In this head-to-head McLaren LT showdown, we dive into the thrilling world of lightweight supercars with a full comparison of the McLaren 600LT Spider, 675LT Spider, and 765LT Spider.

Celebrating ten years of the McLaren LT series, from top-exit exhausts and carbon-ceramic brakes to mid-engine layouts and lightning-fast dual-clutch gearboxes.

Whether you’re interested in the McLaren 765LT price, the McLaren 675LT’s power, or the McLaren 600LT Spider’s top speed, this run-down delivers real-world insights into what makes these road cars track legends.”

Just imagine for a moment if McLarens like the McLaren 675LT or the later McLaren 765LT Spider were made not in Woking, but Modena. I’d not now be facing having to pepper the next few thousand words with ‘Long Tail’, a term devoid of flow, poetry or romance, but instead be relishing the prospect of punctuating my text with as many references to ‘Coda Lunga’ as I thought I could get away with. What is it about the Italian language that makes everything just sound better? Still, had they been built in Germany, they’d have all been ‘Langhecks’, which is even worse, at least to me. I think.

More recently, long-tail designs have been employed by racing cars both to increase the aerodynamic leverage on a rear wing and also create a larger surface area for negative pressure to be developed under the car. Not that today’s McLaren LT models, from the McLaren 675LT to the more extreme McLaren 765LT Spider—have especially long tails, or that the name was adopted in homage to some wildly successful McLaren racer of yore, unless it was referring to the long-tail version of the F1 GTR, which took second place in the 1997 FIA GT Championship.

Then again, the Porsche 911 GT3 wasn’t named after the now famed category of road-derived sports racing cars because said category didn’t even exist at the time, but rather because it already had a GT1 and GT2. But that’s what these cars are: to McLaren what GT3s are Porsche and Scuderias, Speciales and Pistas to Ferrari – high-performance versions of existing products designed not only to fill the coffers in their own right, but also to sprinkle some stardust upon the models from which they were derived. They’re here today first to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the original LT, but also to see how much they have progressed during the intervening decade, and to determine if all that progress has been necessarily in the right direction.

That original was the McLaren 675LT, launched to a rapturous reception in 2015, and rightly so. It wasn’t so much the additional 25bhp offered over the 650S from whence it sprang, but the almost obsessional lightweighting programme to which it had been subjected. The list is far too extensive to go into here but included carbon seats, carbon ceramic brakes, thinner glass, air-conditioning delete, carpet removal, lightweight wheels, additional carbon bodywork, titanium wheel nuts and even seat runners for the passenger relegated to the options list. When done, what was already the lightest car in the class was lighter still, to the tune of fully 100kg, giving a total weight, fuelled and ready to go, of 1328kg. A new vast deployable wing/airbrake combined with a much deeper front splitter and rear diffuser served to increase downforce by 40 per cent too.

McLaren said it would build just 500 examples, but when they sold out in less time than it takes to say ‘kerr-ching’, it kindly clarified that this would apply to the 675LT coupé, with another 500 Spiders toddling along in due course, somewhat to the chagrin of existing customers. Perhaps keen to avoid such confusion again, but more likely to play the same game as Porsche and Ferrari, which create the illusion of their LT equivalents being low-volume exclusive models when they’re nothing of the sort, when the 600LT was launched in 2018 McLaren declined to say how many it would make. Or, to be specific, it said the car was a ‘limited edition’ but then refused to say what that limit was. This created precisely the reverse outcome to that intended, resulting in a perception that McLaren was knocking them out at approximately the same rate as a Gatling gun dispenses ammunition. To this day there is no figure, official or otherwise, so I asked the question and was told that approximately 2000 600LTs were built in both coupé and Spider configuration, which I bet is far fewer than many think.

This time power was up by 30bhp over the standard 570S, while many of the same lightweighting techniques plus its signature titanium exhaust system with pipes protruding from the upper deck produced a weight loss of 96kg and proper kerbweight of 1356kg.

The 765LT, announced as the world locked down for Covid in March 2020, never looked likely to be close to 100kg lighter than its sire, the 720S, but only because the latter was already a preposterously light machine. But the power gain of 45bhp was the most significant of the three and dropping 80kg from what was already a featherweight design is not to be sniffed at. In the end it came in at 1338kg ready to roll, a mere 10kg more than the 675LT, despite an additional 90bhp and a 4-litre engine capacity compared to the 3.8-litre motors in the others. With bandages still wrapping its fingers from its 600LT experience, McLaren was extremely clear about 765LT production numbers, stating that 1530 cars would be produced for sale, split evenly into 765 unit runs for each of the coupé and Spider variants.

