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McLaren 12C Spider UK debut this weekend

The McLaren 12C Spider – the roadster version of the MP4-12C – gets its UK debut this weekend at the Octane Jubilee Tour of Elegance at Windsor Castle. McLaren’s thoughts may be focused on the debut of the new F1 (P12) at Paris in a few week’s time, but that doesn’t mean the more mainstream MP4-12C and its convertible sibling, the 12C Spider, are pushed aside. After revealing the 12C Spider in July – and taking it off to Pebble Beach in August – it’s now time for the UK to get its first public view of the new convertible McLaren.

Spy-Shot Bonanza

Below is a collection of reader-submitted spy shots. Frankly, we're stumped as to what these pictures show us, but speculation ranges from a BMW SUV in the first images, to a new BMW 7-series in the next set, to “your guess is as good as ours” for the last vehicle, caught testing in the Czech Republic. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify as many of the following images and report your guesses in the Comments section below.

The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people. It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good.