Photo: Basem Wasef/Wired

Supercars should look like sex. This is what the voice inside my head has been insisting since I was 14 years old, when the very same (if slightly less mature) spirit guide led me to hang a Lamborghini Countach poster above my bed and doodle Ferrari Testarossas all over my Pee Chee folders.

But somehow, to my eye, the McLaren MP4-12C doesn’t quite strike a nerve the way old school überexotics once did. Eye-popping curves and salacious silhouettes are time-honored ingredients of the exotic car formula. Like Vegas strip clubs or the pool bar at the Delano in South Beach, the meek need not apply — and if they do, they better damn well have a good reason for loitering in that rarified company.

And so the McLaren MP4-12C, while comely and sleek, isn’t the most visually charismatic player in this pumped up, pornographically endowed slice of the automotive stratosphere. Waist-high and swoopy, the McLaren may not be a shrinking violet in the topiary of supercars, but neither is it as sensuously enticing as the Monica Belucci-in-a-negligee Ferrari 458 Italia, or as intimidating as the oh-shit-the-mothership-has-landed Lamborghini Aventador. Even its alphanumeric moniker has more in common with C-3PO than any vehicle ought to. Car geeks unite: Your steed is here, and only you will get the four-wheeled joke.

But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or the dihedral doors, which open up and out to allow easier entry into the cabin, one of countless McLaren details engineered with an uncanny instinct for design purity. Bisected by a narrow center partition, this cockpit exemplifies levels of functionality typically associated with military aircraft. The windshield is taller than it is wide, and the proportion is designed to help you spot apexes and place the front wheels — visually identifiable by the slight humps on the front end — exactly where they need to be. The multimedia screen is oriented vertically in order to help achieve the vehicle’s target dimensions, and the massive tachometer is the instrument equivalent of a Jumbotron. The center console dials, cryptically distinguished with single letter labels, click into place like the switchgear of an F22 Raptor — all the better to enhance your jet pilot fantasies while loping down your favorite boulevard.

Photo: Basem Wasef/Wired

And then there’s the techy viscera: the carbon fiber chassis, the extruded aluminum subframes, the hydraulic roll control that’s so effective at minimizing body movement, it does away with traditional stabilizer bars altogether. Despite its ground-up newness and its of-the-moment technological artistry, analysis of the 12C would be incomplete without a brief look back at history.

Take the legendary F1 for instance, the most recent road car since the 12C that’s a pure McLaren (and no, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren doesn’t count.) With a screaming 6.1-liter V12 and a centrally positioned driver’s seat flanked by two co-thrones for your favorite grunties, the F1′s production run of roughly 100 cars made it one of the most deeply loved exotics of all time, reinforced by the fact that if and when they hit the market these days, they run well into the seven figures.

Can you feel us getting our geek on?

And I haven’t even touched on the fact that McLaren won one of every four Formula 1 races it’s entered since 1966; in contrast, during Toyota’s eight-season, multibillion-dollar F1 effort, the Japanese manufacturer couldn’t muster a single win. There’s verisimilitude in victory, friends.

But enough armchair quarterbacking. Let’s climb into the cockpit, flog this thing, and pass judgment based on seat-of-the-pants driving impressions, not theoretical musings.

The Porsche 911 is an odd duck. Here we have one of history’s great sports cars, a strong-selling, fast, good-looking machine that reeks of sex and history.

It is a marker of success: “Timmy bought a Porsche! He must have gotten that banking job.” High resale value makes it a good investment. It is also a technological triumph — despite their capability, Porsches are almost always reliable, long-lived things. And yet the model has always been something of an acquired taste.

There are a handful of reasons for this. At the moment, the 911 is the only mass-produced, rear-engined car sold in America. The subsequent rear weight bias has traditionally made the car difficult to drive at the limit and slightly unstable at high speed. Cane a 911 on the autobahn and you’ll notice the steering going light and the nose wandering — Dancing! Flitting about the highway! Manly stuff! — above 160 mph. Porsche people find this charming. Detractors think it’s obnoxious and anachronistic.

Porsche engineers being German, they simply saw this as a problem to be solved. The first 911 rolled off the line in the mid-1960s. Careful evolution has seen the car grow ever more docile and controllable, and yet faster. The Germans — again, being German — were apparently not satisfied, and so we now have the 2012 Porsche 911.

All that stuff we just mentioned? Let’s just call it fixed.

Hold on. Fixed isn’t the right word. More like blown to oblivion.

This is a landmark, and in more ways than one. The ‘12 911, known internally as the 991, is a ground-up revamp of the brand’s most hallowed product. It is also just the third such redo in the model’s history. From 1964 to 1998 (34 years!) the 911 used the same basic platform and an air-cooled, six-cylinder engine. From 1999 to 2011, it used a water-cooled six and a new platform, albeit one with a similar profile.

The new 911 shares basic proportions — but no significant parts — with its predecessor. It is longer, wider, faster, and more fuel-efficient than the car that came before it. The 911’s body is a combination of steel and aluminum — the doors, roof, and several other key panels (about 45 percent of the car’s mass) are made from the latter, cutting weight and lowering the car’s center of gravity. Wheelbase is up by 3.9 inches, and the engine is now slightly farther forward in the car relative to the driver and rear axle. Porsche claims this bumps up body rigidity by 20 to 25 percent.

Here’s the kicker: Amazingly, Stuttgart claims the new, larger car is lighter than the last 911. On top of that, the base 911’s engine shrinks, from 3.6 to 3.4 liters, yet gains 5 hp and puts out the same 288 pound-feet of torque. Fuel economy is said to rise a bit, though EPA numbers haven’t been released. All this without an efficiency-boosting turbocharger.

This is what makes Porsche special, and why its engineers are widely viewed as the best in the world — they specialize in surprises. Cars aren’t supposed to get lighter when they grow. Engines aren’t supposed to shrink and become more powerful. Heck, if you really get down to it, from a laws-of-physics standpoint, rear-engined cars aren’t supposed to be a good idea, period.