McLaren MP4-12C

McLaren’s extreme testing programme subjected the MP4-12C to altitudes of up to 12,000ft and ambient temperatures from scorching to well below freezing.
Arfeplog, Sweden: January 2009
The MP4-12C had its first major climatic test when McLaren engineers took one of the early ‘XP’ experimental prototypes to the Artic Circle in the depths of winter 2009.
“Between testing the warm-up behaviour of the car, signing off its Pirelli winter tyres and tuning its ESP for winter driving, we did a lot of basic verification to make sure door seals, window seals and door handles didn’t crack”, explains development team leader Andy Beal. “Most of our running was done in temperatures minus 10 and minus 20 degrees, the later being the coldest we expect to get optimal performance from the car. But we did limited work as cold as minus 32 degrees. At those temperatures, tyres literally freeze to the spot if you leave the car standing too long.
“We were keen to find out whether snow ingress into the engine cooling ducts would be a problem. Unfortunately, that meant spending hours drifting it around on frozen lakes. But we were big enough to take one for the team on that.”

Sakhir, Bahrain: August 2009
At the height of summer 2009, McLaren’s development schedule took Beal’s team to the Sakhir circuit, home of the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Their work here was dedicated to hot weather testing. A week on the circuit enabled them to test the performance of the MP4-12C’s air conditioning system running at high speed in temperatures above 50deg C, as well as to optimise the cooling of the MP4-12C’s engine, specifically its turbos.
“When the track temperature is above 60deg C, you can’t do meaningful handling tests at Bahrain; the tyres immediately overheat,” says Beal. “We focused on fast laps to test engine and brake cooling. We also developed a simulated hill climb test which involved towing a weight behind the car in a low gear, with maximum engine load and little airflow into the radiators.
“This was our last ‘big tear-up’ of the car mechanically,” Beal concludes. “We came out of Bahrain with revised charge cooling, fan placement and thermal insulation, as well as with HVAC [ventilation] improvements and better cabin sealing.”
Yucca, Arizona: August 2010
By summer 2010 the MP4-12C was at verification stage and engineers took VP11 to an airbase-turnedproving-ground just off America’s Route 66, near Yucca, Arizona, for hot weather sign-off.
The development team spent two and a half weeks repeating hot weather tests they’d first performed in Bahrain, testing the effectiveness of the MP4-12C’s climate control system at ambient temperatures up to 46deg C. “A lot of our verification test cycles are designed to mimic typical use,” explains Beal. “So we ran slow, stop-start cycles to simulate town driving, repeated full-bore launches to simulate ‘traffic light grands prix’; high-speed autobahn patterns too.”
Being in the western USA also gave the team the chance to test the MP4-12C at altitude – specifically up at 9500ft, driving to Flagstaff, Arizona. “At altitude, the air’s thinner and cooling systems become less effective,” says Beal. “It was important to find out that we weren’t overspeeding the MP4-12C’s turbos; we did some performance driving on dirt roads to establish that.”
Weeks earlier in Spain, near Granada, McLaren’s development trail had taken the MP4-12C up to 12,000 without issue.

Article published in Autocar special edition dedicated to the MP4-12C

Ever wondered how to tell an MP4-12C prototype to the real thing? Matt Saunders finds out while learning more about how the car is engineered.

Right now, there can’t be many more exciting places to work anywhere in the global motor industry than Chertsey Road, Woking. That’s because McLaren Automotive is about to produce. The paint is now dry on the company’s new £40 million McLaren Production Centre, from where, in a matter of weeks, the MP4-12C supercar will begin to roll out to expectant customers. And so, after four years of intensive design and engineering and close to £750m of investment, the world is about to discover exactly how good one of the most anticipated sports cars in history really is.

But what if the genesis of this incredible car stopped now, before even ‘job one’ – the very first customer order – appeared complete at the factory shutters? What would Ron Dennis have to show for all that invested money and effort? The answer, aside from so many hard drives’ worth of digital ‘intellectual property’ and a very large, very quiet factory, is a warehouse full of prototypes.

