The rear-wheel-drive, mid-engine McLaren offers poise that's unusual for a GT car, coupled with an agility that even the Porsche 911 Turbo S struggles to match. It's true that McLaren has tried to soften the GT a little relative to its more hardcore 570S and 720S — there's a little more body roll and the steering is a tad less responsive — but all things are relative. Anyone jumping out of a Bentley Continental GT will still be shocked by just how sporting the McLaren is.
Nor should you expect the effortless, lazy thrust of a Bentley. You have to work pretty hard for the engine's performance, crazy as that might sound for a car with 612 horsepower and 465 lb-ft of torque from its turbocharged 4.0-liter V8. Leave the seven-speed sequential shift gearbox in auto mode and it needs to drop several gears before it starts making decent progress. Most GT rivals feel far more urgent for more of the time than the McLaren. That's exacerbated if you're in manual mode and lazy with the paddles (as a GT driver might expect to be) since the engine needs a minimum of 3,000 rpm on the rev counter before there's anything in the way of real pace.
Admittedly, above about 4,000 rpm the power comes on with convincing force. That does mean you'll sometimes find yourself arriving at corners a bit faster than you might anticipate. The GT is genuinely supercar fast with a claimed 0-60 mph time of 3.1 seconds and 203-mph potential top speed. We only wish it sounded a bit better. In common with other McLarens, the engine does not have the sonorous appeal of a Bentley V8 or a Porsche flat-six.