Famed auction house Bonhams will offer up a Ferrari driven by Formula 1 World Champion Jenson Button, but the car for sale isn’t one of the contemporary mega-buck supercars, but a more archaic model that has never attracted much fanfare from the Ferraristi.

Button’s ride, a 1978 Ferrari 512BB, is a model known mostly to enthusiasts, and pre-dates the iconic Testarossa and was never sold officially in North America. While Button purchased the car with 49,100 miles on the clock, he only drove the car a further 155 miles, lending credence to his claim that “my F1 commitments will not enable me to enjoy the car to its fullest.”

Bonhams claims that the car has had $154,000 worth of mechanical work throughout its lifetime – pretty big numbers for a car that’s only expected to sell for $179,000.

[Source: New York Times]

Having debuted to critical acclaim at last year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, McLaren Automotive’s highly anticipated road car, the MP4-12C has now gone into production, the very first example taking shape at the McLaren Technical Centre in Woking, Surrey, just outside of London.

The company has said that it plans to build 1,000 of the MP4-12Cs for 2011 and most of those will be assembled at McLaren’s brand new bespoke Production Centre, adjacent to the current facility, though chassis #001 will be entirely assembled at the existing MTC, in order to monitor engineering and production processes, which the company has been fine tuning, ever since the Technical Centre first opened back in 2004.

In addition, prototypes have undergone rigorous testing at the hands of McLaren F1 drivers and former World Champions Lewis Hamilton and Jensen Button, who have been providing valued feedback during the MP4-12C’s development.

So far, the MP4-12C has a long waiting list of customers, stretching across the globe; Antony Sheriff, Managing Director of McLaren Automotive recently said, “meeting our prospective customers at launch events around the world, from Dubai to Cape Town, Paris to Los Angeles, has filled us with inspiration. There is a genuine desire for McLaren to be launching our own range of sports cars, and an exciting appreciation of what McLaren stands for: innovation, technology leadership, and a winning mentality.”

It has taken just five years for the MP4-12C to evolve from a concept developed in McLaren’s own F1 simulator to an ultra high performance car fully certified for street use. McLaren currently has a retailer network of 35 locations in some 19 different countries that will sell the final, production ready MP4-12C.

Pricing the U.S. is set at $229,000 for the 600-hp, twin-turbo V8 machine.

GALLERY: McLaren MP4-12C

See a short compilation video of the car over the past year after the jump:

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After officially revealing its MP4-12C exotic several months back, McLaren Automotive has now announced estimated performance numbers and they’re as shockingly amazing as the rest of the car. The British sports car maker and Formula 1 team claims a 0-60 mph time of less than 3.0 seconds. The elapsed time to 124-mph (200 km/h) is set at under 10 seconds.

How does the car achieve such an astonishingly low time. Well, its a combination of light weight and horsepower. McLaren has already released that the MP4-12C’s twin-turbo 3.8-liter V8 makes 600-hp and 433 ft-lbs of torque and will come with a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission. No curb weight numbers are yet available, but a dry weight (without fluids) is set at 2,860 lbs – meaning it should still only to out at 3,200 lbs total. Much of this has to do with the car’s ultra-light carbon monocoque chassis.

In terms of acceleration, the MP4-12C (according to McLaren, of course) is faster than the Corvette ZR1, Ferrari F430 Scuderia and Porsche GT2.

But how does it handle? See after the jump for video of McLaren F1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button driving the MP4-12C on the track.

Watch out Ferrari.

[Source: Car & Driver]

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