The Best Way to Take in the French Riviera? From Behind the Wheel of a Supercar

The prevailing emotion I felt while nearing Manhattan’s Classic Car Club, tucked in behind the Javits Center off the West Side Highway, to pick up a McLaren 720S? Utter terror—terror, and the feeling that I was about to be pranked. Despite the official-seeming emails about lending me one of the most sought-after pieces of machinery on the planet, a big part of me was expecting, when I walked through the doors of the club and explained who I was and why I was there, a small party of my friends to leap out from the corners of the room, howling with laughter. You did it!?! You actually showed up thinking this would happen?!? I mean, who would lend me—admittedly a decent, if erstwhile driver of station wagons and motorized scooters—a $315,000 supercar that goes from zero to 100 mph in less than three seconds?

Well, McLaren would—to “acquaint me with the brand,” they said, in advance of the launch of an all-new model a few weeks later. And get acquainted I did. There was some tender business acquainting myself with the low-slung, cockpit-like interior of the car, which seats two and only two and contains no glovebox. (The single concession to the sort of easy-peasy add-ons we’ve come to expect in a modern car for modern life is a cupholder—one—for the driver.) I carefully navigated my way across a trickling stream of cyclists and pedestrians on a path that runs parallel to the highway, specifically terrified that the wrong touch of the pedal would send me into a kind of horizontal warp speed, and soon I was barreling up I-95 to pick up a friend for an afternoon of high-speed throttling around the beautifully banked roads of Harriman State Park.

My visions of the open road were initially interrupted by the rest of the world. You see, my McLaren 720S—yes, it’s mine now, everybody knows that because I’m the one behind the wheel driving the thing—exists for many people as a kind of impossible dream. Car after car—and truck after truck, minivan after minivan—came up behind me on I-95, racing furiously to catch me (I tried keeping things around a calm 80 mph or so, much like a Derby horse out on a morning trot at Churchill Downs) to visibly ooh, aah, and snap a few camera pics. Strangers smiled maniacally, bug-eyed, and gave me a thumbs-up. When I eventually parked the thing near a fast-food joint so I could meet my friend, an employee of the establishment who was outside on a smoke break walked over vaguely near me and started weeping, seemingly with a mixture of joy and sorrow. “My dream! I’ve dreamed about this car for years! You’re driving my dream!” I implored him to sit in the driver’s seat; out of some sense of awe, he refused, saying he wouldn’t dare do such a thing, but after some urging I got him to open and close the twin-hinged dihedral doors (which open up toward the sky, rather than out toward passing traffic) before he returned to his shift.

Once free of the nearly continual adulation of strangers, the car opened up on the sinuous roads of Harriman in such a way that produced utter awe and bewilderment. I’d driven fast cars before, yes, but never this fast, with the kind of acceleration (0 to 100 in less than 5 seconds) that induces gasps and goosebumps while never feeling beyond my control. The problems only happened when I drove the car slowly—or when I parked it. Where, indeed, do you casually park a supercar? As my friend and I drove up to a roadside ice cream shop for a treat, a dozen or so happy suburbanites were smiling and chatting happily with one another. Once the first person caught a glimpse of the McLaren, though, conversation stopped, and every neck craned our way. Were we actually going to park this car right in front of them? Why yes, we were. Women and children stared at us in smiling, slack-jawed awe, while the dad types looked on grimly with a kind of thin-lipped, hand-in-pocket rage, all of which reached a fevered peak the moment we opened the (yes, dihedral) doors—and then utterly dissipated the moment my friend and I stepped out of the car. Rather than movie stars (or superheroes), the assembled crowd had to grapple with the sad fact that this otherworldly fantasy car was in fact being driven by two middle-aged men who didn’t even have the decency to don the fleece vests of the financial bro.

Perhaps, I thought, a change of scenery was in order. And so it was that, a few weeks after throttling my 720S around New York, I found myself taking a plane to a helicopter to a Belle Époque palace, where I slept the night before climbing into McLaren’s newest model, the GT, in the French Riviera just outside of St.-Tropez. The GT—the letters stand for “grand touring,” meaning a car meant more for sightseeing and actual travel rather than one built strictly for the racetrack or high-performance driving—is that rare McLaren built with a certain practicality in mind, though let’s be clear what we mean here. While this is, in fact, the first McLaren with a glovebox, and it does come with almost 8 cubic feet of storage space—enough for a set of golf clubs or, far more preferably, skis—this will never be your load-it-up-and-take-the-family-on-vacation car. I mean, there’s a passenger seat, yes—but just one.

