On reflection later, what was so deeply impressive was the way that the car had glued itself to that awful surface. Just a couple of little nano-squeals retained in my slowly-evolving memory of those short moments, along with the mad exhaust howl..and the brakes — a sort of reverse, eye-bulging, experience that underlined how hugely capable this car is.

Taking bends at speed was another joyous experience, and the sense of safety and security all the while never diminished.

For more sheer fun, switch the car to Manual and use the paddles…click – instant change, click – instant change, click – instant change…you get the picture. You have to get your money’s worth any way you can and that’s just one of them.

But the car is very much not just about driving like a wanna-be Formula 1 racer. Normal traffic conditions kept the drive to, well, normal. The 720S is very easy to potter about in, to crawl in traffic jams, to sit at 30 mph if that’s what the road sign says. The steering is nicely-weighted and of course accurate.

The interior is truly quite spacious, although access is ever so slightly contortedly because of the upwards-opening doors. The soft-leather seats beautifully designed, the head-room impressive and a light and airy feeling thanks particularly to the roof’s pair of windows, one above each seat. The finish as expected is impeccable.

The car, with its doors opening upwards, is, as I say, not so difficult to get into and out of. Once aboard, the seats have adjustments that will enable pretty well any driver to find the optimum driving position, except perhaps Lurch from The Addams Family.

The nicely-crafted aluminium circular switch-buttons are where you go to for the main driving configurations and are neatly laid out so that it’s simple to get from comfort to sport to track depending on how you would like the car to feel and respond at any given time. In the Track setting, the instrument panel swops itself for a smaller version for better visibility, a very neat feature. The low nose can be raised, as before, if necessary, to cope with angles entering driveways, driving on and off ferries and the like.

The 720S is breathtakingly beautiful from any angle, surely not just in my eyes, and, with the lights on at dusk, even more so.

The car driven was the Luxury version, starting at £218,020.

You can spend a lot more on options; for example, the lightweight wheels with Titanium Liquid Metal Finish (£1550) added £4630 to the total. The weight-saving was about 4.6 lbs per wheel, working out at £665 per wheel, or roughly £150 per pound weight!

McLaren would hope that this remarkable performer that can be fast and furious will be bought not just as a street fighter, but as a genuine all-rounder able to be used as an everyday super-car.

Unless it’s bought as an investment, that is certainly what should be the case. As it happens, just to take one example, a short-time pre-owned McLaren 720S has been advertised at £285K…a serious investment, therefore.

Fuel consumption? Driven hard wherever possible, the test route of eighty miles gulped petrol to the extent of a gallon every 13.4 miles. With the 72-litre tank, that’s a range of not much more than two hundred miles. But I guess that owners would ordinarily get up around twenty mpg making it well over three hundred between fill-ups, not including track days, though. The official combined figure is 26.4 mpg.

How to sum up the 720S? ‘Wow,’ just ain’t good enough.