McLaren 12C | The Brave Pill

The most extreme Pill yet is a bang-per-buck bargain

For the last Pill of the year, we've decided to push the boat out a little bit further than usual. Out as in somewhere close to the Faroe Islands. We've had supercars before, but none as recent, potent or expensive as this McLaren 12C.

Of course, as soon as any performance car is launched, so journalistic vultures begin to hover, waiting to write the excited stories that will punctuate its gradual decline into affordability. You know the sort of thing: the £10,000 Cayman, the £15,000 C63, or the - um - £70,000 McLaren.

Granted the big seven-oh isn't one of the better-known landmarks, but given that the MP4-12C launched back in 2011 costing £168,500 before options, it marks the point at which this one has lost at least six figures. That's in just seven years and 29,000 miles. From this point on, the depreciation slope has to be considerably gentler.

For £68,990 our Pill is not only the cheapest currently in the classifieds, but also the least expensive way to get a bona fide junior supercar of this vintage. For context the lowest priced Ferrari 458 on the site is more than twenty grand dearer and wears an 80,000 mile odometer reading. Even 2012 Gallardos, which most would reckon to be a generation older than the 12C, are advertised for at least £15,000 more. Consider the close relationship that this McLaren has to the company's more recent offerings - the MonoCell carbon structure and twin-turbo V8 engine have undergone the gentle evolution of all apex predators - and it's desperately hard not to see huge appeal.

The used market's view of the 12C reflects the fact that it didn't receive the warmest critical welcome when new. At the original preview of the car Ron Dennis promised journalists that what was then called the MP4-12C would be the "best handling car in the world - and we've got the numbers to prove it," a Ron-ism that reflected the data-focussed metrics the car had been designed around, but also the somewhat lower priority that had been given to the business of emotional engagement.

I can't remember all of the many numbers that featured in Ron's subsequent Powerpoint onslaught, but I do recall some unlikely ones. The 12C had the highest horsepower output per gram of CO2 of any road car in production at the time. It also had the lowest cabin decibels at a high-speed cruise and - as we discovered when we got to drive it - remarkably pliant ride on cross-linked hydraulic suspension. Yet direct comparison with the 458 also revealed the McLaren felt slightly aloof compared to the rawer and more exciting Ferrari. Or, in other words, it was very slightly less awesome than an absolutely awesome thing.

I'd be lying if I said there weren't some fairly egregious quality issues on the first cars, too. A very early car was rushed to Evo's Car of the Year test in 2011, held on and around the then-new Portimao circuit in Portugal. The 12C was almost certainly the fastest thing I had driven up to that point, crushingly so on the demanding track. But it also came with a crew of technicians who spent many hours trying to track down and rectify various faults, mainly electrical. The most frequent gremlin was the failure of the touch-sensitive panel that was meant to open the door. This was frustrating - if you were trying to get in - or amusing when it was happening to somebody else. The doors also required a hefty slam to get them to actually stay shut, and the IRIS infotainment system didn't work. At all.

Mindful of early criticism, McLaren started to update the 12C pretty much as soon as it went into production. Door release buttons replaced the touch panels and there was the retrofittable option of a soft-close mechanism to cut down on trim-jarring banging. Other upgrades included a power bump - from 592hp to 616hp - and a revised sound generator to increase the amount of V8 noise that reached the previously too-hushed cabin.

But while such tweaks were welcome, McLaren had a bigger surprise in store: the arrival of the 650S in 2014. The official plan was to sell the newer car alongside what was now known just as the 12C - the name having been shortened to make the car look slightly less like a typing mistake - but the idea of offering both was nixed when it became clear everyone wanted the newer car. That meant the 12C was only produced for less than three years, and it was hard not to regard the better-looking, better-sounding and better-handling 650S as being the model it should have been in the first place. It was a view that McLaren insiders tacitly agreed with. The upshot of this truncated life is that there aren't that many 12Cs out there - around 300 Coupes in the UK, plus a smattering of Roadsters - and they tend to be seen as a poor relation.

While that isn't a fair reflection of the 12C's manifest talents, it does mean that the prices of early examples have continued to slide beyond the point many watchers expected them to plateau. It's less than two years since we noted the first ones to be dropping under the £100K mark, with value loss particularly savage for those cars that have dropped out of warranty support. McLaren does offer an extendable warranty on cars up to 12 years and 100,000 miles old, for a not-unreasonable £3,500 a year. But as there is no mention of our Pill being covered in the advert we presume it isn't. Which does take things to a whole new level of brave.

Another factor in the market's valuation of earlier McLarens has undoubtedly been the lack of specialists. Aged Ferraris and Lamborghinis have a relative multitude of fettlers to turn to, but the non-franchise McLaren options are still very thin on the ground. The thought of taking an out-of-warranty car to a main dealer with a major fault is a wallet-puckering one. But things are developing on that front, too - Thorney Motorsport now offering both servicing and upgrades as well as its own warranty support. On the plus side, McLaren owners also tend to report some impressive reliability from their cars, especially when compared to the more temperamental supercars they have also owned. And what's risk if not the spice that makes life interesting?

While Pill doesn't give investment advice, it seems improbable that values will fall much further. We live in a world where a maxed-out four-cylinder Cayman S is pushing £90,000 - see if you can beat my £89,986 on the configurator - and a reasonably specced 720S is going to run you a quarter of a million quid. Against either of those value benchmarks an early 12C is starting to look like a steal. Go on, treat yourself - it's Christmas!

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mrpenks

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