Head to Head: Tuned 911 Turbo S vs. McLaren 765LT Spider
In stock form, a race between these cars wouldn’t be much of a contest. But this tuned 911 Turbo is far from stock.
You don’t have to be an automotive expert to understand that the Porsche 911 Turbo S and the McLaren 765 LT Spider are fast cars. Seriously, a toddler could tell just by looking at them. And you can also tell they’re in wildly different leagues when it comes to performance and price. In stock form, a drag race between the pair isn’t a fair fight, and toward the beginning of this new video from our friends at Drag Times, host Brooks Weisblat reveals footage which proves it. Spoiler alert — the McLaren clobbers the Porsche.
But the tuned 911 Turbo S in this clip isn’t your ordinary Porsche. The 3.7-liter flat six has been tuned by the folks at M Engineering, and sports upgraded turbos, intercoolers, and with a high-flow exhaust, along with with a tank full of weapons-grade race fuel. After those mods, this all-wheel drive monster is putting down a whopping 910 horsepower at the tire. Here’s hoping the eight-speed DCT has been upgraded as well, because that figure is far north of 650 with it had when it left Stuttgart.
In the opposing corner, we have a bone-stock McLaren 765LT Spider. While Weisblat says it doesn’t feel quite as quick as its closed-top sibling, the specs are still impressive. The twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 is good for 755 horsepower at the crank, and it sends all that poke exclusively to the rear meats. While it’s down on power compared to the Porsche, at 3,130 pounds, it’s also around 400 pounds lighter. So the question is whether the lack of weight will be able to compensate for the lack of power and grip. And the answer is, kind of.
In this face off, everything ends in a two-to-two draw. But that doesn’t make the races any less exciting, and seeing how well the Porsche is able to hook up off the line is beyond impressive. Dropping the hammer in that baby must make you feel like you’ve been shot out of a cannon. That said, one of the things I found most impressive about this clip was how the McLaren was able to perform all these hard launches in such a short time frame. After all, it wasn’t designed for the strip, and my understanding is that — even by exotic car standards — reliability is still a challenge for Woking’s hardware.
Photos: YouTube
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