It’s by the design, specification, assembly, testing and subsequent disassembly of prototypes like these that all new cars find their way to the road. These are the cars that bridge the gap between the designers’ vision and the finished product. There are prototypes conceived to test the effectiveness of primary structural systems, to carry out engine and gearbox proving, for dynamic and aerodynamic development, for crash testing and active safety set-up, for the configuration of onboard electronics, for hot and cold-weather proving, for the verification of final production design and more.

You’d be amazed at how many ‘mule’ versions of the MP4-12C McLaren needed to build before it could even contemplate building the very first customer car. You’d be even more amazed, believe me, at what they cost, and at the provenance of some of the parts that lurk beneath the surface.

Standing in one of the McLaren Technology Centre’s impossibly clean workshops, we’re currently looking at four of those prototypes. The nearest one to us is painted, trimmed, flawlessly finished – indistinguishable from a production-line 12C, really. The farthest, by contrast, is outwardly indistinguishable from an Ultima GTR kit car. And we’re about to find out exactly how McLaren progressed from one to the other.

Masters of disguise

“We’ve built 66 mule cars to date out of the workshops at the MTC,” explains McLaren programme director Mark Vinnels. “We’ve got eight more to go, followed by a further 16 ‘marketing cars’ – and that’s all before job one starts at the factory. The very earliest were little more than a running chassis, while the latest are built using production-ready parts and tooling; those ones don’t cost an awful lot more than production-line cars.”

McLaren called its very earliest prototype MP4-12Cs, built at the beginning of 2008, ‘MVs’, short for ‘mule vehicles’. There were three of them: two for very early powertrain work, the other for the earliest proving of McLaren’s Proactive interlinked hydraulic roll-control suspension.

“Our suspension car was photographed a few times,” explains Mark, pointing to the black Ultima-based chassis at the far end of the room. “We needed a car of roughly the right size and weight to experiment with this active suspension set-up, and the Ultima was perfect.” Must have delivered a frisson of amusement, too, throwing journalists and spy photographers so far off the scent with a mule car as left-field as Ultima.

After the MVs came the CPs, or concept prototypes, represented in our photos by the black and white car. These were the first MP4-12Cs that were vaguely representative of the final car in terms of underbody and outward structure. They hit the road fully two years ago, before the final production design of the car has been made public, wearing heavy disguise.

“We had several early carbon Monocells pressed for the CPs,” says Vinnels, “and we mainly used the cars to explore our structural options. We’d already committed to a carbonfibre tub and knew we wanted to make it as light as possible, but not by compromising stiffness. And so our CPs had tubs varying from 80-something kilos at their heaviest, down to 69 at their lightest.” They were expensive, too, costing McLaren up to half a million pound each.

A closer look at the zebra-striped concept prototype shows some intriguing details. From a distance it’s clearly a 12C, thanks largely to the distinctive air intakes on each side, but the closer you get, the more differences you see. The CP has got swollen front and rear bumper, Perspex windows and door handles that could have been lifted from an ironmonger’s bottom drawer. It’s something of a lashed-up masterpiece, but it evidently served its purpose.

Come 2009, after the CPs, came the first breed of almost undisguised prototypes: the XPs, or experimental prototypes. Vinnels says these were “mules with the right body on”, like the all-black 59-plate mule in our photos; they were ‘real’ cars built with prototype tools on the old SLR line at the MTC. It was in one of these that McLaren hotshoes Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button got their first taste of the MP4-12C.

The XPs were also the first 12C prototypes to hit the development trail in earnest, running engine, chassis and electronics calibration tests all over Europe and doing hot and cold-weather tests. McLaren’s proving programme took in the IDIADA proving ground in Catalunya, as well as Nardo in Italy, the Paul Ricard circuit in France and the Nürburgring in Germany. It included a 10,000km flat-out handling test at Nardo conceived to push the MP4-12C’s chassis to the limit of its capabilities and durability, and was driven in shifts. It also included an intriguing 5000km powertrain test at IDIADA that Vinnels calls the ‘IDIschleife’. “We data-logged all the throttle positions, braking positions and gearchange points from a flat-out lap of the Nordschleife,” he says, “and then repeated them on the high-speed bowl at IDIADA, over longer than we could have at the ‘Ring. It was a great stress test for the

engine and gearbox.”

