EVO

evo THE

t h r i l l

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d r i v i n g

celebrating 20 years of the

McLaren f1 200mph test ● Biggest ever gathering of F1s ● F1 GTR driven The untold story of the car’s epic Le Mans triumph

plus

Gordon Murray and Peter Stevens on developing the legend

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Tiff Needell and Andy Wallace’s record-breaking high-speed runs

M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

Pictures Matt Howell

20 years years of of the the F F1 1 20 evo celebrates one of the greatest supercars ever built, driving Rowan Atkinson’s F1 and Nick Mason’s GTR, interviewing Gordon Murray and Peter Stevens, going behind the scenes at McLaren’s private F1 celebration, and more…

Will we ever see another car like the McLaren F1?

Will we ever see another car that can charge to 240.1mph and yet seat three in airconditioned comfort? Will we ever see another car that was never intended to go racing and yet won Le Mans at its first attempt? Will we ever see another car that is the total expression of one man’s vision for the ultimate sports car? Will we ever see a car that avoids unnecessary mass to such an extent that the toolkit is made from titanium and the leather is just 0.7mm thick? Will we ever see another car that that surrenders to no compromise (well, just one, as we reveal on page 14) in its pursuit of driving perfection?

Back in 1988, McLaren was making the Formula 1 season look easy (it would win 15 of the 16 races) but creating the ‘ultimate sports car’ would be anything but – something Ron Dennis has subsequently commented ‘made it interest me even more’.

The initial chat about the F1 road car project occurred while Gordon Murray and Dennis were waiting for a flight after the 1988 Italian Grand Prix – the only race the McLaren team did not win that year. Two years later, in March 1990, the sign-off meeting for the F1 project took place.

The car would be created from

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scratch – with no design or engineering prejudice. It would ultimately exceed the top speed of contemporary Grand Prix cars. Years later, in the hands of our own Dickie Meaden and running on modern tyres, it would defeat the legendary Ferrari Enzo – a car 15 years its junior – around our Bedford test circuit.

Is the McLaren F1 the ultimate sports car? Not necessarily. Was it profitable for McLaren? No. However, today, as McLaren embarks on a plan to become a car manufacturer proper with the MP4-12C, the F1 stands as a talisman for uncompromising automotive purity. Fact is, we may never see its like again. evo.co.uk 003

The Gathering

M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

Twenty years after the F1 was given the go-ahead, McLaren celebrates with probably the world’s greatest ever gathering of F1s. Nick Trott reports

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e arrive early. The security guard at the gate directs us to an area within the inner sanctum at McLaren’s vast Technology Centre – an area tucked away from the visitor’s entrance and far away from prying eyes. The press aren’t usually allowed here. McLaren employees eye us suspiciously as they load the trucks for the next Grand Prix. We shuffle our feet and pretend not to look.

In one of the rooms, behind a half open shutter, we catch a fleeting glimpse of three McLaren F1 road cars. To witness one McLaren F1 among the 31million cars in the UK is fortuitous; to see three is borderline miraculous.

Thing is, today, April 28, 2010, McLaren has assembled 21 F1s from all over the world and evo is the only magazine invited to view this jaw-dropping parade of automotive exotica.

Slowly the cars emerge. Tenderly pushed by gloved technicians, they are positioned around the lake that cools the wind tunnel hidden deep within the main building. We stand and stare. A man from McLaren puts a figure on the line-up at around £60million. One fifth of the total number of McLaren F1s ever produced, right here, right now. And most likely never again.

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1. 1996 GTR race car competed, and won, in the All-Japan GT Championship.

2. All 21 F1s were carefully pushed into position over a period of two hours.

3. Parking millions of pounds’ worth of F1 is no laughing matter, or is it?

4. Copper-coloured F1 divided opinion. Editor Trott loved it. Dickie Meaden hated it. 5. One of three long-tail road cars dominates this line-up, but it’s far from the prettiest F1. 6. That’s around £30million’s worth right there.

7. No power steering means vein-popping low-speed manoeuvring

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‘To witness one McLaren F1 is fortuitous. Thing is, today 3

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McLaren has assembled 21 F1s from all over the world’

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1. Modified flat-bottom steering wheel to aid entry. 2. Orange cam covers unique to this car. 3. XP5 – the fifth experimental prototype. 4.

Enlarged roof-scoop fitted to GTR race car. 5. Downforce/drag adjuster on LM’s rear wing. 6. Extra cooling duct below main duct on this ’96 GTR race car. 7. ’97 long-tail racer had taller light clusters.

