It’s been a long time coming. Pictures have finally leaked of McLaren’s successor to the legendary McLaren F1 road-car, the MP4-12C (its name as you can surmise derives from McLaren’s Formula 1 racing-car-naming schema). And it looks to meet each and every expectation I had of it. Cleverly using carbon-fibre to create a large, single tub as part of its main chassis instead of multiple carbon-fiber parts like it’s competitors, the new car is very light. It’s powered by a relatively small 3.8 liter V8 twin-turbo engine that they developed in-house (the previous McLaren F1 used a BMW V12, while the McLaren Mercedes used a Mercedes engine) that provides 600 bhp and 433 lbs of torque. However, even though McLaren claim they are lighter, I am a bit disappointed that McLaren opted for traditional aluminum brake discs instead of the much more supercar-like carbon ceramic brakes.In some ways, to compensate for this, they did port over a feature from the McLaren Mercedes SLR, and have implemented the airbrake feature in this car as well. The only other really cool thing (apart from that fantastically styled interior) from a driving perspective is the ability of the seven-speed gearbox to be an even smarter implementation of dual-clutch gearboxes. Using the paddles, the gearbox detects when you have pulled a paddle halfway, and prepares the appropriate gear to change to, so that gears change even faster. Priced at $265,000, McLaren is planning on building about 1000 of these fantastic cars in 2011. (Found on Autoblog)
