McLaren has introduced the new 600LT Spider just as we knew they would.
No matter what car McLaren makes, a convertible version is never too far away. When the 600LT arrived earlier last summer, it was just a matter of time before McLaren’s team of speed demons decided to chop the roof off and call it a Spider.
And so it has finally come to pass. The 600LT Spider has a retractable hardtop roof that stows neatly behind the seats in a soft tonneau cover. The whole apparatus adds an additional 110 lbs to the 600LT’s dry weight which still comes in at under 3,000 lbs--2,859.4 lbs to be precise. That’s still 220 lbs lighter than the original 570S that the car is built on.
Best of all, no additional strengthening of the chassis was required as a result of cutting off the roof. The 600LT’s carbon fiber monocoque MonoCell II chassis doesn’t seem to mind the lack of a sturdy top at all.
Under the hood is the same 3.8-L twin-turbo V8 that we’ve come to know and love, tuned to produce 592 hp and 457 lb-ft of torque. Once again McLaren’s engineers have accomplished incredible feats with the Spider by retaining the car’s 0-62 mph time of just 2.9 seconds. Zero to 124 mph is done in 8.4 seconds which is 0.2 seconds slower than the regular 600LT, but not so much that you’d notice.
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Top speed is 201 mph with the roof up and 196 mph with the roof down. Not that we’d expect to see anyone do 196 mph with the roof down. That’d just be asking to eat as many flying insects as exist in this world.
The retractable hardtop can raise or lower at under 25 mph, but becomes locked if you’re going faster.
McLaren says that a limited number of 600LT Spiders will be produced, although they don’t say just how many they’ll make. Each one will start at $260,000, depending on the exchange rate.