McLaren MP4-12C 2011 Review

We liked
?>> Sheer speed is astonishing
?>> Handling refuses to be upset?
>> Around-town ride quality

Not so much
?>> Design is, at best, bland
?>> Lacks the drama and theatre of the Italians?

OVERVIEW?
-- Top Gear top track??
The Top Gear test track is neither as long nor as flat as you probably imagine. It’s a taut figure of eight around an airfield whose wide, open spaces have been manipulated by the Lotus test boffins with the odd dab of paint and bundles of tyres to create a genuine handling test.

Though challenging they did make it, as you approach the Hammerhead corner at well over 200km/h, you can’t help but see a shiny, stylish building on the small hill on the left. It’s got 'McLaren' written on it.

Dunsfold Park, as the oft-named Top Gear "Secret Test Track” is called, was one of the key places McLaren’s test team called home during the development of the MP4-12C, and it shows. Around here, the first car off the 'new' McLaren roadcar production line is, fortunately, nothing like as clumsy as its name.

This place, McLaren’s chief test pilot Chris Goodwin admits, forced a full redesign of the rear suspension that pushed production back by more than six months, all because they wanted more-predictable behaviour from the car’s rear-end on just one of its corners.

And, around here, this car is seconds faster than either the Ferrari or the littlest Lamborghini. Whatever else the 12C is, it’s incredibly fast...

PRICES AND EQUIPMENT
?-- Fist full of Euros
?Australian pricing isn’t confirmed yet, but we’ve got the pricing for just about every other country in the world.

Let's then base it on Germany, where including 19 per cent sales tax, the MP4-12C is a neat €200,000 (euros).

The McLaren price list includes some surprising options, including carbon-ceramic brakes and Pirelli’s grippier PZero Corsa tyres. That is because, McLaren Sales and Marketing director Greg Levine insisted, carbon-ceramic brakes are perfect for people who drive hard all the time and do a lot of track days, but they have some drawbacks that mean they’re not for everybody.

Not many will be put off by their extra cost, though, because €11,500 isn’t that much on top of your 200K, even if you consider that you’re not actually getting recompensed for the stock alloy-cast iron braking system they’ve removed for you.

The track junkies can also have a choice of either lighter forged alloys (another €3500, including German tax) or super light forged alloys for an additional €1000 on top. Both require the tyre pressure monitoring setup for €750.

You can also combine the super-light wheels with the Corsa rubber for a neat €10,000 and an upgrade to the shorter, lighter, sports exhaust will set you back €4750.

Like its Italian rivals, the McLaren options list runs and runs, because very rich customers like nothing better than having a one-off sportscar. That demands a very particular mix of bits and pieces.

You can amp up the safety with parking sensors at both ends for €1800; you can have a vehicle tracker for €700; and you can even upgrade the volumetric alarm system for another €300.

And so it goes. You can 'carbonise' almost all the detail body parts… Like the front splitter, the mirror casings, the turning vanes, the diffuser, the engine cover and even the panels in the engine bay. But don’t be shy with the chequebook because a carbon-fibre rear diffuser is €3500 and even the front splitter -- the part most likely smack into gutters and speed bumps -- is €2500.

Inside, an upgrade to the IRIS navigation and sound system will cost another €6000, while you can go for a full leather cabin for €4000. Electric seats, so common on lesser machinery, are €3000 at McLaren…

A smoker? They’ll throw in the ashtray for free if you ask.

There has been an enormous effort put into every part of it. Except, unfortunately, its exterior design, because design boss Frank Stephenson arrived too late to do much… This is why the overall shape looks fine, but the detailing is a bit off from some angles. Rest assured, the V12 'big Mc' that will partner the MP4-12C won’t look like this...

Being a Ron Dennis-run company (separated from the race team and with different ownership, but still very much a Ron Dennis-run company), it can be assumed that McLaren has not spent too much time reading from the playbooks of the established supercar makers. It doesn’t think it needs to, given the frequency with which it beats Ferrari in Formula One.

For a car that, on price, competes with the 458 Italia and whatever limited-edition Gallardo Lamborghini’s selling this week, it starts well, trumping the aluminium-space-frame rivals with a full carbon-fibre monocoque that is both stiffer and, at 75kg, lighter. The whole car, dry, weighs 1301kg in its lightest form, with the ultra-light wheels and sports exhaust attached.

Then there’s the engine. Where Ferrari offers a high-revving V8 and Lamborghini’s counters with a similarly high-revving V10 (which owes much of its design to Audi), McLaren has designed its own, smaller V8 that is both high-revving and carries two turbochargers.

Big power is a common thread, however, and though it’s lighter than both the 458 Italia and the Gallardo LP560-4, it runs 600 good, old-fashioned British horsepower. That’s 441kW in our money, arriving at 7000rpm, and all from 3.8 litres of capacity.

