking even on a level, dry road. Turn the wheel of the car in this state, and the front end understandably understeers, but what you will NOT expect is the rear end violently swinging out, causing the front end of the car to continue its straight trajectory, but now with very unwelcome and unusable yaw angle that will most likely cause the car to torpedo into the inside wall of a turn and kill its driver lest he can Chaos Control out of the car mid drive, because I don't know if airbags are enough to preserve your life in a frontial crash when the momentum of your body from the neck down compresses upon said neck and you end up French kissing glowing red hot angle grinders that are the brake discs inside the cockpit with you. So yes, under trail braking, the front end understeers and the rear end oversteers, and I don't know about you, but I much prefer to have the complete opposite of that in a car.
The spicy rear end I believe is caused by McLaren's signature brake vectoring, wherein the car applies a little more braking force to the inside wheels when turning to help the car rotate. In the MP4/12 Formula 1 car that pioneered this idea, the feature was activated via a second brake pedal controlled by the driver, and in the road cars that have had the system since, they were at least advertised and had rather mild effects, so you could prepare for it if you even noticed it. In the Ultimate? Same pedal, no mention of it anywhere, and it causes near instant death. You found out about it only by oversteering under braking and damn near killing yourself. Not very user friendly, methinks, but I don't suppose an Ultimate needs to explain themselves to us peasants. Even after the initial shock of damn near killing myself, I find myself forced to brake gradually and only in a straight line, and then almost completely letting off the brake pedal before daring to input any steering angle. It makes me drive the car so gingerly and corner so slowly that I once got taken round the outside by Vic's 919 at Spa's Paul Frère! Say what you want about the insane speed of the man, but being taken round the outside is still a new low for me, and the McVGT is the one that took that cherry of humiliation for me. Maybe if there were an option to adjust the severity of the brake vectoring, it could be useful, but as it is currently, it's just daft and downright dangerous.
Due to the car's horrendous inconsistency with its braking and power delivery, coupled with the usual shenanigans of following high downforce cars in a downforce reliant car yourself, all combine to mean that precisely placing the car, which regularly exceeds 300km/h even on modestly sized circuits, is the ultimate crapshoot I suspect even the Ultimate life form would struggle with. I'm no Shadow the Hedgehog, so I end up having to leave football fields worth of buffer zones in braking and turning in anticipation for the car's inconsistency, which not only meant that I never dared to even find the car's limits, let alone stay near them even in a race, but it also adds yet another layer of danger to the experience, as my peers wouldn't know when I'd brake and turn, because I didn't know when my car will stop and turn. Just ask Rick, whom I wiped out twice on race day, once by braking way earlier than he expected for Suzuka's Casio Triangle, and when I nudged him wide at Spa's No Name. I wasn't sure if I even made contact in the latter incident, and so I asked him if I nudged him, to which he replies, "I have no idea lol". THAT'S how bloody inconsistent and unwieldy the car is—we don't even know if the car itself is sending itself off the track, or if someone else pushed us! The driving experience of the McVGT is so taxing that it screws with the internal stopwatch in my head, and I often cross the Start/Finish line thinking, "are we not done?!" Races always felt twice as long as I've come expect, even in something that laps tracks in half the time as the machinery I'm usually driving.
After just two races, I begged for Balance of Performance to be enabled so I could bring something else just to prove a point: the Mazda LM55 VGT Gr.1. The driver sits upright in it. It's got an engine without turbos or hybrid systems. That engine is hooked up to a gearbox. Gearbox sends power to the wheels, which have traditional brakes attached to them. And it utterly destroyed the "Ultimates" around Dragon Trail: Seaside. And yes, our COTW resident Stig, Vic, was in one such "Ultimate" as well.
(I mean yes he was held up my other competitors, but if you've ever partaken in a race with us, you'll know how big a deal winning a race against Vic is, so just let me have my moment, okay?!)
Let's be clear: with Balance of Performance applied, the LM55 isn't really much faster than the Ultimate, if at all. It most likely doesn't have the fuel economy of the McLaren either. But it is just so much easier to drive! At least the Mazda gives me the option of running out of fuel instead of killing me way before I've used a tenth of the tank! The Mazda behaves exactly as I intuit it, and I was at ease the whole race. I wasn't leaving acres of buffer room waiting for the car to betray me. I wasn't worried about it changing between its tens of personalities mid race on me, It was much more consistent, its limits came gradually and with ample buildup and warning, allowing me to stay near or at the limits from lights to flag. It proves that having 600HP going through 4 wheels doesn't have to be scary. And that comes from a company that has a 120HP FR Roadster as its sportiest product. What excuse has McLaren to be utterly destroyed by a Mazda on a track? What is the point of all those gimmicks like brake vectoring and hybrid systems if conventional engineering can perform just as well, if not better?
After that Ultimate humiliation, I can't help but to wonder what exactly is the point of VGT cars. With real cars that handle terribly in the game, one could at least make the excuse of, "well the simplistic simcade physics of Gran Turismo Sport likely can't replicate all the complex systems at work in the real car," or that "the default suspension alignment really do these cars a disservice," and I truly believe in those statements, because I've cited those reasons to explain why certain cars just drove like coffins on wheels. But with a VGT, especially one from late 2017 like the McLaren, it has no excuse to drive as terribly as it does, because Gran Turismo Sport is the only medium in which it exists. It needs only to perform and impress here, and nowhere else, and it conversely has nothing to fall back on as an excuse or saving grace if it sucks. Polyphony Digital didn't have to adapt, scan, or measure anything to replicate in the game—because it was built from the ground up FOR this game! And so the only reason I can think of as to why the McVGT handles as terribly as it does in this game is that it handles this way by design. It was the creators' intent that this thing handles as snappy, inconsistent, and counterintuitive as it is. And I just can't bloody figure out why a company would willingly besmirch their good name like that in an exercise to proclaim themselves to be the Ultimate. For many other car manufacturers, I might understand the need. But from McLaren of all companies? I just don't get it.
The McLaren Ultimate Vision Gran Turismo may not be the "Ultimate VGT", but it may well end up as the ultimate beater of 2022 here in Car of the Week.
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