The Best Sports Car, and Why to Skip It

McLaren

The new McLaren is an era-defining work of jet-fighter performance, yet oddly flat in affect.

Begin with the proposition that everyone in the car business is a little bit out of his or her mind. From the CEOs to the bolt-turners on the assembly line, from powertrain engineers to your humble reviewer—he said, adjusting his poodle skirt—we're all slightly but measurably tetch'd, meshuggeneh, deranged. If I could choose just one word to describe the mental firmity of these people, that single word would be: not well.

McLaren is best known for making skinny, fast cars. Now it's out with the MP4-12C, which Rumble Seat columnist Dan Neil says feels like the auto maker's typical Formula 1 car. He takes it for a test drive.

Indeed, automobiles are strangely summary of a corporation's collective psychology. Cars are complex objects that represent the outcomes of literally millions of discrete compromises governing everything from, say, the elastic modulus of an engine mount to the degree of sassiness in the rake of a windshield. Designer Bob wants a seat fabric that's 3 cents per yard over budget. Sam in purchasing says no way. God, Bob thinks, I really hate that guy….

The result is that automobiles are a kind of grand pointillism, seen-at-a-distance portraits of the neurotic human apparatus that builds them.

And that brings me to Ron Dennis, CBE, the chairman of the McLaren Group, emeritus leader of arguably the world's best Formula 1 operation, and one of the oddest ducks I've ever met. A genius, of a sort—it might be the Chauncey Gardiner sort—a splendid businessman and, let no one doubt, a dead-eyed, remorseless competitor. About a month ago I stood in the sun-flooded atrium of the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, England, listening to Mr. Dennis talk about the company's new road-car venture and its first issue, the MP4-12C.

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McLaren

See more photos of the McLaren MP4-12C and the McLaren F1.

First impression: Mr. Dennis's reputation for being a wound-like-a-chronograph neat freak clearly undersells his mania. I've been tying ties all my life and never tied one half so perfectly as Mr. Dennis's impeccable blue cravat. The limp, deeply unenthusiastic handshake I received suggested to me a man who couldn't wait to run to the washbasin. Journalists. Ick.

The MTC—which includes the race operations and wind tunnel—looks like Starfleet Academy with cars. Dazzling, Jovian, orderly and tranquil. All shirt sleeves are starched and everyone's breath smells like Altoids. The place is clean. McLaren buys Windex by the rail car.

To give you but one example: Every single white Pastorelli floor tile in the subterranean assembly hall has been laid with a laser level to be perfectly perpendicular to the force of gravity. The building floor is 99 meters by 198 meters (not 100 x 200) so as to avoid having to cut any tile. It's Plato's loo.

To what extent is all this perfectionistic rigor and orthogonality a reflection of the man himself? "All of it," one engineer told me. "This is all Ron."

Some hours later, as I was shagging the new 12C on a track near Portimao, Portugal, I thought, "That seems about right."

You've come with me this far, dear reader, and you've earned the payoff. The McLaren MP4-12C is now the best sports car in the world, an era-defining work of technical intelligence and jet-fighter performance that will—be warned—make you look at other cars in your garage like they were lawn mowers.

One for the Heavenly Road: McLaren F1

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FERAL PURITY A McLaren F1 once hit 240.1 mph.

Among my few automotive regrets, the biggest is that I've never driven a McLaren F1, the company's Le Mans-winning sports car, of which only 106 were built between 1993 and 1998.

A car that breached the boundary between aerospace and inner space, a soulful and gallant gesture of science and art, the McLaren F1 was exactly what you might hope for if you gave the smartest engineers on the planet a boxcar full of money and said, "Have at it."

Oddly, no F1 owner ever tossed me the keys to one of these midengine, million-dollar miracles. Some people are so selfish.

Designed by race engineer Gordon Murray, the F1 was the first road car with a full carbon-fiber monocoque (the load-bearing passenger cell), helping the car to its scant curb weight of 2,502 pounds. Seething amidships, in the engine compartment lined with heat-reflecting gold foil, was a BMW-built 6.1-liter, 48-valve V12 producing 627 hp. The F1's 3.99 pounds per horsepower produced some spectacular effects: 0-150 mph in 12.8 seconds. Quicker than that and you start showing up on Norad's radar.

The F1 is curious in other ways, too. It is a three-passenger car, with the driver in the center position and the passengers set back in flanking positions. Murray claimed the F1 was always conceived as the ultimate road car, but it's hard to warrant that considering the driver's awkward clamber across the threshold and passenger seat. Also, the noise levels in the cabin were fantastic, requiring aviation-style headsets in order for passengers to converse.

And yet the car was apparently pretty easy to drive—according to the lucky, swinish few who have driven them. The naturally aspirated BMW engine was so tractable the car could accelerate from 30-225 mph in sixth gear. Why, practically a grocery-getter.

