McLaren 12C review

It’s an absolutely fascinating car to revisit, for all manner of reasons. On our first acquaintance with a 12C, just after its launch, it felt otherworldly fast, and unfathomably capable. A bit bewildering.

Revisiting it several years later, it’s lost some of that awe factor. But the reason is simple: McLaren’s progress. If you’re jammy enough to have experienced the 675LT, you’ll realise it delivers more than just a 50bhp upgrade over its ancestor.

It doesn’t take much time behind the wheel for the 12C’s performance to come to the fore, though, and fully lit, it’s utterly loopy. Extreme caution is required to keep the speedometer reading a morally correct number.

There’s quite a lot of turbo lag, mind. Keep the seven-speed paddleshift gearbox in manual mode (you should) and, with it unwilling to kick down, you’ll get caught out trying to overtake on a motorway in top gear.

In fact, below 3,000rpm, not a huge amount happens. But keeping your foot on the throttle around there is like loitering around a lit firework, waiting to see if it’s actually going to go off. When it does, you’ll blooming well know about it.

Burst through that point of the rev range and the 12C has the frenetic runaway sensation of the very best turbocharged cars, where the view out the side windows is moving at a quicker rate than your brain can fully handle. It then becomes a game how long you dare keep your foot in. On the road, the answer is probably ‘not very’.

Yes, there’s a supreme amount of power and acceleration, but that turbo lag acts as a nice barrier between you and YouTube infamy. Exciting it may be at full pelt, but it’s easy to build yourself up to it.

It also has some of the more flattering electronic nannies on sale. You don’t feel them stepping in and they act in the background to keep things neat and tidy, rather than rudely rob you of power. Yes, you can slacken them, but there’s every chance you’ll be happy to leave them on. They hardly detract from the experience.

When you find a stretch of road empty and wide enough to extend the 12C as much as you dare, its ability – and how much grip it finds with just one driven axle – is astounding. Recalibrating your brain to how quickly you can turn into corners, and then how much you can push the car through them, takes some time.

I’m not going to pretend it’s more exciting or life-affirming than a Ferrari 458. This is an area where McLaren’s newer cars have really stepped on from the 12C. It doesn’t sound as nice, either; you can drop the rear window on this Spider for more sound to fill the cabin, but I’m not sure the angry, slightly industrial noise of its V8 really warrants that. Give me the Ferrari’s howl any day.

Nor is the gearbox as sharp. It doesn’t rev match on downchanges, which makes it feel a bit clumsy in light of the super-sharp paddleshifters we enjoy these days, but the hinged motion of its one paddle (so you can change up or down with one hand, if you wish) offers an interesting quirk. And it shifts quickly enough.