2020 McLaren GT

This is not the first Suspension Deep Dive I’ve written that featured a McLaren. The last one happened just over 10 years ago, if you can believe it, after a colleague and I had the chance to photograph an early naked rolling chassis of the MP4-12C before it went on sale. But this McLaren GT came to me as a fully operational machine, which allowed me to scrutinize it in my own driveway. That meant using my own tools, of course, which was frankly nerve-wracking when it came time to lift it. But it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, as the jack points (more like zones) were clearly marked with stickers that depicted a floor jack icon that looked encouragingly like my own aluminum race jack. What’s more, I’d recently bought soft rubber jack and jackstand pads meant for safely supporting vehicles such as this. Thing is, the GT sat so low that I couldn’t slide my floor jack underneath without additional measures. In front, this simply meant raising the car’s nose lift, which we’ll see later. But the rear has no such system. To gain the needed clearance I had to drive this quarter-million-dollar GT up onto a 2x6 laid flat on a square of plywood as if I were leveling a motorhome to make the fridge work properly. Yes, really.   Even with the front wheel safely removed, the GT’s huge carbon-ceramic brake rotor blocks most of the view and makes it hard to see much of anything else. The main exception is the top end of what looks like a somewhat familiar damper assembly.   Like the MP4-12C and 720S, the McLaren GT’s shocks are inverted to minimize unsprung mass. The damper’s narrow shaft (green arrow, and hidden by a protective telescopic boot) makes up the moving end at the bottom, while the more massive business end and its horizontally arrayed and electronically controlled damper valves (yellow) are fixed to the chassis at the top. The higher of the two lumps is the compression valve, the lower one is the rebound valve. The McLaren GT parts ways with the MP4-12C and 720S at this point in a big way. Those Super Series cars have a kinetic hydraulic roll stabilization system, in which transverse piping links the compression valve on this side to the rebound valve on the opposite side, and vice-versa. But here we see a traditional stabilizer bar (red) of the same sort as the 570GT and 570S, albeit with a different specification that befits the GT’s role as, well, a GT. But the GT isn’t entirely like the 570 series, either, because here the electronic dampers use the 720S’s advanced sensor suite and its Proactive Damping Control software that analyzes driver inputs and the incoming road surface using something McLaren calls Optimal Control Theory in order to project forward from the current condition and predict what the car will need in the very near future. The idea is to deliver the damping force the …
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