The new McLaren is a very different animal than the F1, and the difference is telegraphed by the name. The feral purity of anything called F1 cannot be matched by a car named the MP4-12C, which sounds rather like a kind of ointment. The F1, hand-assembled in Woking, England, took months to build. The 12C, about a week. Most important, the F1 was a cost-no-object machine and is, in effect, a time capsule of a less constrained time. The 12C is very definitely built to a price and so lacks the F1's exuberance, or you may call it optimism.

But I can't really compare the two unless I get to drive an F1. There's still time. As one is wont to say before being thrown on the plague cart by Monty Python: I'm not dead yet.

Download these data: The 12C accelerates from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3 seconds flat and ravishes the quarter-mile in 10.9 seconds. An acceleration run in this car feels like being hammered between the shoulder blades by Thor's mystic Mjollnir. At its heart is a midmounted 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 (flat crank and dry sump, naturally) outputting 592 horsepower and 443 torques through a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox lubricated with something blessed and wonderful, the Dalai Lama's dandruff, maybe.

Need to refuel? With its carbon-ceramic AP binders, the 12C will decel from 60 mph to a stop in 100 feet. At higher speeds, the deck-mounted aero brake juts hydraulically into the windstream. On the Portimao circuit, where the front straight ends in a stretch of fairly choppy tarmac, the 12C hauled down from 180-plus mph with a surety that approached inevitability.

So the 12C posts some hectic velocity. But it has the singular effect of normalizing such performance. How? First, it's crazy light, a mere 3,279 pounds. There's a kind of sheer depravity of physics going on here, a larceny of inertial mass, as if the car had been scoured of its Higgs bosons. Everything's easier, everything is safer and more controllable. The gyre and pitch of landscape is bent to the car's will. Glorious.

The 12C is also terribly well fitted. The carbon-shell seats comfortably socket you in place so you never feel like you have to brace yourself on the steering wheel. The driving position is raked and sports-car ideal. The center console hosts the way-cool vertical LCD navi/status screen as well as the three-way chassis and powertrain dials. The fettling in the cabin and engine bay is incomparably purrr-fect. In other words, the car's work environment, like Woking itself, is supremely well suited for good choices.

But the best way to describe the gestalt of the 12C is to say what it isn't, and that's a Ferrari 458 Italia. Here we meet Ron Dennis again. After decades in the Formula 1 business—and it is a business first—McLaren has only one real rival, and the 12C takes the rivalry to the street. Mr. Dennis is channeling Von Clausewitz: It's war with Ferrari by other means.

So the 12C feels utterly different. Consider the car's unique carbon-fiber "monocell." Such structures are incredibly stiff and lightweight but also awfully expensive, requiring days of skilled handwork to build. That's why they've been reserved for rare isotopes such as the Bugatti Veyron, Ferrari Enzo and McLaren's own F1, the first road car with a full-carbon tub (1993). The 12C debuts a still-secret process whereby the monocell can be punched out in a mere four hours. The result forms the foundation of a car that can compete price-wise with the Italia—figure $230,000 among friends—but it weighs nearly 300 pounds less. At McLaren, Bob in design absolutely hearts Sam in purchasing.

Still, the 12C also suffers a bit from the endless triangulation. For efficiency and packaging reasons—the car is a touch smaller than the Italia—McLaren chose the tiny 3.8-liter turbo engine. In the Ferrari, the naturally aspirated V8, with its crimson cam covers, is a galling showpiece of aluminized testosterone. In the McLaren, there's a lot of carbon fiber but almost no engine visible. Likewise with the sound of the turbo'ed McLaren: baffled, corked, hissing, an aria sung through a straw. If we're talking sound track and not track times, the Ferrari's spine-tingling Nazgul shriek just kills the McLaren.

And then there's styling, and here the 12C collapses under the weight of its other priorities. Never mind thrilling. This is not even an interesting car to look at, with little amplitude or sculpting in the body and a pro forma supercar profile nicked off an eighth-grader's spiral-notebook cover. The 12C's signature design flourish is the massive engine-cooling gills ahead of the rear wheel arches. At some angles these make the car look like its being overtaken, being consumed, by a Dyson vacuum.

The designer of record is ex-Pininfarina ace Frank Stephenson—who I know for a fact is a genius. My understanding is that the engineers (McLaren's equally high-functioning manager Antony Sheriff, perhaps?) tossed the car over the design wall late in the process, leaving Mr. Stephenson little to do but fiddle at the margins. It shows.

And so you have a car that might be taken as a mirror of Mr. Dennis himself. Utterly vanquishing, innovative, a masterpiece of reconciled engineering and accounting. Obsessively compulsively brilliant. And yet oddly flat in affect, a strangely clinical exercise in high-speed, low-altitude mathematics. In performance and dynamics, the McLaren has it all over the Italia. But the Ferrari is emotional, visceral, a whistling scythe of car that cuts off the top of your head and pours in pure automechanical pleasure. The McLaren delivers telemetry.

And so, ironically, you may not want the best sports car in the world. Crazy, huh?