McLaren finally reveals its new super in March. The company should then know whether McLaren has built a worthy successor to the legendary F1… A car capable of maintaining an iconic lineage intact.
The 12C gets a traditional two-seat, side-by-side lay-out, and a 3.8-litre, twin-turbocharged V8, with a racing-car dry sump and flat- plane crank. It should produce 592bhp and 443lb ft of torque, 80 per cent of which will be available from less than 2,000rpm. A fact that indicates the MP4-12C will be an incredibly easy car to drive very quickly: this is no racecar detuned for the road, but a road car down to its very core.
It has a seven-speed seamless-shift gearbox (SSG) paddle-operated, with modes that include ‘normal’, ‘sport’ and ‘performance’, as well as ‘automatic’ and ‘launch’. There will also be a system called – amusingly — Pre-Cog, which will allow the driver to prime the gearbox for a gearchange.
Tech-heavy, but still concentrated on avoiding inefficiency, the target weight is a sprightly 1,3b1kg, thanks to a chassis based on an F1-style carbon-fibre tub that weighs only 80 Kg. That translates into performance enough to put the wind up
Ferrari’s sublime 458 ltalia: 0-62mph in around 35secs, 0-l24mph in under 10, with a top speed in excess of 200mph. And it’s clean too; with such a high specific output and a modest CO2 figure under 300g/ km, in terms of bhp per gram, this should be the world’s most efficient internal combustion engine — including hybrids. Even the airbrake is incredibly efficient; it’s designed to utilize the airflow around the car to pop itself into position when needed, negating the need for a heavy electric motor.
Some of the most interesting stuff relates directly to the driving experience. The 12C has suspension that chucks out the traditional anti-roll bar, using hydraulically interconnected dampers instead. That allows for greater wheel articulation, meaning that the 12C should keep its wheels on the floor for much more of the time.
There is also a system McLaren is calling Brake Steer, which first appeared on the MP4/12 F1 car way back in 1997. It uses the car’s brakes to do a very similar job to a torque-vectoring differential, paring back understeer and adding to cornering speeds.
All of which means that now we know the MP4-12C in intimate detail, we’resuffering from breath so comprehensively bated that we’re in danger of passing out.