It was with the XPs that McLaren’s crash testing programme for the MP4-12C also began. “We had to be sure that the basic underbody structure of the car was strong. Structural parts like the Monocell, the car’s primary crash structures and the body-in-white around the bulheads – they’re all long-lead items. It takes a long time to change their design, and doing that can have all sorts of knock-on effects on the design of other components, so if you do need to redesign anything major, you need to know early on.”

“Altogether, we threw 12 cars at the wall,” Vinnels goes on. “We’ve done well over a hundred barrier tests and more than 250 sled tests with all kinds of offset barriers and poles, and at various speeds. And we’re very happy with the car’s crash performance. The basic passenger Monocell is sufficiently strong that we could recover several of the tubs used in one test, fit new crash members and re-use them.”

Uncompromising approach

Standing in front of the final prototype in the workshop, Vinnels explains the raison d’être of a validation prototype, or VP. “These cars are built using production tooling; they allow us to start assessing and fine-tuning material quality and fit and finish on the car, as well as to continue tuning electronics, driving characteristics and NVH.

“We’ve built 22 VPs to date, having started in January 2010,” Vinnels says, speaking back in December, “and by the time we get to number 30 we’ll have arrived at a car we’re pretty much ready to sign off.”

There is one further prototype stage, he explains, during which McLaren will make a number of production prototypes, or PPs. They’ll come off the factory line just like any customer car, allowing the team to validate their quality and performance one last time. If the MPC production cycle isn’t quite right – if designed-in, systemic problems are adversely affecting build quality – these cars will allow McLaren to remedy the situation without disappointing customers.

So is there any part of that development process that McLaren could have skipped or trimmed, you wonder, without adversely affecting the finished car? Four years seems like an unusually long gestation, after all.

Not according to Vinnels, who joined McLaren in 2005 and therefore oversaw the whole thing. “The fact that we were starting from scratch with the 12C, without any proven componentry we could carry over from a previous model at all, added a year to the process,” he says.

“We’ve also been pretty uncompromising in our approach, and that’s added time in. We couldn’t find a ventilation system for the car that was compact enough, and yet good enough to meet our requirements, for example. So, for the sake of 50mm of overall width, we developed our own. We’ve been continually focused on weight, too; the original specification was for 20kg of sound-deadening NVH insulation in the car but, after some experimenting, we’ve ended up with just 7kg.” You get the distinct impression that engineers with Vinnels’ experience (he has stints at British Aerospace, Lotus and GM on his CV) aren’t in the habit of wasting time and money without gain.

“When I step back and look at the car we’ve created, I’m proud of the work – even more proud of the team that did it, though,” he says. “Ultimately, there’s only 300 of us; Ford would have 3000 people working on a project like this. When you guys finally get to drive this car, I’m hoping you’ll agree that we’ve done a good job.”

Article published in Autocar special edition dedicated to the MP4-12C

McLaren chief designer Frank Stephenson has a world-class CV, but nothing prepared him for the challenges of a clean-sheet supercar. He gives Hilton Holloway a guided tour.

Frank Stephenson is a famously prolific designer; he’s worked on projects as diverse and iconic as the BMW Mini, Fiat 500 and the Maserati MC12. And he’s about to explain the thinking behind the first in a future family of McLaren supercars, to be designed and built at McLaren’s Woking base.

But unlike his previous projects, this brand has virtually no backstory, which offers both an unusual freedom as well as the difficulty of starting from a clean sheet. Having said that, virtually the first question that occurs to the enthusiast when looking at the MP4-12C is why doesn’t it look more like – or at least make more visual references to – the legendary McLaren F1 from 20 years ago, if not the original 1960s McLaren M6GT?

“It does make reference to the original,” says Stephenson. “It has McLaren’s strength in engineering and materials in spades. But it has to compete in its market segment – in the £160k-£170k-plus price range. It’s not the ultimate supercar. Of course we could do a car like that; we’ve done it before. But if we’re going to build a car company, we need to be in the segment that generates the biggest sales.

