Postby carfreak » August 24th, 2010, 9:31 am
In 1998, something miraculous happened. Auto aficionados around the globe began stripping their walls of their beloved Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari Testarossa posters. Trash cans in offices and bedrooms everywhere filled with the tattered remains of Italian exotics, discarded overnight in favor of a new supercar champion destined to dominate dreams: the McLaren F1.
Although 12 years have passed since the F1 made its debut, only recently has the automotive world begun catching up to the car that reinvented what it meant to be an engineering masterpiece. During that time, McLaren wasn't exactly sitting on its haunches watching the competition race by. In between winning Formula One championships and crafting some of the finest sports cars with Mercedes-Benz, the company toiled to develop a successor to the F1 throne. Meet the McLaren MP4-12C.
2012 McLaren MP4-12C
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The grandchild of the F1, the MP4-12C wasn't created to establish a new hypercar dynasty. Instead, the mid-engine, carbon-fiber craft was penned to remind the world what a supercar should have always been in the first place — something exotic and well-crafted that delivers chart-topping performance while maintaining unsurpassed comfort.
McLaren calls the MP4-12C the world's first "and" car, because company engineers set out to build a vehicle that could do away with the dichotomies of today's supercars. Whereas the current pack of high-performance machines can be either lightweight or safe, provide extreme handling or ride comfort, the MP4-12C will supposedly deliver all of those attributes in one svelte package when it arrives in the United States late next year. In order to do that, McLaren turned to its experience in Formula One and translated a number of technological advances from the track to the street.
The MP4-12C is a completely bespoke vehicle. There isn't a single component that can be found on any other automobile in the world. McLaren didn't take that path just to make going to the parts store a hassle. Instead, the company's engineers wanted to extract every ounce of weight possible from each of the car's components to build the lightest car it could. In order to do that, each piece of the vehicle had to be engineered from scratch. As a result, the MP4-12C will weigh just 2,866 pounds.
The largest of those weight savings comes from the car's carbon-fiber monocoque chassis. The design yields stiffness superior to those using other materials, while maintaining chassis integrity in the event of a crash — with significantly less weight. That stiffness also translates into superior handling. McLaren says that although it's still fine-tuning the MP4-12C, engineers have seen peak grip well above the 1 G mark and acceleration above 1.4 G.
The company expects zero to 60 mph to take a little more than three seconds, while zero to 120 mph should click by in around 10 seconds. Top speed is estimated to be well above 200 mph. Those numbers can be attributed to the car's unique 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged V8 engine, which produces a staggering 600 horsepower while emitting just 300 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer. Shifting duty will fall squarely on the synchros of a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission.
As impressive as the drivetrain is, McLaren developed a new handling system that should allow the MP4-12C to deliver class-besting track manners while still serving up a comfortable ride on the road. The company calls the system Proactive Chassis Control, and it does away with traditional anti-roll bars in favor of a hydraulic semiadaptive anti-roll system. The system alters the car's roll control in order to produce suspension that is razor sharp one second and luxuriously comfortable the next. The best part? Early estimates say the car should be priced at $250,000 — a fraction of the cost of the F1.
In all, the MP4-12C isn't the new F1. Instead, it's a new definition of the supercar. Strangely enough, we're told that this machine isn't the end of the story. McLaren has an entire flock of mid-engine terrors in the works, each more refined and capable than the next.
