Mind the doors: Stunning McLaren 570S Spider draws Catalan crowds and sizzles on the road to Andorra

The lithe, laser-guided opposition-defence-shredder that is Lionel Messi’s left foot. The impossibly intricate exultation of Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia: piety rendered in stone. The wondrously phantasmagorical visions of supreme surrealist Salvador Dali.

All local boys – after a fashion – made good; their greatest creations forged in the crucible of creativity that is Barcelona, the glamorous, and newly defiant, city by the sea and cultural capital of Spain, never mind Catalonia.

There isn’t much that could hold a votive candle to all that towering talent, you might think; little point in setting yourself up to fall flat on your cylinder head gasket. Unless … you are McLaren Automotive and you have a cunning plan.

But cunning plan or not, you’d still need some impressive hardware to stand up to the overwhelming bounty of Barcelona: glide forward the McLaren 570S Spider, the latest supercar for the generally rich and a machine that’s just generally super.

Which means that when McLaren rolled into town recently for almost three weeks of intensive press briefings with motoring journalists from across the planet, the tables were inverted and Barcelona had to do justice to its conspicuous visitor. And so it did, with goggling citizens and tourists almost cheering on the Spider as it sashayed through the cruise ship crammed port, behind Barceloneta Beach.

The test car then roared around a disbelieving Christopher Columbus – today figuratively flipping the bird to all vile fanatics from atop his monument at the end of La Rambla – and out into the sizzling heat of the country, northwest towards Lladurs and the distant Pyrenees of Andorra. Cheering, that is, when they weren’t frantically snapping pictures or quickly selecting video mode as the Spider approached, to grab their sliver of reflected glory.

With a largely spectacular three-hour drive each way, McLaren sent drivers out in teams of two; and any unintentional Le Mans reference seemed appropriate the moment my track-experienced co-driver hit highway speeds of … well, let’s say speeds that should have interested the Spanish constabulary.