McLaren F1

Peter Stevens styled it and the brief was that no line existed for its own sake. The result reads as small and plain next to what came after it, which is exactly what Murray wanted: a drag coefficient of 0.32 with no wing on the car at all, downforce coming from the underbody, a rear diffuser and two electric Kevlar fans instead. The details are where the obsession shows. Butterfly doors. A roof-mounted snorkel feeding the V12 with a low-pressure exit at the very back. A luggage locker let into each flank, with fitted bags made for them. Cockpit trim plates half a millimetre thick to save weight. A gold-plated titanium Facom toolkit stowed on board. Roughly sixteen grams of gold foil across the engine bay, chosen because nothing else that light reflects heat as well. Inside, the driver sits ahead of and between the passengers. The seat was hand-laid in carbon and trimmed in Connolly leather to the buyer's own measurements, and the steering column and pedals were positioned before the car was built and then fixed there permanently. There is a Kenwood CD system and no radio, because Murray did not think a radio was necessary.

McLaren did not want to go racing. Murray had built a road car and said so. Ray Bellm and Thomas Bscher, two customers who wanted to run theirs in the BPR Global GT Series, talked Ron Dennis into it in early 1994, and the F1 GTR that resulted was a road car with a restrictor plate, race bodywork and about 600 PS. Seven went to Le Mans in June 1995 against purpose-built prototypes. It rained, harder and longer than any 24 Hours on record, and the prototypes broke. Chassis 01R, entered by Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing and run by Lanzante Motorsport in Ueno Clinic black, took the overall win after 298 laps, one lap clear of the Courage-Porsche of Bob Wollek, Mario Andretti and Eric Helary. Yannick Dalmas, JJ Lehto and Masanori Sekiya drove it, and Sekiya became the first Japanese driver to win Le Mans outright. Behind them F1 GTRs finished third, fourth, fifth and thirteenth. Mark Blundell, who was fourth, said the car was top-heavy, not properly balanced and aerodynamically not quite there, and that the BMW V12 saved it. Twenty-eight GTRs were built. They took the BPR teams title in 1995 and 1996, became the first non-Japanese car to win an All-Japan GT race, and were finally outrun by the Mercedes CLK GTR in 1997.

Channel 4 put the F1 first in its 2005 list of the hundred greatest cars and called it the greatest automotive achievement of all time. Autocar had got there in 1994, writing that it was the finest driving machine yet built for the public road, and adding that it might be the fastest production car the world would ever see. It has spent thirty years as the answer to the argument. The owners list reads like a joke: Lewis Hamilton, Elon Musk, Jay Leno, George Harrison, Ralph Lauren, Nick Mason, the Sultan of Brunei. Rowan Atkinson bought his in 1997 for £647,000, crashed it twice, and the 2011 accident near Peterborough produced a repair bill of £900,000 to £910,000, the largest single car insurance claim in Britain at the time and roughly three times the previous record. The oddest afterlife is the laptop. McLaren said in 2016 that servicing an F1 still meant a Compaq LTE 5280 running MS-DOS, because only that machine carried the card the car's ECU would talk to, and that a modern replacement was in development. That story has been argued over ever since.

An F1 costs money whether you drive it or not, and the schedule is the reason. The fuel cell is a racing bladder that McLaren renews about every five years, which means the engine comes out and the bill lands near $100,000. That interval was ten years originally; ethanol in modern fuel attacks the rubber, and the debris finds the filter and the pump. Dampers are a ten-year item. Owners describe a few thousand a year for routine work and £20,000 to £30,000 every few years when a major item falls due. The rest is more reassuring than people expect. The BMW V12 was built with proven technology on purpose, without titanium rods or valves and without variable intake geometry, because Rosche had no time to gamble. It is not a fragile engine. The carbon monocoque does not rust and does not tire. What you cannot do is take it anywhere. There is no independent specialist network worth the name, no owner workshop manual, and structural damage goes back to Woking. McLaren will fly a trained technician to the car, which is a genuine service and also a fair summary of what owning one is like.