Juliana here. I picked this car at Col de Turini because I trusted the math before I’d even driven it, and by the bottom of the descent, the math had done exactly what I expected it to do.
30 kilograms, and why that number is the whole story
750 hp is the headline, and it’s a real number worth taking seriously. But the number I actually care about is 30 — the kilograms McLaren cut between the 720S Spider and this car. That’s not one dramatic engineering breakthrough; it’s lighter wheels, revised bodywork, a lighter exhaust system, dozens of smaller decisions that add up to a car that turns in faster, brakes shorter, and changes direction with less inertia to fight against, without giving up a meaningful amount of the outgoing car’s outright pace.
Why weight matters more than horsepower on a real road
Anyone can chase a bigger horsepower number — it’s the easiest engineering problem to solve with money. Cutting weight without giving up structural integrity, especially on a convertible where the roof mechanism and chassis reinforcement already add mass the coupe doesn’t carry, is the harder problem, and it’s the one that actually pays off on a road with real corners rather than a straight-line dyno chart. This is the exact argument I made at Col de Turini, and it’s the reason I picked this car over two rivals with their own legitimate cases.
What actually happened at Col de Turini
I drove this car against a Ferrari F8 Spider and a Ferrari 488 Spider on the Monte Carlo Rally’s most famous stage, and the 30-kilo weight advantage showed up exactly where I said it would — through the tighter switchbacks, where less mass to redirect meant less work for the chassis every single time the road changed direction. It wasn’t a blowout. Both Ferraris made real cases of their own. But by the bottom of the descent, the lightest car in the test was also the one that felt most in control of itself. Read the full road test.
Where it sits in this fleet
The 750S Spider is currently the lightest spider in this fleet, ahead of both the Ferrari and Lamborghini convertibles it regularly gets cross-shopped against — a genuinely different engineering priority from cars chasing bigger horsepower figures, and the reason I keep coming back to it.
The McLaren 750S Spider is bookable out of Monaco, the French Riviera, Munich, and Paris. Get in touch if you’d like to drive it yourself — or read the full Turini test to see exactly how it won.