McLaren Automotive’s newest road car, codenamed P12, will be launched at the Paris Motorshow on Thursday 27 September. Details are limited for now, but Mclaren’s Asia Pacific Director, Ian Gorsuch, recently said “..it is going to be extreme in technology: how it delivers power and how it handles.”

McLaren will use Paris to showcase its future plans, and unveil to the world its strategy to fast forward the automotive world into the 21st century. The name of the game is as much about technology as it is headline numbers, with McLaren refusing to be drawn on just ‘how extreme’ the P12 will be.

“We are not revealing the power yet,” said Gorsuch to Australian magazine CarsGuide.com, “..we don’t get into the game of competing on numbers, what is being shown in Paris is just a wonderful extreme example of what we can do.”

Unlike the 12C, McLaren’s P12 will be a strictly limited-edition model, with no more that 500 cars produced worldwide. It will also be a highly bespoke car, just like the McLaren F1 road car, which was launched in 1992.

The P12 will be built around the same carbon fibre ‘MonoCell’ structure as the 12C and powered by the same 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8, but using a new flywheel-assisted turbo mechanism providing higher levels of boost, without turbo lag and optimised to deliver fluid changes when combined with McLaren’s bespoke Seamless Shift Gearbox (SSG).

Back in ’92 when the F1 was launched McLaren used the phrase, “built without compromise”. They’re using the same phrase for the P12 – “with the 12C road car there are various compromises you have to make: price and benchmarking against the competition. That’s the market the 12C is playing in. With the P12 we don’t care what market we are playing in. This is just extreme.”

Sounds ominous if you’re sitting in Maranello or Sant’Agata, but ‘game on’ if you’re an enthusiast.

Thanks to: @RacingPuma for the insights.