Cardle Puzzle Spotlights McLaren 720S Despite Game's Stubborn Resistance

The morning puzzle on Cardle—that daily game where five progressively clearer photographs of a car challenge you to name it before the image becomes too obvious—landed on the McLaren 720S on Thursday, July 23rd, 2026. It should have been straightforward. The car's signature elements are unmistakable: those upward-swinging dihedral doors, the sculpted haunches along the rear quarter panel, the way the whole thing reads as deliberately, almost aggressively modern. And yet the game rejected the answer anyway, forcing a skip through to clue five before the puzzle finally conceded what should have been obvious from the start.

This is the particular frustration of Cardle on certain days—you know the answer with absolute certainty, but the game's algorithm insists you're wrong, and so you're left second-guessing yourself, wondering if you've misidentified something fundamental. With McLarens especially, that doubt cuts deeper. But this time the silhouette was too distinctive to deny. Those dihedral doors and that rear haunch could belong to nothing else.

The 720S arrived in 2017 as the successor to the 650S, and it represented a meaningful step forward for McLaren's core lineup. The numbers alone were striking then and remain serious now: a twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 producing 720 horsepower—hence the name—capable of accelerating from zero to 100 kilometers per hour in 2.9 seconds. But what separated the 720S from being merely another supercar with impressive acceleration figures was the engineering underneath. The car sits on McLaren's carbon fiber MonoCell II chassis, an evolution of the architecture first introduced with the MP4-12C. That construction keeps the kerb weight to around 1,283 kilograms in its lightest configuration, a figure that matters enormously when paired with 720 horsepower. The result is a car that manages to feel both svelte and approachable, a rare combination in the supercar world.

The active suspension system deserves mention too. Rather than relying on conventional anti-roll bars, McLaren engineered an interconnected hydraulic setup that contributes to both the ride quality and the handling precision—the kind of detail that separates a car engineered to be driven from one engineered merely to impress. When the 750S arrived in 2023, it pushed the output to 750 horsepower while keeping much of this fundamental architecture intact, a testament to how well the original design had aged.

What made the 720S genuinely interesting, though, was something harder to quantify than horsepower or lap times. It earned respect from people who actually drive cars for a living—journalists, test drivers, the professionals who spend their days evaluating machines. Part of that came from the interior, which McLaren had refined considerably from earlier models. Where the brand's earlier cars had been criticized for feeling sparse, almost austere, the 720S cabin felt purposefully minimal instead. There's a difference, and drivers felt it.

Visually, the 720S remains one of the more striking designs to emerge from McLaren's Woking headquarters. The front intakes flow seamlessly into the bodywork. The rear diffuser and quad exhausts are integrated into the overall form rather than appearing as afterthoughts bolted onto the back. There's a coherence to the design that rewards a longer look, even if McLaren's overall design language can sometimes feel repetitive across the lineup. The 720S, though, transcends that sameness through sheer visual distinctiveness.

So Cardle got the car right, even if the puzzle's logic got in the way. Another morning, another supercar, another reminder that sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one—even when the game insists otherwise.