Where this engine really takes it to the Latin supercars is in both the amount of torque it produces and how soon it gives it to you. With 600Nm, it’s in the mega-crunch league, and it’s all there to play with from 3000rpm -- then it stays in a flat line to 7000rpm.

Code named the M838T, the engine is 199kg dressed, and it’s dry-sumped so it can sit as low as possible in the engine bay. Rather than bolting directly to the chassis, the engine is connected directly to the gearbox at the back and via three long, forged aluminium arms to the chassis, one of which is there just to counteract the twisting from the torque delivery.

It follows a Ferrari lead in using a double-clutch gearbox (Lamborghini will need to wait for the all-new Gallardo in 2013 before it gets one) that can be run as an automatic or as a paddle-shift manual. There's a tweak on the familiar theme though -- it has one long shift paddle that runs straight through behind the steering wheel, so you can pull the right paddle towards you to shift up a gear or, if your right hand’s busy with steering duties, you can push the left paddle away instead. Your choice.

Where Lamborghini prefers all-wheel drive, McLaren has aligned with Ferrari in the rear-wheel drive corner. It has gone beyond Ferrari’s locking diff to feed the drive to the tyres, however. It uses a diff but it also includes a thing it developed and ran in F1 before it was banned for being, well, too fast. Called Brake Steer, it brakes the inside rear wheel independently to push the drive to the outside tyre. It’s especially effective on the way out of corners.

Then there’s the suspension that is at once familiar from certain angles, but very, very different. It uses double wishbones at the rear, with five links, but McLaren has a fundamental hatred of anti-roll bars, believing they effectively deliver each wheel an undamped spring that hurts the car’s handling accuracy. Thus the 12C’s rear end instead runs two of them, each of which stops before they get to the other side; kind of like two Panhard rods.

If that’s quirky treatment, the front end is seriously strange. There are no cross-body springs of any kind here, and it instead uses a system to pressurize the dampers with “free” hydraulic force when the car needs it for hard cornering, but which allows it to run soft when the car’s running straight. It also allows the outside corner to stiffen to minimise roll while the inside one can soften off to cope with bumps. Thus the outside tyre is never affected by bumps the inside wheel hits.

It sounds simple, but you know it isn’t. Effectively, each front corner carries a spring and a damper (all conventional so far), but manages cross-body shocks by also giving each side a compression reservoir and a rebound reservoir, both full of power-steering fluid. The theory is that the compression reservoir on one side is directly linked to the rebound reservoir on the other -- though, on its way from one to the other, the fluid passes through an expandable diaphragm (let’s call it a rubber ball, just for simplicity).

You can change the pressure in the system by selecting the Normal, Sport and Track modes, which both vary the amount of fluid in the system and change the size of the 'ball' (which also changes the fluid’s pressure).

It’s ingenious and far more simple in operation than it sounds, because the rubber ball and the car’s standard power-steering pump are the only moving parts in it, and the rubber ball just sits there getting bigger or smaller.

SAFETY?
-- Carbon crash course
?The 12C's crashworthiness is all based around its carbon-fibre chassis, the strength of which has been well proven in racing all over the world. McLaren bolts extruded aluminium subframes to the front and rear of this to both carry the suspension and drivetrain parts, and to act as a crumple zone for the occupants.

There are dual-stage driver and passenger airbags to cover the normal stuff, but McLaren expects its carbon tub will prevent any intrusion into the footwells and the strength of the carbon tub also acts as a rollover bar.

That said, it’s not as easy to repair as, for example, Lamborghini’s new Aventador, with its combination of three different carbon technologies, including a braided weave to side-impact protection. This braided tube is easy to replace and patch up, which makes the Aventador the first really practical carbon tub.

McLaren, by contrast, will assess each bent 12C on a case-by-case basis to see if it can be fixed on site or needs to return to its Woking HQ.

COMPETITORS
?-- Rarified air?
This is probably the easiest part of the review to write: Ferrari and Lamborghini.

With Lamborghini struggling to keep the Gallardo relevant, Ferrari is having a field day with the 458 Italia, winning award after award. For all that, the 458 lacks the pure speed of the 12C, even if it makes the driver feel it more. McLaren’s, it seems, has been a conscious departure from the supercar norm.

“If we try to be Ferrari, we will fail. That’s not who we are and it’s not our character as a company and it never has been,” Levine insisted.

“The McLaren we delivered is exactly what we wanted to deliver and it’s incredibly effective getting from Point A to Point B. We have had comments that it’s not exciting and there’s no drama, but [they are] mainly from the media, not our buyers.

“We are trying to appeal to a different style of driver and it’s probably one of the easiest sportscars to use. You can drive this car every day and get stuck in traffic without worrying about it.