“The last thing you want to do is be restricted. If you are styling a Ferrari or Lamborghini, there’s a DNA that you have to follow. Everything you do [as a designer] has to have the feeling of the company. What we’re doing at McLaren is a chance to start with a clean sheet of paper. We’re starting a whole new design language for McLaren. I’m not saying the F1 wasn’t a fantastic car, but we know there are ways of doing things better – aerodynamics and packaging – than we did in the 1990s.

“You have to establish something that really hits you as containing the design cues from the new-age McLaren. But this is only the first product. Everything we do after this has to build up from this car.

When Stephenson worked on the Maserati MC12, many aspects of the shape were determined by the Ferrari Enzo tub and mechanicals beneath. What, then, drove the styling of the MP4-12C?

“This is pretty much the shape that could be developed around the engineering package. The whole car started from the inside out. Many people claim that’s how they approach a new car, but it’s really how we did it.”

So why not just let the engineers put a skin on the package and really go for form driven by engineering function?

“That’s pretty much what we did,” says Stephenson. “We took as much body mass as we could out of the car. That’s the McLaren way to do it. You don’t want sensual surfaces like a Ferrari or origami shapes as on a Lamborghini. When you consciously style a car, it always ends up larger than it needs to be. Ferrari get a nice shaped hip [over the rear wheel], but in a strict engineering sense it doesn’t add anything to the car. It just adds weight and material, and there really is an obsession with cutting weight at McLaren.”

Such is the priority given by McLaren to aerodynamic performance, Stephenson explains, that his design team had to follow the lead of aerodynamic calculations; the aero work was done under the aegis of Simon Lacey, who has worked on several McLaren’s race cars.

“The MP4-12C was done the same way as the Maserati MC12, in and out of the wind tunnel and using computational fluid dynamics. We’d take a shape, put it in the tunnel and then change it. We use a 30 per cent scale model, which offers a minimal difference to using a full-size car. We’d take information straight from the wind tunnel to mill out new clay models.

“The priority is to get the air to stick to the surface of the car. So we can throw special paint onto the car in the tunnel and then can see where streaks [of paint] are detaching from the surface. From there we can tweak the section of bodywork in question.

“I believe that form really is equal to function and that if it looks right, it is right. I don’t want a car the looks tortured, something that’s trying to fight against logic, because it just won’t work [visually].”

With aerodynamics driving much of the design process, Stephenson’s team took great care to finesse the MP4’s aero-honed surfaces for maximum aesthetic appeal. “Once a surface has been optimised, we in the design team can then negotiate on the surface highlights, which also means going backwards and forwards to the wind tunnel,” he says. “We need a full-size clay model at this point. There’s no way that you can judge surface highlights on a screen. We need to see the highlights and feel surfaces. We need to look at it from a million viewpoints. Ultimately, of course, it has to look good.”

Air intakes

The majority of the car’s shape and detailing backs up this detailed account of its development – apart from the huge air intakes on each side. At first glance these look like pure styling. “A great deal of this car is about getting the air back to the air brake and into the side-mounted radiators,” he says. Most other manufacturers will angle the side radiators to get the maximum amount of air into them, but that’s counter to keeping the car as small as possible. We’ve mounted the radiators completely flat, parallel to the side of the car, so then you have the problem of getting the air into them.

“So when people look at this detail and say, ‘Why did you do such a funny panel for the air intake?’ it’s not styling, it’s pure engineering. This piece was designed on computer for maximum efficiency in turning the air inwards. If you moved the central blade outwards by a millimetre it would make a huge difference to the amount of air being channelled inwards. This is F1 technology.”

Stephenson gets down on his knees and feels the edges of the side air intake. He says he would, for example, have liked to thicken the leading edge of the MP4’s air intake, but even such tiny changes were overruled by aerodynamic considerations. And of course, once you’ve got the optimal amount of air into the 592bhp engine and its surrounding bay, you need to get it out again.

“The whole rear end is not exactly like a Swiss cheese, but there’s a lot of openings, such as the tailgate being lifted on the rear. Too many openings are not good for aerodynamics, but when you do get the heat from the engine building, you need heat evacuation areas, particularly at the back because there’s a lot of heat from the exhausts when the car is idling. The engineers gave me the amount of extraction area we needed in centimetres squared, but how that was divided up was down to us. We [the designers] had a pretty free hand.”