8. Door-pull below the passenger seat looks like an ejector handle!

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‘A man from McLaren puts a figure on the line-up at around 7

£60million. One fifth of the total number of F1s ever produced…’

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9. Titanium exhaust looks as beautiful as it sounds.

10. Extraction vents on GTR long-tail race car.

11. Modified LM-style splitter fitted to this road-going F1.

12. Note modified high-level mirrors. 13. Neat cooling intake positioned adjacent to wing support. 14. Waferthin carbonfibre seat and headphones belong to XP1 LM – the car promised to Lewis Hamilton if he wins three F1 titles. 15. Ralf Schumacher took three wins in the AllJapan GT championship in this F1 GTR. 16. Updated xenon headlamps one of the F1 upgrades available from McLaren

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M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

evo’s John Barker was one of the first journalists to test the McLaren F1...

...after 15 years, they meet again

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nch by glossy inch, the McLaren F1 emerges from the unassuming box trailer, its fanfare the slow, gritty whirr of the winch. Moments later it’s sitting there in all its understated glory, the greatest supercar the world had ever seen, the best car in the world, circa 1994.

The F1 moved the supercar game on so far that it was over a decade before any other road car got close to its performance, and even though its headline figures have now been bettered, some would argue that as a complete car the F1 is still without peer.

Can it be so, despite the relentless pace of automotive development, despite the advances in materials, tyres and brakes, engine and gearbox technology and electronic control systems? The F1 has aged well aesthetically, which is the reward for not being fashionably styled at the time, but there are clues that it is not a recent design. Notable is the lack of obvious aerodynamic kit, such as a low front splitter and rear diffuser, and the tyres are rather plump, especially at the rear, but even when the car was revealed in the early ’90s these aspects of the F1 pointed up Gordon Murray’s uniquely informed approach to re-setting the supercar benchmarks.

It’s been a long time. I last drove an F1 in 1995.

Even now I’m still not sure how we managed it, but we convinced Ron Dennis to authorise

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Pictures Chris Rutter

M c L a r e n f1 : 2 0 y e a r s a clutch change so that we could have the car for a couple of days for our Performance Car feature. We did just what you’d do with the world’s fastest, most powerful, most expensive car: we took our mates and our folks out in it, cruised around town and drove some of our favourite roads. We all came back with a bundle of unforgettable experiences. Mine include hitting the limiter in fifth on a Yorkshire B-road without really trying, setting a still unbeaten 167mph record between the roundabouts near the office while trying quite hard, and getting deep into three figures on a wet dual carriageway with the bobbing, grinning head of a policeman in each rear-view mirror.

When my mind settles on the hard points of driving the F1, I recall the phenomenal power and reach of the BMW V12 and, just as strongly, the heavy, unassisted brakes and steering, which made you think hard before exercising it fully.

Gordon Murray wanted minimal weight and maximum feel, and he got them, but I felt they came at the expense of properly engaging and adjustable handling. The supercars that followed in the F1’s immediate wake didn’t go down the same road, and those of the last ten years, from Ferrari and Lamborghini, Porsche

and Bugatti, Pagani and Koenigsegg, have been considerably more user-friendly thanks to the universal fitment of power steering, anti-lock brakes and, at the very least, traction control. I’m worried that, 15 years on, the McLaren will feel like a throwback.

Up close again, the F1’s sensational finish and build quality are evident, from the flawless mirror finish of the paint to the pristine nap of the suede and leather interior. This generously loaned car has over 36,000 miles on the clock but inside looks almost brand new, apart from the perforated suede section of the steering wheel, which looks grubbied and roughed up.

No surprise there, though.

McLaren has sent along its long-standing F1 road car test driver, Peter Taylor, to look after us today, and he takes the car for a few laps to check it over and establish that all is in order. It clearly is and he offers a passenger lap or two to remind me of the car’s characteristics. evo has been to Bruntingthorpe’s XXL runway on a number of occasions to get big numbers from other supercars and come away disappointed, and back in 2003 we trekked to Germany to top 200mph. I’m soon wondering why.

I slip into the fixed, bucket-like, surprisingly

comfortable left-hand passenger seat and I’m reminded how inclusive the F1’s unique threeseat layout is. I can see most of the instruments and the driver’s feet on the pedals, and I have a great view out of the low windscreen. It’s an almost cinematic experience, the view in Panavision widescreen and the V12’s voice as it gulps air via the roof-mounted intake a sort of Dolby surround-sound experience.

As Taylor had described, there is nothing amiss with its performance. Working it nicely through the long, long right-hander onto the main runway, the F1 feels settled into very mild understeer, the balance changing to neutral as Taylor gets back on the power fully and unwinds the lock as we join the main runway.

