McLaren Special Operations Crafts Bespoke 12C Concept McLaren Special Operations, the division responsible for the company’s bespoke projects, has unveiled a new concept car based on the McLaren 12C coupe that showcases customizing ideas for those wishing to make their...
germancarforum.com
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/chasing-perfection-1000-miles-in-the-mclaren-mp4-12c-feature
Chasing Perfection: 1000 Miles in the McLaren MP4-12C
People who don’t own supercars and have never driven one often wonder why owners don’t rack up tens of thousands of miles on them each year. We’ll agree, to an extent, that the defenses for not doing so sound an awful lot like whining. Too much traffic on your commute? Buy a new commute. Clearly you have the means. Ditto for depreciation and high maintenance costs. Ride too abusive? C’mon, a little abuse can be fun. Just ask any sadomasochist or
Jackass cast member. Still, those who aren’t into S&M (yet) and have never let baby alligators bite their nipples for laughs do have limits. Now and then, we want a little comfort.
When we first drove the McLaren MP4-12C, we were startled by the uncommon level of comfort this 593-hp supercar offers. It seemed like perhaps the best mix we’d ever encountered of everyday livability and mind-altering performance. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. Have you heard that McLaren chief Ron Dennis has the gravel from his driveway regularly scraped up, cleaned, and replaced? This isn’t a man who tolerates imperfection. To see how completely the car measures up to Dennis’s exacting demands, we needed an extended road trip. This car being a most impressive feat of engineering, we aimed for another triumph of engineering, the Hoover Dam. (If, by the way, they’d called it the Hoover WC5-57L, we wouldn’t have had to put up with those stupid “dam tour” jokes.) Backing up an appropriate distance from the WC5-57L put us in Colorado Springs, which sounds like another impressive engineering feat. It isn’t. Sitting at the foot of the Southern Rocky Mountains, it is, in a sense, bottomed out.
If you take the interstate, it’s just over 800 miles from A to B. To form a more perfect route, we instead bent and wound our path along mountain two-lanes that ricochet through the Rockies like an asphalt EKG. Our total distance was just shy of 1000 miles, an adequate road-trip trek. In honor of Dennis’s obsession with cleanliness—the factory in Woking, Surrey, England, is cleaner than the room in which your appendix found its second career in a jar of formaldehyde—we packed the MP4’s forward luggage hold with Windex and paper towels for cleaning bug splats from the car, trash bags for picking up litter, and other miscellany. We even jammed a paintbrush next to the seat so that we could dust off our shoes before getting into the car. With a cooler (lunch would be every day from 1:27 to 1:48 p.m., followed by a 20-minute nap), a briefcase, and an overstuffed duffel bag taking up most of the space, we had to Tetris the smaller items to fit everything into our tightly packed frunk. (Note to self: Lobby Merriam-Webster to recognize “frunk” as a real word so we don’t have to use made-up ones.)
The key to the MP4-12C’s dual nature is its Proactive Chassis Control suspension, which allows it to be, in the words of the philosopher and noted thespian Ludacris, a “lady in the street but a freak in the bed.” Leave the switch in “normal,” and the car rides like any great sports sedan. Data streams up through the steering wheel and the seat, but it’s rarely intrusive and never abusive. Even after three consecutive 14-hour days, we were still perfectly comfortable inside. It’s so smooth that one of our crew nodded off in the passenger seat and stayed asleep as the driver pushed the car well into triple digits.
Comfort is also a function of space, which the McLaren has in spades. Colleagues regularly laugh out loud watching your six-foot-seven author try to fit into some of the MP4’s competitors. A driver of this height has to slouch so much that the steering wheel is almost within reach of his tongue and his knees regularly activate turn signals and windshield wipers. He might have more luck trying to get comfortable in the trunk of a Miata. After 1000 miles, though, we still don’t know what the McLaren’s steering wheel smells like—probably antiseptic.
In addition to the normal mode and an intermediate sport setting, the McLaren suspension boasts a maximum-attack freak—er, track—mode. One morning we vowed to spend the entire day in this setting. That lasted for all of 21 minutes. Freakiness as an available alternative is the key to long-term happiness. And in any mode, the McLaren is so nimble that it can make interstate lane changes without stepping on any cracks (dotted lines) at more than 120 mph. In twisty sections, we developed the 100-percent rule. It states that a car such as this can exceed the recommended speed through any turn by 100 percent. Even on posted 50-mph sweepers that pitted our desire to follow the rule against our will to live, the car was so planted that we occasionally exited turns while adhering to the 125-percent rule. We didn’t stick to that one in every corner, however, because the greasy midcorner cowpie that proves to be the definitive counterargument is an inevitability in ranch country.
We did, however, feel comfortable enough to count turns using a hand-held mechanical counter. Or try, anyway. Our attention span is somewhat shorter than Dennis’s, and many turns went uncounted. Okay, most turns. We also brought along counters to keep track of cars passed (73, or more than three full Formula 1 fields) and McLaren F1 sightings. After a day on the road, we realized that we could keep track of the latter with commemorative back tattoos cataloging the date, time, and location of the sighting, as well as a two-foot-tall caricature of the driver. So we made a running change and used that counter to track the number of people who saw the MP4-12C and believed they were looking at an F1. Four.
