Things I learned driving a supercar for the first time

But I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. After getting the download on the knobs and buttons that adjust the McLaren’s drivetrain on a sliding scale between "stupid fast" and "pants-shittingly fast," I was handed a smooth, pebble-shaped key and cautioned not to bottom out the low-slung 650S on a driveway. That left me with an upsetting vision in my head of the glossy, meticulously woven carbon fiber splitter scraping against asphalt while innocently trying to turn into a Dairy Queen.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a valid concern. But left unsaid were dozens or perhaps hundreds of other rules and idiosyncrasies involved with driving a car like this — ranging from "Don’t enter a Fast & Furious-style street race" to "Don’t test the rated top speed of 207 mph on the Long Island Expressway." Most of these rules I inferred; some I learned as I went. Others, I suspect, are unknowable unless you’re an actual billionaire with a garage full of these things.

The 650S Spider is the convertible version of McLaren’s mid-level model, slotting between the recently-announced 570S and the P1 hypercar — it plays in roughly the same space as Ferrari’s 488 GTB and the Lamborghini Huracán. Of course, I use the term "mid-level" very, very loosely here: the base 650S coupe starts at over $260,000, and you can spend basically as much as you want on options, customization, and the Spider’s mesmerizing electric hardtop. (Tack on an extra $90,000 or so for the limited-edition, hardcore 675LT.) This car is the refreshed version of the MP4-12C, which was McLaren’s first proper self-badged road car since the legendary F1. (The company spent those intervening years racing, working with Mercedes on the SLR, and growing a substantial engineering consulting business, among other things.)

For that money, the 650S looks and acts the part. It has 650 horsepower on tap from a high-revving 3.8-liter twin-turbo V-8 mated to a 7-speed dual-clutch gearbox. But what truly separates a supercar from a garden-variety sports car is its weight: this British machine tips the scales nearly 1,000 pounds lighter than a BMW M4, for instance, which gives it a supernatural power-to-weight ratio.

But this isn’t really about the 650S. (You can already read great reviews of it here, here, and here.) I don’t have the street knowledge to compare it against its contemporaries — but I can tell you that as I cruised the city, schlepped out to Long Beach, and braved the traffic north to Crotonville, I found it to be a superlative car in basically every possible sense of the word.

This is about what it’s like to drive a supercar for the very first time, and to do it in the unforgiving streets and avenues of New York. Here’s what I learned.

1. You can’t sleep on parking

Days before I took delivery of the McLaren, I realized I had to solve a pressing but mundane problem: parking. It’s not as much of an issue in the ‘burbs, but this is Manhattan we’re talking about: I’m based here, my office is here, and my pickup spot was Manhattan’s Classic Car Club. I had no way around it. Cars are basically virii here, foreign objects that the city’s infrastructure is designed to combat and expel.

Street parking never even entered the conversation, because I kept imagining a parked van inadvertently (or intentionally) using the McLaren’s wedgelike front end as a ramp. Garage parking in Manhattan is almost universally valeted, which, on the one hand, provides some measure of security — but also evokes the valet joyride scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Ultimately, I parked the 650S underneath the gleaming Time Warner Center complex — home to CNN, the unapologetically unaffordable Thomas Keller eatery Per Se, and the high-end Mandarin Oriental hotel — where I found a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Audi R8, and Mercedes-Benz SLS. Garaged amongst the cars of millionaires and billionaires, I figured, the McLaren would be properly cared for without drawing unwanted attention. That peace of mind cost me $60 per day, tax included.

Of course, $60-per-day parking isn’t a great long-term solution. The fact is, there’s no great long-term solution for keeping a car in Manhattan. Many garages offer monthly rates ranging from $400 to $600 or more, but you’ll usually pay several hundred extra as an "exotic surcharge" — presumably to cover the garage’s liability in the event your 650S meets an untimely demise.