We’re already motoring and four crisp 7500rpm upshifts later I look to the speedo with mild curiosity and do a double take. We haven’t crested the rise yet but the fine white speedo needle is swinging through the 180mph mark.

Over the other side the needle climbs steadily to 200mph and beyond before Taylor gets on the brakes. That was ridiculously easy.

‘It’s best to stay off the expansion joints,’ says Taylor after a second 200mph-plus run, ‘and keep an eye on the windsock, too.’ Ah, that’s it

Left: Barker reacquaints himself with the McLaren’s cabin. Below: on the agenda the first time he drove an F1 were giving his mum a passenger ride to remember and taking the Big Mac to buy a Big Mac (yes, really)

‘From ambling in second gear at a steady 3000rpm, I floor it. It feels like time travel; the F1 is gone’

then; the car was wandering more than on the first run because of a crosswind.

McLaren wanted the F1 to be everydayuseable and its compact dimensions (it’s 911-sized) and the lack of front and rear overhangs mean that speed humps hold no fears.

But it feels like there’s not an over-abundance of downforce at very high speeds, even with the flip-up rear spoiler cranked to its most vertical setting. That said, this slipperiness contributes to the F1’s exceptional 240mph top speed.

My turn. Slide across the front edge of the left-hand passenger seat, hoik legs over the tall carbonfibre channel and then settle backside into the slim but instantly comfortable driver’s seat. And drink in the view. Wow. I’d forgotten how extraordinary the central driving position is, and how obviously right. The symmetry, the exceptional visibility, the feeling that you’re

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right at the very heart of things, that the car is built around you, the driver. Yes, it’s a bit of a faff getting there, but the rewards are great.

Twist the key, flick the safety cover off the starter button and rouse the V12. Snick the tall gearlever into first, ease the carbon clutch in without bothering the throttle and you’re away.

The tractability of the 6.1-litre V12 is such that, as Taylor has demonstrated, it’s possible to go up through the box on tickover, and then floor the throttle in sixth without the merest hint of a stumble or a murmur of protest. This is an exquisitely tuned monster of an engine, and even pulling a top gear good for over 230mph, the F1 soon picks up pace and strikes out for the horizon. It’s a perfect illustration of the irresistible combination of big-capacity torque and a minimal kerb weight.

The lack of flywheel effect in the engine evo.co.uk 011

M c L a r e n f1 : 2 0 y e a r s

‘Fifteen years on, the world has yet to welcome a better packaged, better finished or more habitable supercar’ ensures that the revs flare and die back almost instantly, which is another factor in the F1’s amazingly crisp, clean throttle response. It also means that you’ve got to be positive and accurate with the gearshift, clutch and throttle; conducting the McLaren smoothly demands finesse, but the satisfaction of getting it just-so is ample reward. The biggest surprise as we mooch around for the camera is that the steering is perfectly weighted and brimming with textured feel. I don’t remember this, though I later learn that Gordon Murray reckons this particular F1 has the best steering feel of any he’s driven.

With the tracking shots bagged, I get the thumbs up and, ambling in second gear at a steady 3000rpm, I floor it. It feels like time travel; the F1 is gone, seemingly before the staccato bark of the engine digging deep has reached your ears or the throttle pedal has hit the stop. Sure, there’s a mighty engine in the back but the ease with which the F1 gains speed

Specification Engine Location Displacement Cylinder block Cylinder head

Max power Max torque Transmission

Front suspension

Rear suspension

Brakes

Wheels

Tyres

Weight (kerb) Power-to-weight 0-60mph Top speed Price On sale

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V12 Mid, longitudinal 6064cc Aluminium alloy Aluminium alloy, dohc per bank, 4v per cylinder, variable inlet timing 627bhp @ 7500rpm 479lb ft @ 4000-7000rpm Six-speed manual, rear-wheel drive, limited-slip diff Double wishbones, alloy dampers, co-axial springs, anti-roll bar Double wishbones, alloy dampers, co-axial springs, anti-roll bar Ventilated steel discs, 332mm front, 305mm rear, four-piston monobloc calipers, non-servoed 9 x 17in front, 11.5 x 17in rear, magnesium alloy 235/45 ZR17 front, 315/45 ZR17 rear, Michelin Pilot SX 1137kg 560bhp/ton 3.2sec (claimed) 240mph £634,500 (1995) 1994-1998

is uncanny, and although the engine sounds vocal, it spins very smoothly.

The ride is surprisingly supple too. Get on the brakes and the nose dips, tack into a corner and there’s a degree of roll, power up for the exit and the nose lifts again. Despite the name of the car and the motorsport experience behind its design and construction, it’s no race car in disguise.