Now it just so happens that all three cars featured here are Spiders, adding approximately 50kg to each. But because all have carbon fibre monocoques they require none of the invisible bracing that would see the weight gain reach deep into three-figure territory were their structures hewn out of aluminium like those of rival Ferraris, leaving them to drive to all intents and purposes on a public road just like their coupé sisters.

I’ve driven over to our Welsh hillside location in the 675LT. I remember as if it were last week the car’s original launch at Silverstone and the surprise registered at my request to drive it on the road. They weren’t keen, as this was to them a track day car, but I managed to commandeer one for half an hour, enough for me to return to the circuit first questioning McLaren’s sanity in denying journalists the chance to drive it on the road and second convinced it was one of the best cars I’d ever driven. Not best supercars, or best McLarens, but best cars, period.

How would it feel now we’re both 10 years older? Certainly it still looks gorgeous, by a distance the prettiest of the three here and a strong claimant to being the best-looking McLaren to date, though I have a very soft spot for the 570GT. It still looks modern, at least on the outside, and I love those turbine wheels. Inside it is dated and you can tell from the feel and action of the switchgear just how much McLaren has striven in recent years to increase the sense of quality in its cabins.

It was like I had never been away. Despite all the intervening years I knew this car now as well as I ever did. I knew what it’s going to do and exactly how it was going to do it. Unlike its driver, it seemed to have aged barely a minute. There is something about a McLaren – and all three have it – that just puts your mind at rest. The deep glasshouse and the easily judged extremities are part of it, but in the main it is McLaren’s dogged insistence on retaining hydraulically assisted power steering that makes you feel so much more in touch with the road, that instils the confidence essential to getting the most out of such potent machinery, especially in public.

I took the long way to our location – of course I did – over the same road where we recently shot our Aston Martin Vanquish twin test, because I knew that would provide me with my benchmark for the day. And oh my goodness, how fabulous it felt. The performance is just containable. It means that while the engine can only be fully extended briefly, it is enough to send endorphins racing through your arteries. Yet you’re so comfortable – and I mean that more figuratively than literally, as the tight carbon bucket was built for chiselled whippet McLaren test drivers, not large middle-aged men – it never fails to put you at ease.

When at its very best, swooping into quick, difficult curves, its abilities remain breathtaking, even by 2025 standards. If you spot an exit point on the far side of the corner, you know that whatever lies between you and it, the 675LT will park you on that precise patch of tarmac with an accuracy that beggars belief for such a fine-riding road car. It’s part its clever roll-bar-free interconnected hydraulic suspension, part that steering, part aero, part the stiffness of its carbon tub and everything I love about driving McLarens fast.

It’s the kind of car which, if driven in isolation, you’d find very hard indeed to fault. I first drove it at the Hungaroring – McLaren this time point-blank refusing all entreaties to let me try it on the road – and concluded: ‘the 600LT is a fabulous device, a car so deftly judged I not only enjoyed driving it more than the P1, but I expect around a tight circuit the six-year-old hypercar would likely be slower, despite having half as much power again. It’s not really comparable to a Senna but compared to all other McLarens of the modern era, as a device in which to celebrate the pure joy of driving, only the 675LT is in the same league. And given that was one of my favourite road cars of all time, you can see what McLaren has achieved here.’

And I stand by all of that. Okay, almost all. The truth, which requires you to have both on hand to realise, is that the 675LT is not in the same league as the 600LT. It’s in the one above. You notice it first when you really extend the 600LT’s motor and find your foot staying flat to the floor for far longer than would ever have been possible in the 675. In itself that is no bad thing and avoids the frustration of having to lift off quite so quickly just as things were getting really exciting. But I thought you’d not really be able to feel its performance deficit on the public road and I was wrong about that: you absolutely can.

But the bigger difference comes when you present it with proper work to do. In many ways a race track is a more benign environment than the public road because they tend not to come with the severe undulations, camber and surface changes found in the mountains. And when you’re really driving, the 600LT simply lacks the chassis bandwidth of even the 675LT, let alone the 765LT which will be along in a moment.