Although it is hard to tell when viewing the MP4-12C in isolation, the car is significantly smaller than its direct rivals.

“It was critical to get the cowl area as low as we possibly could,” says Stephenson, “so we designed the HVAC [heating and ventilation system] from scratch so that it is extremely low compared with the competition. The result is that when sitting in the car the highest point of the body from the driver’s point of view will be on the fender, right over the centre of the front wheel. It’s a reference point to give you a permanent sense of the position of the front wheels.”

Stephenson also points out the steeply sloping windscreen and the ‘cab-forward proportion’. “It’s an ideal position for driving a car like this; you feel pushed to the front.

“You might imagine the car will have a very small boot, but it’s probably got the best luggage space in the segment. The size of the space in the nose was a sacrosanct area during development.”

Although the MP4-12C’s chassis is a work of art in carbonfibre and aluminium, it is actually mostly skinned in Sheet Moulded Compound (SMC), a kind of high-end plastic.

“For pedestrian impact reasons, three sections – the bonnet, the fender and the roof – of the skin are made in easily deformed alloy. Elsewhere we’ve used SMC. It’s not cheap, but it is the right material. Using carbonfibre panels for the outside skin would have been lighter, but it probably wouldn’t be the best material for crash performance and it takes a lot of time and effort to paint it.”

Bespoke cockpit

Lift the 12C’s door (there’s no handle, just a touch-sensitive pad) and it reveals a sober, thoughtful cabin. The only unexpected design flourish is three protruding air vents.

“We wanted to make an interior that offered the least distraction possible,” says Stephenson. “So it’s i-Pod-ish in that you don’t see that many buttons and we’ve kept the buttons off the steering wheel. It’s as simple as we could make the interior.

“If you need it, it’s on the touch-sensitive screen. The way of adjusting the main functions – chassis and engine settings – is similar to the manettino dials used by Ferrari. The controls you only use when you’ve stopped – the hazards, reverse selection and handbrake – are in the centre console because you can take your eyes off the road to use them. We made the car as narrow as possible and even the GPS screen is in portrait mode to save space. But it means that the driver is much closer to the middle of the car, which is a great help for the weight distribution and therefore a benefit for the handling.

“Everything in the interior is bespoke and even the column stalks are drilled for lightness. It’s lightweight but solid feeling. The steering wheel rim is shaped off Lewis Hamilton’s gloved hand, but slimmed down by a couple of millimetres. The gear changing paddles are mounted on a single beam, so pulling one paddle inwards makes the other paddle move out.”

It wasn’t McLaren’s intention, Stephenson concludes, to make the 12C look ‘modern’. “We wanted to make this car look effective and purposeful, like a military aircraft. If you get it right, there’s no reason for the car to change through its life cycle. We followed a good, honest design direction. It’s a look that will be in today and gone tomorrow.

Article published in Autocar special edition dedicated to the MP4-12C

Full review from Jeremy now online here. Full texte below:

The Ferrari 458 is fantastic. Yes, the button-festooned steering wheel is stupid and the driver is forced to choose between a speedo and a satnav, which is insane, but when you ignore the idiocy of the interior and you put your foot down, it feels like no other car. It feels better. More alive. Just absolutely, totally brilliant.

This is why, on our television programme, James May wondered out loud how the McLaren MP4-12C could be better. Unless it runs on water and does zero to a million in one second, it just doesn’t seem possible.

McLaren however says that it can prove, scientifically, that in fact its car is better. It says that the maths are on its side. So are the headlines for that matter, because the MP4-12C is a tiny bit less expensive than the Ferrari, but delivers more power. A lot more.

There are other things. The McLaren is a much nicer place to sit and a much nicer car to use. In a Ferrari 458, the indicator buttons are on the wheel, so if you are going round a corner, you push the button on the left to tell other road users that you are about to turn right. And at night, when you want to indicate, change gear and dip your lights at the same time, you need to deploy your tongue.