Yet there’s no slack, no lost motion either; a polished, instantly responsive feel permeates the F1, and the level of feedback and feel it delivers is unmatched by any other supercar.

Sweeping out on a wide line through the last corner, brushing the concrete kerb on the inside, you can feel its gentle ridges in detail through the rim of the steering wheel, and that’s followed by the crinkle-cut surface and the vein-like joints between the concrete sections of the runway on the exit. This is the car wrought as an instrument, a precision instrument.

The steering piles on weight in the faster turns, though, all the time relaying the level of detail you need and want but at the same time cautioning against getting too ambitious with the throttle. Many current supercars allow easy, risk-free access to their full performance, with power steering making their fat front tyres manageable and sophisticated stability control systems letting you know you’ve been overambitious by blinking a little yellow warning light and gently keeping a cap on things.

I didn’t want to overstep the mark when I first drove the F1 and I don’t today. I have no idea what a Bugatti Veyron would do without its stability control, or quite when it might do it, but I have a good idea of what the F1 would do, and it would involve not catching an oversteer slide. I remember watching one of Martin Brundle’s videos and seeing the look on his face when the rear of an F1 he’d borrowed stepped out in a straight line, in the wet, when he gave the throttle a good poke. Had there been subtitles, the words ‘Oh Lord, please, no’ would have appeared beneath his slack-jawed mug.

So although it has a finely responsive, torqueheavy, naturally aspirated engine tailor-made for on and just over the limit play, that’s not in the F1’s repertoire. But it doesn’t matter. The aural richness of this engine and its sparkling

delivery, whether it’s lugging a high gear from low revs, keening to the red line, or anything in between, makes it utterly compelling.

Fifteen years on, the world has yet to welcome a better packaged, better finished or more habitable supercar. Or one that’s as potent, light and tactile. I admire the Bugatti Veyron, which has been developed just as fastidiously, but it’s a blunt instrument in comparison, a carpet bomber as opposed to a laser-guided missile.

And although it does 253mph, the Veyron hasn’t moved the supercar game on.

The next generation of supercars will be smaller, lighter and more efficient. In other words, more like the McLaren F1, though there’ll probably never be another supercar that puts its driver so at the centre of things and so in charge of their own destiny.

Above: editor Trott (nearest the camera) and editorial director Metcalfe prepare to hit 200mph in the capable hands of McLaren test driver Peter Taylor. Left: magnificent V12 engine is the real highlight of the car evo.co.uk 013

M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

After 20 years Gordon Murray still hates this bracket The F1 was Murray’s vision of the no-compromise ultimate road car. Two decades on, he tells Harry Metcalfe what he still loves about it – and what winds him up

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sking Gordon Murray if there’s any one thing he’d like to change on his McLaren F1, I sense I’ve hit a nerve.

‘That damn bracket!’ he snorts back.

Erm, which bracket is that then?

Next minute the door is up, the engine cover popped and I’m peering at an inoffensive aluminium support for a tiny pressure switch, sitting above the twin carbon air intakes. Its job in life is to switch the engine bay light on whenever the engine cover is raised. And, to be honest, I can’t really see why it infuriates Murray so much. But then he explains that it’s a bracket mounted on another bracket and in Murray’s perfectionist world that is simply not allowed. ‘It looks like the sort of thing you’d find on a Ferrari,’ he quips.

It’s this obsessive pursuit of perfection that made the McLaren F1 such an extraordinary car, of course. What is not widely known, however, is that Gordon Murray has owned a McLaren F1 road car since the very beginning, thanks to a nifty clause in his McLaren contract that gifted him one of the development cars from any road car project they succeeded in getting to market.

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It turns out the offending bracket was added after Murray had signed the original car off, so he only discovered this offensive piece of aluminium whilst peering at his own car one day. He had originally mounted the switch as an integral part of the engine cover itself but during testing at very high speeds engineers had found the cover lifted slightly, potentially causing the engine light to come on, so they moved the switch to this new position. No-one thought to tell Gordon what they’d done…

Murray’s F1 is ‘XP3’, a hard working development car that did plenty of the highspeed testing at Nardo in Italy, as well as much of the set-up work at MIRA in the early ’90s.

By the time the development work was finished, it had covered around 20,000 miles (10,000 of which Murray did himself) but today there’s 60,000 miles showing on its odometer.

