In IEEE 802.11 networks a data packet is delivered simultaneously to multiple receivers through the multicast paradigm. The standard defines a simple mechanism that does not implement any error-recovery mechanism, thus, the reliability of the service provided to the multicast users is penalized. This issue is more important as the number of collisions increases due to a large number of active stations and/or a high load network. In this paper we carry out a detailed optimization study of the multicast collision prevention (MCP) mechanism, a highly-efficient multicast collision avoidance mechanism for IEEE 802.11 previously introduced by the authors. Besides a more in deep explanation of MCP, this study includes a comparative performance evaluation of the optimized MCP with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Results shown that, through this optimization, the number of collisions in MCP can be made negligible for any network load.