TB993tt:
Whoopsy:
TB993tt:
hunterone:
Tyres. Flugplatz Corner 168 kmh is not Cup 2 R 185 kmh Teritory.
Also GT2RS has 265 f 325 r vs 245/305 for the Macca, lot more grippy Cup 2 R rubber being deployed
Well that's the build in weakness of the 12C platform.
McLaren is limited by it and can't use any bigger tires front and rear.
Do you have any source for this statement other than anecdotal, doesn't sound plausible to me and also the 720 carbon tub is a later more developed generation.
I tend to believe more that Mclaren are going for lightness with the thinnest rubber which will do the job, the 570 has a similar tub and that runs 225/285 set up this is to give the car a certain feel to the driving and it does, the 570 feels delightfully light and moves around nicely....
Up till now, every single McLaren, from 12C to 650S to 675LT to P1, to 540C to 570S to 600LT to 720S, all have the same wheelbase and hard points. That's a hall mark of a 'platform'. I believe the Senna also.
It's sort of like Porsche going from .1 to .2
As McLarens are built on a carbon tub vs a unibody, the tub itself can be easily modified, as long as it fits within the space as defined by the platform hard points. One could think of them as building an R8 vs a Huracan.
But the 720S is a bigger step than the rest, more stuff is changed vs the previous versions. Most notably the engine got bigger.
The tire width issue is confined by the hard points of the platform. Their initial thinking was lightness, you are correct. But that was on paper. In the real world it would seems the tire width is the limiting factor to their cars' performance,
See no farther than the P1. It was limited by it's tires, even with McLaren's excellent traction control and Trofeo R, it was struggling to put down all the power effectively, hence being slower than the LaFerrari and 918.
They had a few years under their belt to tune the traction control more, the results is that the 720S and Senna became that much better at putting own power, especially on corner exits, to become that much faster.
McLaren don't make that many cars, so this strategy works, just like Aston did with the VH platform. The Aston one is more flexible as it can have different hard points across the range. But the Mclaren platform is newer and more advanced and performs better.
I have to imagine McLaren is hard at work working on their next platform, which will make their cars that much faster still in the future. They have already learn a lot with the 12C platform and know the weaknesses.
One of the reasons for going with narrower than expected front tire width in the first place was to make the car 'safer', on paper it should understeer first when it runs out of grip sooner in the front. One way to combat the engine over powering the rear tires.
Ex-McLaren designer Frank Stephenson is a friend and we had discussions about the McLaren cars before.
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