What I did learn, once out on the road and pointed north toward La Garde en route to the jaw-dropping terrain and winding, banked roads of the Gorges du Verdon, is that a supercar is really only super if it does what you want it to do. I wanted the 720S to deliver the kind of speed and hair-raising power and acceleration that I honestly hadn’t even dreamed of—and it did that, and more—but now I wanted a (super)car that I could settle into for a several-hours drive.

The roads around the Gorges du Verdon seem like the kind of otherworldly, perfectly pitched, and almost beyond-scenic spectacles that only exist in luxury car commercials—and that’s because this is where luxury car companies come to shoot their commercials. If the vertiginous oceanside roads of the Amalfi Coast were relocated inland to forested parkland—and the armadas of Cinquecentos seemingly hell-bent on playing chicken with other vehicles were somehow magically scrubbed from the scene—you’d have the Gorges du Verdon. Unless you’ve got a fear of narrow roads with white-knuckle hairpin turns, with a half-mile plunge on either side should you veer off-piste, you need to drive this route, supercar be damned: Rent yourself a little Peugeot or Renault—check the tires and the brakes before setting out, please—and throttle around for a few hours (you can do a day trip from St.-Tropez up through the Gorges and back down to Cannes, as I did, in a day, easily, with stops for lunch and coffee along the way).

Given that I was, after all, driving a $200,000-something supercar at high speeds, on quite technical roads, in a foreign country, having signed my name on some insurance papers and/or liability waivers that I didn’t bother to actually read, there was a certain nervousness to the proceedings—though I’m happy to report that the only glitch I had was a minor one (I think): Somewhere outside of Saint-Julien-du-Verdon, while taking a fairly sharp corner at a fairly decent clip—McLarens are mid-engined cars, which means their center of gravity is just behind the driver’s seat, which helps them grip the road like velcro—I drove over what seemed to be a tiny, miniscule bump or ridge in the road. If I was going the speed I was supposed to be going, in a car other than the one I was going in, this would likely have resulted in nothing. But because of my speed and torque around the corner, the GT left the ground for what had to have been a fraction of a second—truly, I was back on terra firma before I even realized I’d left it. But because I was cranking it around a corner, when the rubber did meet the road again, there was a brief but instant course-correction, a sudden but momentary jolt as the car essentially righted itself again. At that moment, I heard what sounded like a piece of plastic being thrown against the inside of the car somewhere. Once back on a straightaway I slowed down and looked over—and saw nothing. I was mystified. An hour later, pulling into a private golf club at Chateau de Taulane, where I was met by a team of McLaren technicians, I explained, casually, my “incident” as I opened the passenger door to look for this mysterious object. Not to worry, they told me—we’ll give the car a once-over. Just then I found a tiny plastic box wedged under the passenger seat and held it up to be inspected. The technicians looked at each other—or, more accurately, they gave each other a look—and then asked me to repeat my story about what happened. Only when I finished my retelling did they inform me that the object in question was the local version of an E-ZPass, which the force of my course correction had ripped from the inside front windshield and hurtled against the car interior. I smiled politely, feigned a vague incomprehension, and quickly retreated to the patio of the club for a restorative lunch.

And how did the various crowds—to which I was a high-speed passerby while throttling through Chateaudouble, and Montferrat, and La Martre, and Barréme and, later, Grasse and Mougain, before eventually rolling to a stop at my hotel in Cannes—handle the sudden incursion of the McLaren GT into their seemingly bucolic, nature-kissed, and plus-plus French lives? Reader: They cared not a lick. Citizens of the more rural locales seemed eminently focused on their respective tasks at hand—while the crowd on Le Croisette was, in a word, nonplussed. The marina’s annual Yachting Festival was underway, you see, and the nonstop parade of supercars on the city’s streets simply couldn’t compete.

Originally Appeared on Vogue