With 710 horsepower (or 530 kW) and 568 lb-ft (770 Nm) of torque on tap, and all the technology that one of the world’s leading racing constructors can throw behind it, there was never any question that the McLaren 720S would be fast.
It’ll run to 62 mph (100 km/h) in under three seconds and top out at 212 mph (341 km/h), according to the manufacturer. But just how fast does its transmission shift gears?
That’s precisely what this latest video review aims to find out. And that, as it turns out, may have been a task more difficult than originally anticipated.
The 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 in the 720S comes mated to a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox that McLaren calls “seamless-shift,” and with good reason. The quick-shifting transmissions in supercars like this are known to swap cogs in a matter of milliseconds – even quicker than the previous (and more hardcore) 675LT, and far quicker, at any rate, than even a professional driver could row an old-school manual, and more than a match for the rest of the supercar’s capabilities.
To measure just how quick McLaren’s gearbox can shift, Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained brought along a highly precise VBox DataLogger telematics device, which draws data from an array of satellites to measure with pinpoint accuracy a vehicle’s performance. The idea was to see where along the acceleration curve the gearbox was switching sprockets. But as you can see from the ten-minute segment, the McLaren proved faster than the data-logger could measure. Which is pretty damn impressive, if you ask us.