The first time I sat in a McLaren MP4-12C, it was 2009 and I was in a preview room deep inside the McLaren Technology Centre, with Ron Dennis looking back at me through the windscreen. The man who’d overseen most of McLaren’s eight drivers’ championships and 12 constructors’ titles, not to mention the McLaren F1 road car, was intently following my prompts until his finger lay exactly on the highest point of the passenger-side front wing.
‘Right a bit… STOP! That’s the centre-line of the wheel,’ announced McLaren’s executive chairman proudly, once I’d successfully directed him to the summit. ‘Optical cueing, those things against which the driver determines his timing. You can position this car precisely on a race circuit or in a car park.’
Now, 15 years on, those same peaks and the low scuttle are helping me guide a 12C (the MP4 prefix was quickly dropped) over this fast and flowing landscape with total confidence, the view like that from a low-flying F14 and the handling to match as tarmac ribbons ahead of me. I squeeze the throttle and boost from twin turbochargers hauls me out from the next 30mph zone like an undertow dragging me relentlessly out to sea, with every throttle-lift and gearshift triggering a whipcrack release of pent-up energy, every determined squeeze on the brake popping up the Airbrake rear spoiler behind me.
Even the boss hadn’t driven a 12C when we spoke in 2009, deferring to his development team, but he’d covered 1000 miles in his own F1 road car the