There's no such madness in the McLaren. The steering wheel is just a steering wheel. And what's more, the circumference is precisely the same as the circumference of the wheel fitted to the cars driven by Messrs Hamilton and Button. Minus a fraction to take into account the thickness of their gloves.

There's more. Where the Ferrari is festooned with miles of shiny carbon fibre, the McLaren is all leather and hand-stitching and simple, clear, nice graphics.

McLaren's people are also at pains to explain that their car rides much more sweetly than the Ferrari. They say that because it doesn't have anti roll bars, the suspension is truly independent. And that the computer which controls it - designed by a man I don't want to have round for dinner - ensures that bumps are ushered into another room so you simply don't notice them.

They have a point. On the last left, through the tyres on the TopGear test track, it's tempting to drop two wheels off the tarmac and into the grass. In most cars, this causes your entire skeleton to shatter as though it's been dipped in liquid nitrogen and then hit with a hammer. But in the McLaren, I thought I'd simply misjudged the move and that all four wheels had remained on the road.

That's not really possible though, because visibility is another area where the McLaren trumps the Fezza. I'm not suggesting for a moment that the 458 is a postbox, but in the McLaren, because the windscreen is so deep and the top of the front wings are precisely over the centre of the front wheels, you are alwaysexactly where you want to be.

Yes, yes, yes, I can hear you saying. But is it fast?

Yes. Biblically so. In Track mode, with all the driver aids turned down to a minimum, it absolutely flies. In a straight line, and round the corners, I would say that it is faster than the 458. And with the optional ceramic brakes, and that big wing on the back, I would guess it stops faster too.

Certainly, and thanks to the turbocharging, it always feels more muscular. If I may be permitted to liken the Ferrari to a kingfisher, then the MP4-12C is a gannet.

The gearbox isn't that brilliant, though. In the 458, you just tap the paddle and you have another gear, whereas in the McLaren the paddles are mounted on the same rocker set-up they use in the F1 cars. So, you pull the lever a bit which lets the double-clutch gearbox know whether you want to go up or down the 'box and then you pull it a bit more to actually make the shift.

This sounds clever, but in practice you have to put more effort into changing gear than you would imagine. And, since I'm fundamentally lazy, most of the time I told the gearbox which way I was thinking of going, but then let go of the paddle before we'd actually got there.

That said, though, the traction control is terrific. Instead of ordering you to behave by dropping an anvil on the throttle cable, it asks you to come in for a cup of tea and then it sits you down and gently reminds you that you might be overdoing things a bit, old chap.

So, by any scientific or mathematical measure, then, yes, the MP4-12C does appear to have its only real rival licked.

However, while science and maths are very important in the pursuit of speed, emotion must also be considered, and here, I'm not so sure the McLaren stacks up quite so well.

Look at it. It's pretty, and it definitely has the air of a supercar, but where is the flair? Where's the suggestion that a human being has been at work? It's a bit too clinical. You get the impression it was styled by software and shaped by a simulator. It probably was.

Then there's the noise. For sure, a Ferrari never stops shouting, but the sound it makes is spine-tingling. The sound an MP4 makes, even at full volume in Track mode... isn't.

There's a similar issue with the driving experience. The 458 feels more agile, more deft, more nimble. It probably isn't, but it feels that way. In short, then, and for reasons it is impossible to explain without climbing into the pit of my stomach for a furtle, the McLaren isn't as exciting as the 458.

No car makes the root of my penis fizz, but if such a thing were to happen, it would be the 458 that caused more effervescence.

Of course, there's no doubt that you really could use the McLaren every day. It rides beautifully, its engine can be put into submarine mode and the interior is a far, far nicer place to be. But why would you want to use a car like this every day?

Let me put it this way. The Ferrari is a pair of stockings. The McLaren is a pair of tights. Scientifically and mathematically and practically, the McLaren is better. And yet somehow, it isn't.

Fot those who can get the English Autocar magazine, don't miss this week's edition with a special separate booklet dediacted the the MP4-12C. The last time they did something similar, it featured the McLaren F1, so this is really a special edition! I haven't started yet to read it, but I will try to summarize it when I can find some time

For those in France, be careful, some shops are selling the magazine wihout the bonus dedicated to the MP4-12C... a pity!