In normal conditions its ride is pretty good, though less silken than the 675LT’s, but it’s when those really big inputs start to arrive that the real differences emerge. It wriggles and rolls a bit more, you’re aware of having to up your own work rate and can no longer take for granted that the car will cope with whatever is thrown at it with insouciant equanimity. There’s an upside here too, for the car definitely feels more alive, but in such machines at such speeds, the confidence inspired by the likes of the 675LT counts for more. That car’s freakish ability to apparently resurface the road milliseconds before you arrive is notable only by its absence in the 600LT. Curiously, this example also felt rather less well built than the other two, despite having only around 1000 miles on the clock, with the odd creak, rattle and permanent wind whistle all the way home.

Yet still it surprises. The car is a complete animal, the only one of the three that feels completely caged on roads like these. When the revs are up you simply don’t dare go near full throttle in it, and at first it’s not immediately obvious why. It’s a fraction heavier than the 675LT, and while an additional 90bhp is a lot, it’s not enough to explain by itself why the 765LT is alone here in feeling like a fully paid-up member of the hypercar class. Then you realise: it’s the combination of that power, plus an additional 74lb ft of torque and shorter gearing, that does the trick and all that force is ultimately transmitted through the rear wheels. You find yourself short-shifting at around 6500rpm – some 2000rpm short of peak power – just because the car’s easier to control that way. Here’s another way of looking at it: the Lamborghini Revuelto has 1001bhp and is, to date, the fastest car my chums at Autocar have ever tested. And its power-to-weight ratio is inferior to that of the 765LT. That is what we’re dealing with here.

Too much? Not really, but it does mark the 765LT out as a track car in a way the other two are not. It took me back to a lesson first learned at the wheel of a McLaren F1, on a drive up to and across the North Yorks Moors: driving it fast is not about balls-to-the-wall, damn-the-torpedoes ebullience, it’s about balancing saintly restraint with precisely meted, carefully considered, flawlessly executed moments of deployment. Anything else is going to hurt.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that. Indeed, you can feel how the trick suspension has evolved over the years since the 675LT, to provide an even broader sphere of operation, maintaining a steely grip on the car’s ride height even after its grandfather starts to feel ever so slightly restless. The steering is just as good too. By any measure, it is a phenomenal achievement.

So now I’m going to place them in some kind of order, and if there is a lot of qualification in what follows, I hope you will forgive me. These are not simple cars, and assessing their relative strengths and weaknesses is no easy process.

You’ll see what I mean when I say there’s a very strong case for this comparison to be won by the car I’m placing last, the 600LT. For two-thirds of the money required to secure even the 675LT you’re buying a car that’s probably as quick point-to-point in the real world and which comes with a full set of McLaren attributes, from its spacious, airy interior to that peerless steering. And that zone where the suspension of 675LT and 765LT really does make a difference is sufficiently small and remote that many owners might choose never to go there. Without such complex underpinnings, a 600LT may also prove easier and cheaper to run.

And yet, you only have to sample once the true extent of the brilliance of the other two never to want to go back. Above all, a McLaren is a driver’s car, and should be judged by those standards; with no other maker is how a car performs when being really extended more important.

And the simple truth is the 765LT is just better and, given its modernity, perhaps it would be a surprise were it any other way. It’s faster, grippier and, were you to get it onto a track, as I did one memorable day at Silverstone, it will do things even the 675LT could barely imagine. This is an astonishing car and, in its ability to pack so much raw power into so light a machine, it delivers a level of thrill and dynamic capability that draws favourable comparison to any car at any price. So it should win.

Except it doesn’t. I’ve agonised about this for a while now, but every time I ask myself which of the three would I be happiest to see parked in my shed, the answer is always the same: the McLaren 675LT. On another day, on other roads and certainly if a track were involved, I could see myself going the other way; but for all the fantastic excitement and sheer sense of occasion that comes as standard when you’re about to drive the 765LT, given one last run up that road, it’s the oldest of the trio I would take.

There is a sense of oneness in a 675LT I’ve not felt in any comparable car. I almost said it feels like it’s on your side in a way the 765LT does not, but that’s not strictly true. Though some reckon the 765LT can be properly spiky on the limit, it’s not a side of its character my driving style has exposed. But you do feel a little like its subordinate, a second lieutenant to its captain and company commander, in whose hands your life rests. That never happens in the 675LT. From start to finish, through thick and thin, you are in it together, come what may. It is the best feeling a car can provide. The fact it is currently the best part of £100,000 cheaper than the 765LT, and by a distance the best value, rarest and most investable car here, merely seals the deal.