Then again, none of this matters if you’re wealthy enough to afford a $300,000-plus car, does it?

2. You are now a piece of exotic meat

"He’s the guy from TV!" a man shouted to no one in particular, coming to a stop mid-crosswalk at an intersection while pointing at me. (For the record, I am not the guy from TV.)

I knew there’d be gawkers, but not like this.

I don’t know to what extent it was because the McLaren is an exotic among exotics — it doesn’t show up on the streets with the regularity of a Ferrari California or 458, a Gallardo, or an Aston Martin. But given that several people asked me "Is that a Lambo?," my suspicion is that it doesn’t matter.

The car doesn’t help its own cause. Even in white — a totally normal, un-supercar color — the exhaust growls an intoxicating note at idle with the subtlety of an air raid. While stopped at a light, pedestrians would run up to the car and take close-up pictures of the front and rear without saying a word. A couple of them asked for rides; one got angry with me when I declined. Putting the top up and closing the windows didn’t afford any sanctuary: people yelled at me as though I could hear them until I put the window down. It’s briefly entertaining, but at some point, I just wanted to disappear into the anonymity of the cabs and delivery trucks around me.

3. The ground clearance, or lack thereof, is no joke

Driving a car like this onto an incline — basically any driveway — is a surgical procedure that requires hyperactive situational awareness and a thought-out stratagem. Driving slowly and deliberately isn’t enough: if you don’t plan correctly, that just means you’ll scrape the undercarriage in excruciating slow motion. (And I don’t want to know what happens if you bottom out at high speed.)

The higher performance a car is, the lower it is to the ground. This isn’t just because it looks cool — lowering a car improves airflow and lowers its center of gravity, which can have a dramatic impact on handling. But unless they’re designed specifically for uncompromising performance, production vehicles don’t typically ride that close to the pavement, because real-world pavement sucks: it’s uneven, filled with holes, and in a perpetual state of disrepair. (Doubly so in New York City, where the roads are notoriously awful.) Supercars, of course, aren’t really designed for the real world.

Regardless, even if you live in an idyllic town with impeccably well-funded infrastructure, the occasional bump, imperfection, or driveway is unavoidable. Several manufacturers now offer a lifter system that can raise the front of the car by an inch or two on command; such a system is an option on the 650S, which gave me some degree of confidence when I needed to stop to get gas. (Actuating the system requires too much fiddling with the car’s user interface, but that’s neither here nor there.) Regardless, it doesn’t magically turn the car into a Jeep Wrangler — you still need to exercise a great deal of caution.

Similarly, even a small pothole will swallow a supercar whole. Just blocks away from picking it up, I ran the 650S at full speed over a seemingly shallow divot in the atrocious pavement that I didn’t see — I’m not sure I could’ve seen it from my vantage point. The entire car shuddered with a smack that woke me more effectively than the La Colombe coffee I’d just finished. It echoed in my brain for the next several hours. I can still hear it. No one wants to hear that sound; it’s the sound of sadness.

4. Other drivers are weirdly nice to you

I, like many, have a preconception about supercar drivers in that they are not good people. They think they’re better than you, they have considerably more money than they know what to do with, and — let’s be honest — much of it probably came from illicit sources. They’ll cut you off in traffic, wave their Black Card around at the bar, and leave a 12 percent tip. They’re inappropriately over- or underdressed at all times. The only exceptions to this rule are Magnum, Crockett, and Tubbs. (Actually, on second thought, there are no exceptions.)

This isn’t a fair stereotype, inasmuch as no stereotype is fair. And, in fact, I know good people who own supercars. But it’s a common stereotype nonetheless.

I didn’t experience any of this hatred. If anything, there was an almost surreal deference to my presence on the road. Even in nightmarish gridlock heading out into Long Island from the city and back, I could just start to drift into another lane (with or without my turn signal) and gawking drivers would get the hell out of my way. And on the every-man-for-himself streets of Midtown Manhattan, I made multiple errors — blocking the box, getting confused in Columbus Circle, standing in a No Standing zone in rush-hour traffic — without a single honk.

