MCLaren 12C - An Amazing Car To Drive

The 12C is an amazing car to drive, but we want to know what it’s like to live with one. This approved used example is ours for the next six months

Just drive it slowly out of the showroom, they said. Ease it over the threshold, but watch those big steel posts on the left. We don't want them rearranging your left front wing. Get it right, though, and it'll make a great picture.

This was all very well. In an ordinary saloon with an ordinary level of torque and a panoramic view of the road, it would have been child's play. Yet my heart was thumping and my palms were wet. This metallic red, late 2012 McLaren 12C, maintained for all of its short life within McLaren and now with just under 14,000 miles on the clock, was about to become Autocar's supercar flagship for the next 10,000 miles and six months. It was hardly the kind of car you'd choose for subtle exercises in maneuvering around a car showroom.

This was all very well. In an ordinary saloon with an ordinary level of torque and a panoramic view of the road, it would have been child's play.

I'd just been hearing how its 3.8-liter, twin-turbo V8 had been uprated to 616bhp and given a razor-sharp throttle response; who was to say the merest brush of its accelerator wouldn't catapult us both through the immaculate plate glass window of McLaren Birmingham and out into the street?

I'm always the same when picking up a really potent and valuable car: apprehensive, excited. The tension had been building for a couple of months, ever since McLaren had rung to suggest we run one of the nearly new 12C coupes being used to usher in a new approved used scheme called McLaren Qualified. Seems the advent of the 12C Spider has encouraged a few dozen of the original 2000-odd fixed-head 12C owners to trade their cars. Now, the first yard I'd drive was to be in this confined space, for the camera. What would it be like?

I'm always the same when picking up a really potent and valuable car: apprehensive, excited.

We'd done the handover. In the past 20 minutes McLaren Birmingham's sales director, David Tibbets, had taken me through the 12C's mostly logical switches, controls and instruments with a practiced ease that made me feel this car was as normal as a Renault, instead of about 50 times more exclusive (on total numbers built) than a Ferrari.

What strikes you every time about today's supercars, if you remember the now-distant hand-made era as I do, is how closely cars like this match the best quality standards of mass-production cars. This McLaren's quality could be judged on an Audi scale and our car was close to faultless. Only later, 50 miles down the Fosse Way on my way home, would I note two surprising niggles: that the radio reception (despite the $7,500 cost of our upgraded audio system) wasn't up to the standards of a Ford Focus (whose steel body is always going to attract a more faithful signal than the McLaren's carbon fiber structure). And the climate control, on auto, made an unseemly fan noise for a car priced at $255k. But the trim and panel fit, materials quality and the ambience these things do so much to create were all of the finest.

This McLaren's quality could be judged on an Audi scale and our car was close to faultless.

We all shook hands and I departed into the southern Birmingham going- home traffic. Hero drivers might have moved the console switches that govern engine sound/response and suspension rates away from the basic settings, but I was content with the comfort option, knowing that if necessary this car could deliver most of its 3.1sec 0-60mph sprint time, right there, even with the seven- speed gearbox changing automatically.

Impressions pile in on you in the first 10 miles, all good. This is a car that truly fits the roads of Britain; our previous Mercedes SLS and Ferrari F430, for all their ability to inspire, were too wide for comfort. You were continually missing apexes for fear of kerbing alloy wheels of eye-watering value. The same goes for the 12C's visibility. You know it's good, because after half an hour in the car you've never been unsighted. That's a departure from the old supercar era, too.

However, the true source of amazement is the suspension. Both the anti-roll bars and the dampers of this car are varied continuously according to road conditions and the regime you've selected via two twist controls on the console. The result is true suppleness over surfaces that throw stiff-legged saloons about, without a hint of bounce. In this country, I predict I'll want to do 90 per cent of my miles in this setting albeit with the powertrain set for more engine note and quicker gearshifts because there's still next to zero body roll and grip is amazing.

This is a car that truly fits the roads of Britain; our previous Mercedes SLS and Ferrari F430, for all their ability to inspire, were too wide for comfort.

It has only amassed 300 miles, but I already know we're going to be delighted with our 12C. My apprehension has disappeared; with a few caveats (such as avoiding leaving it in unlit railway station car parks), it is apparent that the 12C is going to be genuinely easy to use. The job from here will be to demonstrate the extent of its versatility.