Home » Auto News, CAR, McLaren » 2011 McLaren MP4-12C

2011 McLaren MP4-12C

[ Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 | by automotiveroom | under Auto News, CAR, McLaren ]

The first McLaren MP4-12C production car takes shape in McLaren Technology Centre (MTC) General Assembly Hall in Woking, England at Monday 17 January 2011. Which is in the final stages of development of various sports car innovation that will also be very efficient, safe, comfortable, practical, dynamic, lightweight, and high quality.

up to 1,000 12Cs McLaren berencana membangun pada tahun 2011. Most will be manufactured in a bespoke new £40m McLaren Production Centre, which is due for completion in May on a site adjacent to MTC. However, ‘Chassis 01’ is being built in the existing MTC production facility, where outstanding quality and highly efficient production methods have been fine-tuned since the Foster + Partners-designed building opened in 2004.

in southern England in July 2010, prior to a North American debut at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in August The innovative 12C was first presented to the public at the famous Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Adding lightness

Weight is the enemy of performance in every area of car design. It affects acceleration, speed, handling, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions – everything. McLaren Automotive engineers pursued weight saving obsessively. For example:

* The Carbon MonoCell not only reduces the weight of the structure but also allows for the use of much lighter weight body panels.

* The close position of the driver and passenger allows a narrower, lighter body while giving improved visibility with a clearer perception of the car’s extremities.

* Brakes with forged aluminium hubs save 8 kg and weigh less than optional carbon ceramic brakes.

* Lightweight exhaust pipes exit straight out the rear of the car, minimizing their length and weight.

* Airflow-assisted Airbrake deployment dramatically reduces weight of the Airbrake activation system.

* Small, compact downsized engine coupled to lightweight compact SSG minimizes vehicle length, weight and polar moment of inertia.

* Significant weight was pared off the alloy wheels through intensive Finite Element Analysis of wall thicknesses.

* The engine cooling radiators were mounted at the rear, as close to the engine as possible, to minimize the pipework, the fluids contained within them, and therefore weight. They were also mounted in car line to minimize vehicle width.

“We have spent most of the programme ‘adding lightness’,” said Mark Vinnels, McLaren Automotive Programme Director. “If the cost of reducing weight brought performance gains in speed, handling or economy, we did it. However, if the expense could deliver improved performance elsewhere we didn’t pursue it. We never set weight targets as such; we set cost-to-performance targets and examined everything in this way.

“A good example of this philosophy is that we considered carbon fibre body panels. They would have reduced weight but added little benefit as the new one-piece Carbon MonoCell provides all of the torsional strength the body needs. The costs saved were used elsewhere for greater weight reduction and efficiencies overall. This was the holistic approach to weight saving that we used all the way through development,” he concluded.

The legendary McLaren F1 sports car was the first road car to feature a carbon chassis when it launched in 1993. Two years on, a McLaren F1 entered the famous Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race and won on its debut. F1s also finished 3rd, 4th and 5th. From 2003-09, McLaren worked in partnership with Mercedes-Benz to produce the carbon-based Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. With 2,153 SLRs manufactured in its seven year production run, the SLR is the most successful car in the£300,000+ price-point and the most successful of any car built on a carbon chassis.

Now, the McLaren MP4-12C takes carbon innovation to a new level. And offers a design and production process that could see the benefits of carbon fibre chassis’ cascaded down to even more affordable cars.

For McLaren MP4-12C Technical Specification :