Buy This Ultra-Rare McLaren MP4-12C Rolling Chassis For $80,000

You know, in case you’ve outgrown your shifter kart.

byJames Gilboy|
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Most of us at one point or another have wished for a cheap McLaren. Just admit it. Any reason between "I want to build a time attack car" to "I need a cheap commuter car that won't rust out" are at least somewhat valid when it comes to reasons for dreaming of buying a McLaren. Maybe it's not cheap, but this MP4-12C rolling chassis could, in theory, be converted into just about anything one could wish for. 

At $79,900, it's not exactly an easy buy for those of us known to Marx as the proletariat, but a serious privateer race team could use it as the basis for some variety of purpose-built race car.

The chassis is being sold by Illinois-based dealer Lake Forest Sportscars. According to their listing, a mere 35 chassis were available to the first adopting vendors of what was McLaren's first road car in almost two decades. This is likely one of but a few of said chassis to be made available to private collectors or those with more interesting purposes in mind for this tub.

Both the fluids and wiring are absent from this chassis, so any buyer who means to do something with it would need to find a way to purchase them from McLaren or cannibalize them from a crashed MP4-12C. Given the age of the tires, they too would need replacement if this car was meant to be driven again... presuming, of course, that those tires are anything more than a plastic display replica.

As far as the aforementioned uses for this chassis go, there are a couple bright ideas that should be considered for whoever buys this chassis. One Reddit commenter pointed out that the wheelbase is almost identical to that of a Volvo 850 wagon, making this a candidate for a god-tier sleeper car. Never mind the capacity for an aftermarket company like HyperCar Development to give the McLaren M838T engine a tri-turbo, 1,200 horsepower kick up its hindquarters.

Another option is to turn it into a different kind of sleeper— something even more ironic and hipster-baiting than a Volvo 850 wagon. Find a way to drop the body of a Pontiac Fiero over top, and then pay a subpar body shop to turn said Fiero body into a poor Ferrari kit car imitation. That way, you're driving a car that looks like an average joe trying to leave the impression of wealth on others with a knockoff supercar kit, but in reality, it is a supercar underneath.

That idea may be too Portland for the rest of the world, though, so feel free to choose the Volvo option instead. It's probably less embarrassing for most people to be seen in a Volvo than in a Ferrari kit car, anyways.

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