Pack your bags luv, we're going to Belgium...
McLaren will follow up the 12C GT3's racing debut at Spa this weekend with a planned crack at the Belgium circuit's 'classic' 24hr endurance race in late July.
The new car will make its racing debut against rivals contesting the British GT Championship at their Spa round on 8th/9th July, as part of McLaren's development programme. It will be intriguing to see how the car measures up against its 'performance balanced' competition in the GT3 category not least because, following the British GT round, the current plan (still TBC by the way - we're expecting an announcement...) is to return to Belgium to contest the legendary Spa 24hrs in July. Again this is planned as part of the development programme, but the entry will mark McLaren's first return to long-distance endurance GT racing for around 15 years. We think.
Actually, we know, because PH hot-footed it to the McLaren Technical Centre this morning, mainly to talk about blagging a 12C road car for the Wilton House event in August. They said yes straight away (Woo Woo Woo! Etc.), so naturally the chit-chat turned to the GT3 programme as we'd all been dribbling over the revised racer's appearance at the Goodwood FoS last weekend.
We're guessing McLaren's rivals will be regarding the 12C's arrival in the paddock with some trepidation. It's notably a fabulous looker and appears to be constructed to a standard that will make some competitors look like back yard specials. On top of that, details like the £40k F1 carry-over steering wheel, and the behind-the-scenes back-up of the McLaren F1 simulator must be giving rival 'customer race car' builders pause for thought.
Just 20 customer GT3 racers are planned for next year, and beyond that? Well, it may not be official yet, but the ultimate goal must be a return to top honours at Le Mans, surely? There's no car or programme in place (officially at least), but our McLaren source was quick to point out with a wink over a cappuccino (not that sort of wink...) that the 1995 Le Mans winning F1 is still the favourite machine of most of the engineers at Woking.
We also tried to dig out some news about a possible road-going version of the GT3 racer, because of course there's something on the cards, even if they're not ready to talk about it. However we definitely get the impression the McLaren team is loving the reaction to the new racing car's appearance at Goodwood - in the light of some 'mixed commentary' around these parts and others which has occasionally described the 12C road car as being a bit, well, visually un-arresting.
Officially, all we got on the GT3 road car was a significant (we thought!) nod towards the treatment McLaren meted out to the F1 following its Le Mans success - a programme which resulted in 'God's Own Supercar', a.k.a. the F1 LM.
Which makes us surmise the road-going 12C GT3 will be lighter, stripped out, raw-er (Is that a word? Ed.) machine and will feature key bits of the racing car's more ferocious 'body kit'. In other words, it will be a no-brainer for supercar poster fans, a (relatively) few track-obsessed customers, and a bunch of hairy-arsed magazine road testers.
F1 LM - God's Own Supercar?
On a related note, you'll have noted recent reviews in the motoring press have set the 12C down a peg against the Ferrari 458 Italia - mainly (as we read it) on the back of the 12C lacking the 'extrovert passion' that drips from the Italian stallion's every pore.
So we were intrigued to note a significant majority of customer road cars awaiting build in the Technical Centre were specified in black or silver, with scarcely a vibrant McLaren Orange in sight. In fact the stats show that 60 percent of orders are in subdued black or silver, with pearlescent white popular too.
Does this mean real buyers in the supercar sector really are looking for something a little more sober after all? A groaning order book for 2000 cars (two years production at the new McLaren factory which opens this summer) is a good pointer, we reckon.
Either way, we still need to see that 12C GT3 car on the road! (You can see it at Goodwood in the video below...)
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