McLaren 650S Spider: car review | Martin Love

Few cars can match the performance of a McLaren on the road or the track, but from the air it's a sitting target"

The word McLaren sends a shiver of expectation down the spine of anyone who thinks life on four wheels is how God intended us to spend our most fulfilled moments. On the track it's the most successful marque in Formula 1 history, the car in which Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Lewis Hamilton and co have smashed records and set pulses racing. On the road it is sure-footed, sublime and intoxicatingly faaaaaaaaast" But no one had bothered to tell the large woodpigeon that swooped over me as I whipped the open-topped McLaren 650S along a country lane in Northamptonshire. It unloaded a colossal pile of guano which hit me square in the forehead before exploding over my face and splattering over the instrument panel and the immaculate suede lining of the doors. A real life angry bird!

It's a sign of luck, they say, but when you are at the wheel of a McLaren you don't need anyone to tell you how fortunate you are. The road cars take their lead from 1993's seminal McLaren F1 - a car which caused a proper hoo-ha when it was launched. Back then it was the world's fastest production car (240mph), used real gold in the engine and cost 635,000. Only 106 were made and today each is worth at least 10m. Back then it used to take about 3,000 hours to make each carbon-fibre chassis, today it takes four hours to create the carbon MonoCell at the heart of the 650S.