“You can dream what you want, but you won’t always have the empty, mountain road in front of you that you dreamed of when you bought your supercar.”

While Italians are the focus, it doesn’t stop there. Porsche’s twin-turbo 911 is also a target, as is the 911 GT2 and GT3… If the racetrack beckons, McLaren has already developed a 12C GT3, which costs another €110,000 and is built to take on the Porsche/Ferrari dominance on the FIA GT circuit.

Aston Martin is another company in McLaren’s sights. Where the Woking mob trump it on technology, Aston still has a style advantage.

ON THE ROAD
?-- The cosseting supercar?
There are compromises to be had everywhere with normal supercars and English B and C-roads are just the places to expose them. They are full of sudden, soft depressions where the deep soil has moved beneath the blacktop, plus high crowns to shift all that rain. And broken edges where farmers decided a large tractor was a workable substitute for a small truck. There are also sudden changes to the road surface, with coarse-chip bitumen giving way mid-corner to highly-polished smooth stones poking through the asphalt base. It’s never dull.

The surprise is how easy the McLaren is to drive on these roads. It should be, because it was developed here by people who drove these roads every day, but it’s still very, very good.

The seating position is the key to it all, because from the 12C’s lightweight seat (with its awkward, front-mounted electric controls), the highest part of the front end you can see sits directly above the tyre contact patch. This makes placing the nose of the 12C so intuitive you wonder why the concept has fallen out of favour with so many other carmakers.

The money hasn’t been spent on an interior to make the driver feel like he’s luxuriating in carbon or sumptuous leather, either. There’s one enormous dial in front of the driver and McLaren has saved width in the centre console by turning the standard MMI screen on its ear. The space saving idea works, too, because it’s easier to follow the navigational instructions vertically than it is on most horizontal screens.

It’s an easy enough job to navigate through the performance and suspension settings, too. They’re isolated to one switch each on the floating console (one with an H for handling, the other with a P for performance, though please McLaren in V2.0 make them metal and not silver-looking plastic...) and couldn’t be easier to figure out. To get either of them to do anything, you have to hit the Active button beneath them first, then they light up and you’re away.

The V8 fires up quietly enough in its normal mode. Actually, it’s almost too quiet. There’s a very meaty blat as it flings the revs up to get things going, then it settles down again to become a background noise not dissimilar in volume to a big-six Audi or BMW sedan.

It’s not an intimidating machine to get started, either. You just push the Drive button and, if you want, you can make it manual, then away you go, either doing nothing or pulling the shift levers.

Its ride quality is sublime. It’s stupidly cosseting for a supercar, with the wheels falling gently into the undulations and the car happily tracking straight and true regardless of what’s happening beneath it. The driver sits there, barely moving, while you can feel the suspension working vertically beneath you.

All the while, the automated shifts slide up and down the box seamlessly and, at part throttle, the engine seems docile and a little quiet.

That changes when you flick the P switch across to Sport, because the powerplant suddenly sounds a lot louder, even at the same throttle opening. You know it’s artificial, because you physically haven’t changed anything. McLaren does it by the neat expedient of simply turning down the engine bay’s noise cancelling. Flick over to the Track mode, and it’s louder again… More on that later.

If traffic’s bad, then the Normal mode’s not the worst to be in. The shift are slurred and soft, the throttle is similarly relaxed and there’s no hint of crackle or fizz on the upshifts. Leave the Handling switch in Normal, too, and you’d mount a convincing argument, that your passenger may even accept, that this is a perfectly useful daily driver.

That won’t last long, though, and neither will your patience the instant the road clears. The 12C will shoot forward with everything left in Normal, for sure, but it won’t shoot forward with the same fury as if you’d grabbed any other mode.

And that, indeed, is furious. There is little question the 12C is mega quick, yet the flexibility of the engine and the easy comfort of the chassis mean you don’t sit there becoming impatient with the traffic, as you would in one of the high-strung Euros. It changes its character and you feel happy enough to run, walk, stop and start with everything else.

The speed is not the demanding, insistent speed you find from the Italians but it is speed and the twin-turbo V8 will pull hard from as little as 1000rpm, even in fifth gear. There’s little noise and little apparent acceleration, but the McLaren diligently keeps at it without a murmur or a tremor… Until around 2500rpm when you feel someone starting to let go of the stretched rubber band as the engine climbs to its torque peak at 3000.

When it hits 3000  it begins to fly, with a rising, but still comfortable, noise level and not a trace of harshness. By the time it crests 5000 revs, the McLaren is doing everything it can to twist buckles in the road, with the engine piling on more noise and turning everything around you into a blur.

The sheer speed and breadth of performance is astonishing but the casual manner of it, in its Normal mode, is a little disconcerting. It’s as though the 12C is this fast, but doesn’t even care about it -- like the ultra-talented golfer who’s not really interested in golf.

