With all things being equal, these two McLarens aren’t all that different when accelerating in a straight line. The newer 650S will however pull away as long as there’s nothing up the 12C’s sleeve.
Well, this happens to be one of those instances when things aren’t equal and somebody is flat out cheating – sort of. The discontinued MP4-12C was a 625 PS rocket, able to hit 100 km/h (62 mph) in just 3.1 seconds, which is about the same as the 650S’s 3-second flat 0-100 sprint time.
But what about the popular rolling start? You also need to let your torque do the talking and the 650S has more of it, not to mention less weight to carry around. So yeah, the 650S Spider would be the clear winner here if the 12C didn’t have its AMS Tune with TR3 Downpipes.
The two cars race each other three times in this video, with race no.3 looking like the most relevant one since they both accelerate at about the same time, and they went with a 1st gear roll instead of 2nd gear.
We can safely deduce that the 650S pulls away a little quicker than the 12C, but once they reach higher speeds, the extra muscle makes itself known and the tuned car steadily drives past its newer and more impressive sibling.
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen AMS tuned 12C’s flex their new power outputs against stock rivals – see races against the Z/28 Camaro or the Z06 Corvette.
We’ll tell you what though, the 650S was way more difficult for a tuned 12C to conquer than anything else we’ve seen it race lately.