At this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, the McLaren 570S added some letters to its name and lost its fixed top panel. The McLaren 570S Spider joins the base 570S, 570GT and 540C in McLaren’s Sport Series line of more affordable supercars. McLaren says the retractable hardtop borrows tech from the more upmarket 650S and 675LT Spiders but only tacks on an additional 101 pounds.
Short of the open-air cabin, the 570S Spider is about the same as its fixed-top brethren. Powering the supercar is a 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged V8 making 562 hp and 442 lb-ft of twist. That’s good enough to hustle from a dead stop to 62 mph in 3.2 seconds, and if you don’t lift, you’ll eventually find the 570S Spider’s 204-mph top speed. Opening or closing the roof takes nearly five times as long as the car takes to hit highway speeds — you’re looking at 15 seconds to go from open-air cruising to a closed cabin or the other way around. McLaren did add an extra 0.472 of an inch to the rear spoiler to help deal with the slightly different body shape.
2016 McLaren 570S drive review: Get noticed
The first thing I thought when I looked at this car, and its price, was that the McLaren 570S is Porsche-911-Turbo-S money. They’re both supercars, by any stretch of the definition; they both …
As Automotive News points out, this new addition to the Sport Series could be a move to help fund the company’s electric endeavors. When McLaren added the 570S and 570GT to its Sport Series lineup in 2015, sales spiked. McLaren’s sales climbed to 3,286 cars last year, almost twice as many as the 1,649 cars the company moved in 2014. That adds up to nearly 70 percent more profit before taxes, according to Automotive News Europe. That’s necessary revenue for costly technology development.
Adding another version of its volume-moving supercars is a win for everyone –- customers who were turned off by only closed-coupe McLaren 570S cars can now experience wind in the hair, and McLaren can focus on developing technologies to make its cars more competitive on and off track.
If you’re looking for one of these 570S Spiders, it’ll set you back around $213,703. Of course, that’s a current conversion of the price for the U.K., so U.S. pricing may vary.
At the same time, McLaren patriarch Ron Dennis announced he’s selling his shares in the company and will step down as chairman; Dennis was already forced out as chief executive officer after clashing with majority shareholders Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Co. and TAG Group. The move ends 37 years of Dennis’ involvement with McLaren Automotive.