Few cars will ever be this quick on a public road: that’s how fast it is. The sprint to 100km/h takes 3.3 seconds, but you can knock two tenths off that by choosing the stickier Corsa rubber. Even 100-200km/h, is only a 5.8sec exercise (regardless of what rubber it’s wearing) and it officially runs across the quarter mile in 10.9sec at 216km/h.

Push the 12C even harder and it bursts across the standing kilometre in 19.6 sec (with 272km/h of speed) and it doesn’t stop hauling until it hits 330km/h.

Yet, in Normal mode, all of this is relatively uneventful and, apart from the immense shove in the spine and the blurring of your surroundings, it does nothing to upset or frighten anybody.

One of the keys to that feeling is the way the 12C rides. It’s magnificent and the only time you ever feel uncomfortable over anything like a manhole cover or any other square-edged hit is if you’re braking hard. Then, there’ll be a crack through the front end, but it won’t lose its composure.

The driving position makes it a fairly simple thing to park, too, and so does the relatively large glasshouse. Getting in and out of the door isn’t always so easy, though, and we almost smacked our head on the thing getting in more than once. Then it’s hard to shut without slamming it.

Sport mode is the one you’ll want most, then, just because it’s a bit, well, more. You don’t buy a supercar because it rides better than an S-Class - as countless Ferrari owners will attest.

Sport sharpens the suspension and everything in the engine bay, too. From feeling fast but subtle, the McLaren turns into something stupendously, stupidly fast. It suddenly becomes more cohesive in its chassis and its handling and it tightens up to shrink around the driver. It’s then that it begins to make sense, because the 12C combines rear-drive agility with assurance and a steering feel and accuracy that’s just about spot on.

With the increased noise, the 12C also feels tauter below decks and more aggressive in its gearshift, yet never relinquishes its basic position of polished, composed efficiency.

Is it fun, though? That’s more difficult to answer. It’s fast, for sure, and it’s difficult to conceive of anything sub-Aventador that might be quicker point-to-point. Certainly, nothing in Ferrari’s line-up will get there on a public road. Yet Ferrari’s line-up is also brimming with cars that occasionally sacrifice raw speed in order to saturate the driver with the utter joy of driving… Re-infuse them with the spirit of a five-year-old on his first bike.

To McLaren, that attitude is an anathema which falls only just short of contrived artifice. And that’s not what they want to be about.

The gearshift, in Track mode, tightens until the shift times are almost non-existent gaps. The little rubber ball in the suspension gets larger and the whole thing gets stiffer. And the engine gets louder. A lot louder!

It’s hard to know how loud this is from the outside, but inside the car is almost uncomfortably loud in Track mode. That’s partly because you tend to use a lot more revs than you do on the road. The engine will happily rev to 8250rpm (though it’s giving its absolute best at 7000) and you use all the revs, all the time, on the track.

The difference between loud in a Ferrari or Lamborghini and loud in a McLaren is that the Italian engines use their volume to add not just urgency and excitement, but to tell a story and that alone adds character. While it’s not an unpleasant sound, the McLaren’s engine doesn’t change in tone, character or nuance from 3000 revs to 8250. It just changes in intensity.

And it should, because the rest of the car seems to get better with speed. For starters, the brake-steer makes the car feel as disturbingly effective on slow-corner exits as an all-wheel drive car without losing any of the rear-drive’s ability to dance through the front half of the corner.

It’s pretty astonishing, and as soon as you’ve got the nose to tuck into the apex, you can stand on the throttle -- using it like an on/off switch. You then feel the McLaren’s rear end working to stop the nose from sliding wide. It bites the brakes down on the inside wheel and modulates it with brilliant precision so that it all feels warmly cohesive and stupendously fast.

Under brakes, too, the stiffened front end can take a sudden, sharp bash on the pedal without dipping too close to the ground, and it remains unaffected by bumps on one wheel.

It’s helped by a flip-up air brake at the back of the car that adjusts the centre of aerodynamic pressure, which is a technical way of saying it hunkers down calmly and you don’t know it’s working at all, because it’s all just giving you the maximum braking with the minimum of fuss.

It’s perhaps at its best on faster corners, though, because it combines its agility and corner-entry stability with a suspension system than can crunch its inside wheels over the worst holes without any unsettling effects on the loaded, outside tyres. The only slight hint of disappointment, except the engine note, is the slight turbo lag when you want to fine-tune the throttle in longer corners.

There’s little doubt the 12C would eat a 458 Italia around a racetrack -- any racetrack. But being quick, again, doesn’t mean being fun, even on a track.

McLaren insists it was after raw, authentic speed when you can use all of your supercar and authentic ride quality and comfort for those times you can’t. There’s little doubt they’ve achieved it.

The question now is: is that really what supercar buyers actually want?

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