McLaren MP4-12C GT3: born, ready

Pounding through Eau Rouge at 140mph in the Spa 24-hour race at the end of July, the downforce from that massive rear wing won’t be the only thing weighing down on the MP4-12C GT3 on its competitive debut. There’ll be a few hundred kilograms of expectation pressing on the McLaren’s wide arches too. The MP4-12C is McLaren’s first GT car since the F1 GTR, one of the iconic racers of the Nineties... and the outright winner of Le Mans in 1995. Talk about pressure. Brooklyn Beckham’s Wembley debut will be a breeze in comparison.

Words: Sam Philip
Photos: Paul Barshon, Patrick Gosling

This feature was originally published in the May issue of Top Gear magazine

So, at a crunchingly cold dawn at northern Spain's Navarra circuit, on just the second day of the MP4-12C's first big shakedown, you might expect a few nerves in McLaren's pit garage. Especially with the car's gearbox languishing on the workshop floor about four feet clear of its intended location. Tension? Not a bit of it. There's a heady buzz of confidence as the mechanics scurry about the car.

Then again, if you'd cooked up a car as heinously good-looking as this one, you'd be pretty cheery too. True, TopGear reacts to extravagant aero slattery like cats to crack-laced catnip, but still, this McLaren is more than a standard wings'n'fins make-over. The MP4-12C looks like it was born to race. It was: the GT3 project has been developed alongside the road car since an early stage of the MP4-12C programme.

"Doesn't look bad, does it?" says McLaren Automotive's chief test driver, Chris Goodwin. "One day, this car will be changing hands for millions of pounds. People don't spend millions on ugly cars."

See what I mean? No shortage of self-assurance. Goodwin continues:

"If you join up your aero, it should look nice and clean. Some GT3 cars look as if the team's just been down to Halfords. That's because it's bolted on to an existing car. Our aero was developed in CFD [computational fluid dynamics, an insanely complicated physics modelling system] by the F1 team."

Keeping this development in-house explains how McLaren has geared up its GT3 project with such alarming rapidity. No customer has yet received a road-going MP4-12C, but the GT3 car is already primed for a summer debut ahead of a full season's racing next year. "If we didn't race this car, someone else would have raced it for us," says Goodwin. "And believe me, this car will be winning from the very first race." Starts with ‘c', ends in ‘onfidence'.

GT3 cars are, in essence, road-going supercars turned up to 11 and beyond. So the MP4-12C's twin-turbo 3.8-litre V8, carbon tub and scissor doors have been transplanted wholesale from the road car, joined by a 10mm wider track, roll cage and slick tyres, as well as a mass of vents, louvres and a salami-slicer of a rear diffuser.

"We wanted this to be the absolute peak of GT3, quality-wise," adds Andrew Kirkaldy, project manager and test driver. He's a gently spoken Scot with a fine race pedigree, the winner of the British GT Championship in 2005 and a former recipient of Autosport's young driver award, an accolade shared with Messrs Coulthard, Franchitti, and Button. "We've got Akebono brakes, bespoke looms... oh, and the damper technology from our F1 team. The steering wheel is from Lewis's F1 car of a couple of years ago..."

But in several regards, the MP4-12C GT3 car is actually less extreme than the road car. For a start, the V8 has been cooled by a gas mark or two, from 592bhp to around 500bhp, to comply with GT3 regs. (“Good for durability,” nods Kirkaldy.)

That pesky rule book also forced McLaren to chuck out its Graziano double-clutch transmission - replaced by a Ricardo sequential 'box - and radical ‘PCC' suspension used in the road car, a system that does without anti-roll bars. Instead, the GT3 car gets standard FIA-compliant dampers and bars, a change that raised a few issues. "We'd love to have used the magnetic suspension," says Kirkaldy. "It would have given us a huge advantage. The car was designed around the suspension, so it took a lot of work to fiddle the anti-roll bars in. Packaging is tight when you're talking about a carbon tub."

Such a substantial rework would traditionally render a car's first test a bit of a trial-and-error botch job. But on its very first shakedown, Goodwin says, the GT3 car was already lapping Navarra around 15 seconds quicker than the standard MP4-12C (which, as an aside, he proudly boasts is the fastest production car round a track in the world - yes, quicker than a Veyron).

"Normally, before you take a racecar to the track for its first shakedown," says Goodwin, "you're guessing at the set-up. You turn up at the track, it's a bitch to drive, and you change everything. Not here. I've driven - and won -in GT cars that were less drivable than this was on the first day of testing." 

So how, when other teams turn up at their first test session with a bag of bolts and some figures scribbled on a beermat, can McLaren roll up with a race-ready car? The answer lies in a small, dark room in Woking. A small, dark room filled with a 180-degree projector screen, the butchered core of an F1 chassis and some of the most powerful computers in the automotive world. This is the McLaren simulator, spoken of in revered tones even by the team's engineers. Established by the F1 team in 1997, the ‘sim' is rumoured to represent £50m and at least 200 man-years of development.

The sim is so complicated that not even the McLaren engineers can define how powerful it really is. Their best guess is that it can handle around 250,000 individually tuneable parameters, a level of complexity that makes even the most intricate racing game available look like Pong by comparison. What it means in practice is that McLaren can set up a GT3 racer to within a couple of degrees of perfection without ever going anywhere near a real track.

This all bodes well for a successful return to Le Mans, surely? Afraid not. For reasons believed to stem from the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1807, Le Mans doesn't run to the same regulations as the FIA series, so the McLaren is ineligible for the world's biggest 24-hour race. Even if it were, of course, the MP4-12C could never challenge for outright victory against the prototype diesels of Audi and Peugeot. I ask if McLaren was ever tempted to build a racer with a shot at taking the Le Mans chequered. Goodwin shakes his head.

"It'd be a real fairy story, but it was never an option for us," he says. "Unfortunately Le Mans isn't run to the same rules as it was back in the Nineties. Right now, GT3 is the biggest series in the world, and if you look at the level of competition we'll face in these races, it's as fierce as the F1 faced in its day... if not more fierce."

But, I persist, it must still have been tempting to build an GT car eligible for Le Mans, to at least nail a class victory? "If Le Mans changes its rules, we would certainly run again," Goodwin confirms. "And Le Mans will change its rules."

If the MP4-12C is to continue the F1's legacy, it'll have to do more than be quick on track. That Le Mans-winning car spawned a road-car variant, the F1 LM, a stripped-out, bewinged beast. Six were built: five sold to customers, with one retained by McLaren. Ron Dennis has promised that car to Lewis Hamilton if he wins a further two world titles.

You might guess where we're going here. Imagine a road-spec MP4-12C GT3: a rival for the F430 Scuderia, 911 GT3 RS and Aston Martin Vantage N24. Big wing, low weight, even more noise. Not an unappealing thought, is it? We know there are more cars in the Woking pipeline: Goodwin mentions more than once that the MP4-12C's carbon tub will underpin more McLarens in future. Surely a road-going GT3 must be towards the top of that to-do list?

Before that, though, there's a 24-hour race to win. Gearbox back in its rightful place, the GT3 bellows to life and charges off downthe pit straight, V8 hollering a thunderous, metallic charge. The decal on the MP4-12C's bonnet catches the afternoon sunlight. 59, it reads: the number of the Le Mans-winning F1 in 1995. See? Confidence.