Missed your chance to buy a new McLaren F1 back in the 90s? Got a spot in your garage for a mid engine, rear drive 600 horsepower supercar, but want one that’s easier to live with on a daily basis than the original McLaren F1? Then get your financing in order, because the McLaren MP4-12C may be just the ticket. More pics after the jump.

Here’s the first picture (credit to Autosport) of the 2010 McLaren MP4-25. Note the significant aerodynamic changes from the MP4-24, pictured below. The new car features down swept side pods and a sharper nose (presumably to reduce drag) and a pronounced vertical stabilizer running from the airbox to the rear wing.

Despite featuring performance specs that would make a grown man weep for the sheer beauty, the McLaren MP4-12C is having difficulty earning a warm U.S. welcome. Originally, the highly-anticipated Ferrari-fighter was scheduled to make its first U.S. appearance at the LA Auto Show in December, followed shortly thereafter by its inaugural debut on dealer lots. Now, after a struggling market has left many dealerships skittish of six-figure commitments, McLaren is finding it all but impossible to wrangle a dealer network and has subsequently delayed the MP4-12C’s launch. Thus, contrary to earlier reports, the MP4-12C will not be featured at the LA Auto Show and likely will not see a U.S. launch until much later in 2010.

How do you follow up after producing possibly the world’s single greatest sportscar of all time, the McLaren F1? Apparently, you design and produce this, the new McLaren MP4-12C. (Gesundheit.) It has all the go-fast bits you’ve seen on countless other supercars recently, and while it has a trick twin-turbo V8 … maybe it’s the fact that we got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning, but color us unimpressed. In fact, we’re going to go out on a limb and quite blatantly ask: WTF? This is the replacement for the all-conquering McLaren F1? This generic mashup of Saleen, NSX, and Fierro bodykit styling? And we thought the new Lotus Evora was disappointingly under-styled. We snagged a mega-gallery of photos, so make the jump and decide for yourselves if we’re just being unnecessarily grumpy. (Also we’ve got a full press release and more details below.)

Come live vicariously through us as we, the most prestigious automotive blog in the world, grace the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance with our stately presences. We’re sure to be the star attractions – forget the live unveiling of several never-before-seen new cars, and the endless rows of priceless works of automotive art sprawled out on the golf course greens like so many unobtanium sandtraps. Surely Jay Leno and the other celebrities will probably manage to jostle themselves into the photos of our expert appraisals of the class frontrunners, but we won’t be too upset. We’ll take a break from being the life of the Concours every so often to update you, our faithful readers. So check back often, and follow us at http://twitter.com/ridelust and in our Pebble Beach live coverage to catch all of the latest updates.

Hopefully you’ve heard of the Can-Am racing series of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, which was one of the final bastions of seemingly no-limits racecar engineering (the other being Gruppe B rally). Very few rules constrained the Can-Am racers, and so quite often they were fitting with nutty experimental technology – like the Chapparal “fan car” with its snowblower-engine-powered sucker fans – but more often than not, these cars were just giant highly tuned engines situated in minimal but aerodynamic chassis. Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme, both Kiwi racers, decided to build their own car to challenge the series, and the result was the McLaren M1C. The first in a long line of McLaren cars, the M1C was competitive late ‘60s . A German company (LMP Engineering) is now offering replicas of the car as the “Can-Am M1C,” which puts this wedge-shaped shot of high-test LUST in the hands of folks who couldn’t normally afford one of the rare original cars. Check out the gallery after the jump for more.

Crank up the sound and get a nice sturdy bucket to capture the drool – the straight-out-of-a-teenage-car-nut’s-dreams McLaren SLR “Stirling Moss” is an open-top (actually, no-top) limted-edition version of the already formidable McLaren SLR, and market the end of the Mercedes-McLaren partnership. Its blown V8 generates 641 HP, enough to motivate this neo-Sliver Arrow to 62 MPH in less than 3.5 seconds onto a top speed of 217 MPH. The top-ectomy gives this version a 441 lbs advantage over a normal SLR. Click through to see Bruno Spengler, a Canadian DTM-series racecar driver, flog the beast around the Sachsenring track in Deustchland.

The road-going version of the McLaren F1 is quite possibly the greatest supercar … ever. I stand by that statement. The Veyron is faster, the Koenigsegg has more raw horsepower, but the F1 did it all, arguably with more class. And the GTR version was all that and more. It’s famous for winning the 1995 24 Hours of LeMans outright despite merely being entered in the GT1 class … the reliability and balance of the F1 GTR allowed it to triumph over much faster LeMans Prototypes. And now, if you have a vast wad of cash and access to a racetrack, you can own your own F1 GTR. How much? If you have to ask …

Oh, the humanity!

Ok, so apparently if you are taking your McLaren out of long-term storage, make sure you have a Halon fire extinguisher (or 6) handy. This unlucky chap sprung his F1 from the lockup after a six month nap, and it turned into a veritable roman candle very quickly. Make the jump for more photos of the carnage.

Now that the calendar reads ‘2009′ and summer is upon us, we can already begin shutting the book on the first decade of the new millenia. All the cars that will be produced have either made it to dealerships or have half a dozen reviews already printed in some magazine collecting dust on your shelf.

This decade closes much like the 1960s, in an atmosphere of uproar and protest, with rumors of war and peace and revolution at hand. The auto industry has experienced a second Golden Age, bigger and grander than the first, and has again sunk into crisis, darker and dimmer than the one Baby Boomers remember. And enthusiasts young and old fear that a similar fate awaits them in the coming years with news of outrageously stringent CAFE standards, and fear-mongering legislators fuel anxieties that we’ve already seen the best cars of the next thirty some odd years.

So it is that we turn back to this decade already a bit nostalgic. Here lie the future legends, the autos of myth and lore. With the future unclear, we ask ourselves which cars made the glorious 2000’s the decade we will all miss more than we know?