More confidence flows from the brakes, which yank the car to a stop so abruptly that our radar detector, plugged into a forward-facing outlet, repeatedly came unplugged. The McLaren can stop from 70 mph in just 145 feet—useful when, say, you spot a rabbit lying on the side of the road, spoiling the perfect scenery. Fortunately, we’d packed rubber gloves and surgical masks so that we could sanitarily move roadkill out of sight. We also packed a bottle each of olive oil and red wine and a loaf of bread for administering last rites, but the rabbit refused to confess its sins. So we simply placed it in the bushes for roadkill-free photo and video work before we continued.
While they impart great confidence, the brakes are a major hindrance to the MP4’s everyday usability. The firmest pedal we’ve encountered in recent decades feels almost unboosted. In traffic, it’s a genuine workout. And the fantastically amusing air brake completely blocks the view aft when it deploys in a mere 700 milliseconds. Even when we knew with absolute certainty there was nobody behind us, we felt a little paranoid that we were about to be rear-ended every time it flipped up and found ourselves obsessively checking the side mirrors under hard braking. There’s no override, but if you just want to show off, the air brake can be raised partway by pressing a button, ostensibly to increase downforce.
McLaren drivers are especially unlikely to have anyone tailgating them due to the 3.8-liter’s incredible output. Unless they’re driving the Blue Flame, tailgaters quickly fade to distant dots. Between the warp-drive thrust and parachute braking, it’s easy to immediately adjust your speed so that you pass all highway signs at a velocity matching the road’s number. Crack a window, and the gasping, hiccupping, hissing turbos will have you thinking you’re driving a gnarly drag-strip bruiser. Actually, you are: A 10.7-second quarter-mile at 134 mph will get plenty of respect at the Wednesday-night test-and-tune.
Perfection is an uncompromising concept, and while the MP4-12C might be closer than anything we’ve ever driven, it isn’t quite there. The name, for one, is cumbersome. We just told people it was a McLaren, because if we had said it was a McLaren MP4-12C, we would have sounded like pompous twerps who’d memorized the car’s VIN. The paddle-shifted dual-clutch transmission occasionally disappoints with drawn-out or poorly timed shifts, and the paddles themselves lack the crisp feel of many competitors’. And in an age when supercars are finally becoming somewhat dependable, a few aspects of the car felt disappointingly cheap. The HVAC fan sounds like it’s chewing on its bearings; the infotainment system, disabled in the last car we tested, was in this example sporadically not fully abled; and the lightweight doors do not like to close tightly, frequently requiring a second (or third) unsettlingly aggressive slam to finally latch. Small concerns, but questions about build quality of minor parts fuel nagging doubts about major systems.
The greatest hurdle to everyday usability is that, unlike offerings from Lamborghini and Porsche, the McLaren has no means of lifting its nose over speed bumps and during severe transitions. Using every last inch on two-lane roads to angle over larger speed bumps, we couldn’t always avoid scraping the car’s chin. Thankfully, the McLaren’s less ostentatious (some would say cottage-industry) styling isn’t as likely to ignite furious jealousy in onlookers, and traffic gave us room. The comparatively demure look might be ideal for a daily-use supercar. Car people notice it and others don’t. It does elicit strange responses from some people, though, such as the guy in a Nissan Versa who, upon seeing the McLaren in his rearview mirror, accelerated to 115 mph and maintained that speed for many miles. Passing would have been easy (at that speed, 150 is only about five seconds away), but we so admired his enthusiasm that we backed off.
Speed is the greatest danger of driving a car like this daily. You can double the speed limit just about anywhere without endangering anything but your license. On remote roads with no traffic, there’s no apparent reason to ever slow down. But if you drive flat-out all the time, either the law or the laws of physics eventually catch up with you.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the McLaren’s usability is that, with its comfortable ride and subdued engine note, it lets you forget you’re in a supercar. Forgetting seems like a shame, but it’s necessary if you want to drive something like this every day—and you do want to. Because when nobody’s looking, you can get just as raunchy as yesteryear’s prom queen after a second divorce and a few drinks. McLaren’s prom queen will not only get as wild as anyone’s, but she’s just as happy turning it off for civilized school-board meetings and quiet nights watching
Puss in Boots (the DreamWorks one) with the kids. A lady on the street but a freak in the bed—isn’t that The New American Dream? It’s ours.
Data/test sheet:
http://media.caranddriver.com/files/2011-mclaren-mp4-12c-for-chasing-perfection-feature.pdf
VEHICLE TYPE: mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door coupe
PRICE AS TESTED: $276,855
BASE PRICE: $231,400
ENGINE TYPE: twin-turbocharged and intercooled DOHC 32-valve V-8, aluminum block and heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 232 cu in, 3799 cc
Power: 593 hp @ 7000 rpm
Torque: 445 lb-ft @ 3000 rpm
TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic with manual shifting mode
DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 105.1 in
Length: 177.4 in
Width: 75.2 in
Height: 47.2 in
Curb weight: 3187 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS*:
Zero to 60 mph: 2.9 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 6.1 sec
Zero to 150 mph: 13.9 sec
Rolling start, 5–60 mph: 3.6 sec
¼-mile: 10.7 sec @ 134 mph
Top speed (
drag limited, mfr’s claim): 205 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 145 ft
Roadholding, 120-ft-dia skidpad: 1.02 g
FUEL ECONOMY:
EPA city/hwy: 15/22 mpg
C/D observed: 13 mpg
TEST NOTES: To launch, set the handling and powertrain switches to “track,” then push the “launch” button. Mash the gas and brake, wait for ”Boost Ready” to show on the dash, then go.
) 