While this was wonderful for me as the driver, please, don’t afford supercars any special treatment. I would’ve honked at me.

5. Being quiet is not an option

If you don’t want to wake the neighbors or make heads snap like they’re on spring-loaded swivels, buy a Nissan Leaf. Or really, your average gasoline car with its civil, well-mannered exhaust will do just fine, too. Even at its most pedestrian powertrain settings, the 650S’s default sound is "very angry." The lightest tap on the accelerator unleashes a cacophony. If you let it spool up beyond 4,000 rpm or so — less than halfway to the 8,500 rpm redline — high-strung whistles from the two turbochargers join the symphony, right around the same point that light starts to bend and the front of the car tears a hole in the fabric of spacetime.

For car lovers, this is music, particularly when the combustion is happening just inches behind your head. The sounds of a meticulously tuned performance engine are a constant reminder of the barely-controlled chaos at your disposal. But for everyone else, this is a "look at me" signal that will attract either excitement or disdain at your conspicuous consumption with every turn you make. Sometimes that can be fun, but often, you just want to go about your business. This is not the car in which to merely go about your business.

6. Everything is terrifying

White knuckles, clenched rear: there was no moment in or around the 650S where I wasn’t analyzing the pavement ahead of me, calculating the trajectories of the drivers nearby, looking around for ill-meaning people, and planning an escape route for me and the vehicle should something start to break bad.

Driving a supercar is not a relaxing experience. There isn’t really an opportunity to revel in it, take it in. If anything, I’d put the stress level on par with, say, driving a box truck in an area crisscrossed by overpasses. The stressors are different, but the knot in my stomach was the same.

You could make the argument that a high-strung performance car like this shouldn’t be a relaxing experience. I hear that, but it’s not good for the heart. Just let me cruise down a twisty patch of asphalt without the constant fear that someone driving the other way is going to cross the double-yellow and level me, you know? Yes, that can happen in a $30,000 car just as easily as it can in a $300,000 one — but at least insurance is a no-questions-asked proposition on a normal car. I gathered from the lengthy contract I signed with McLaren that there would, in fact, be some questions involved had I wrecked it.

By my estimation, the only way to drive a supercar stress-free is to be so wealthy that a fender bender, a break-in, or a head-on collision with a whitetail deer will relieve you of an imperceptibly small percentage of your bank balance. That certainly doesn’t apply to me, and I bet it doesn’t apply to a significant fraction of real supercar owners, either.

7. It really is a religious experience

For all the hassles, living with a supercar is awesome. As a lifelong car guy, I’ll say that there’s absolutely nothing else like it. It helps that the McLaren 650S is so meticulously designed and livable — passengers commented that they were surprised at how much room they had, and the trunk compartment (which is in the front, since the engine is in the rear) is big enough for a couple people to disappear into the Hamptons for a few days. And I’m assuming that’s exactly how the moneyed couples who own these cars actually use them.

But the tao of the supercar isn’t merely a product of the raw power and the stunning looks: driving a car like this connects you to the machinery and the road in a way that other cars do not. The 650S made me feel like I was a quicker, more responsive, and more capable driver. Let me be clear, that effect is mostly psychological — a vehicle with this amount of power delivered to the rear wheels and a top speed north of 200 mph can both humble you and end your life — but it’s a euphoria that I don’t think you can get from any lesser car.

None of this matters in practice, because the 650S is an exceedingly rare car for rare people. You and I aren’t among them. But like many rare things, it’s a beacon of aspiration; an example of the incredible things humans can make when they put their minds to it. Even if you never drive it, its existence is somehow still exciting.

But yes, as I learned, driving it is pretty nice, too.

Verge Video at the New York International Auto Show: McLaren's "low-end" 570S is incredible