‘I use it all the time, even for simple trips like going shopping,’ Murray tells me. ‘It’s not exactly standard as it’s got the springs and dampers from the F1 LM, plus the sports exhaust, so it’s a bit lighter than standard, probably weighing in around 1100kg.’ The only

Pictures Barry Hayden

M c L a r e n f1 : 2 0 y e a r s

Ones that got away When Gordon Murray was working at McLaren the plan was always to build more road cars than just the F1. Here’s a glimpse of what might have been that you might not know about;

Above: this chain arrangement was incorporated in the throttle mechanism to reduce the effect of initial throttle openings and make the F1 more driveable in town. Below: Murray shows Metcalfe round the F1

■ 1995 McLaren P2 Stillborn 2+2 mid-engined sports car conceived in collaboration with BMW. Designed to use either the M3’s straight-six engine or the V8 from the M5. The project was cancelled abruptly after BMW discovered McLaren had signed up Mercedes to supply engines for its Grand Prix cars.

Above and right: Gordon Murray in May 2010 with the F1 that was gifted to him as part of his contract with McLaren. XP3 was one of the prototypes that clocked up thousands of miles of high-speed testing

■ 1996 McLaren PGTB Another 2+2, mid-engined car, commissioned and built for the Sultan of Brunei as a one-off special.

The PGTB was powered by the McLaren F1’s V12 engine but remains hidden away amongst the Sultan’s vast collection of cars that includes no fewer than three F1 LMs.

■ 1998 McLaren P5 This is the car that Murray originally designed for Mercedes. Company bosses liked the car but decided they wanted their ultra-sports car to be front-engined so commissioned McLaren to turn the Vision SLR concept car into a production reality instead. And so the Mercedes SLR McLaren was born.

■ 2002 McLaren P8 A group of McLaren engineers were instructed to investigate new ways of using carbon composites in road car construction and came up with a way of creating a moulded carbon tub economically. This project, originally envisaged to go on sale in 2004, evolved into the McLaren MP4-12C

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time he won’t use the car is when the weather is really wet or the roads are icy.

I ask him what’s the longest journey he’s ever done in the F1. ‘I once drove it over to Hockenheim for a race weekend, which was over 500 miles each way. It was great and I got up especially early on the Sunday morning to drive on a German autobahn when there was no traffic about. I wanted to find out how long I could drive the F1 at over 200mph.

‘I couldn’t believe how tricky it was. I kept coming across trucks or buses in the inside lane and it doesn’t feel safe passing them at such high speeds. I did manage to hold it for long periods at around 180mph but I very rarely achieved over 200mph.’

Apparently Murray’s wife isn’t keen on going really quickly in the F1 either, so he has to agree never to exceed 140mph whenever they go on a road trip in the McLaren together – a speed the F1 can achieve in third, incidentally…

Murray has his F1 serviced by Paul Lanzante, who ran the race team that won the 1995 Le Mans 24 Hours with the GTR version of the F1 (see page 18). These days Lanzante Ltd specialises in converting McLaren race cars into road cars as well as doing servicing for other

F1 owners. The engine in Murray’s car had to be rebuilt recently (the work done by BMW in Germany) after the block started to leak water between two cylinders during a road rally he was doing in France. He drove the car back to the UK, thinking the slight misfire was just down to the engine ‘losing a plug’, but eventually he discovered it needed a full rebuild. It now has what is effectively a new engine.

‘I managed to hold it for long periods at around 180mph but rarely over 200’

As murray manoeuvres the car around for the photographs, I can’t believe how easy he makes accessing the central driver’s seat look; he’s seemingly developed a knack of dropping straight into the seat as soon as the door swings open. Then again, it probably helps if you’ve had 20 years of practice, are well over six feet tall and were responsible for the design in the first place, but I’m still impressed.

‘I wanted the interior to be entirely focused around the driver,’ he tells me. ‘That’s why there’s the muted grey trim on the top of the dash, which continues round the rest of the cabin, but the driver’s seat is trimmed in a different, much brighter colour. The reason is, when someone looked through the side window of a parked F1, I only wanted them to notice the

driver’s seat, like in an F1 car.’

Gordon’s driver’s seat is finished in black with vibrant red trim, the naked carbon shell clearly visible from behind. The rest of the interior looks brand new, only the light scratching around the ignition barrel betrays the fact that this car is actually nearly 20 years old.

Which components on the car does he think really date the McLaren F1 today?

‘I suppose the brakes do,’ says Murray. ‘We tried to develop ceramic brake discs at the time but we couldn’t get them to work effectively for general road use. The trouble with the standard steel brakes is that we had to develop them to pass the brake performance tests in force at the time, which demanded repetitive

stops from 80 per cent of a car’s top speed. With an F1, that meant braking repeatedly from 190mph-plus, so the pad material we ended up with was very hard, leading to very high pedal pressures and squealing brakes when cold. It was far from ideal.’

Murray also thinks the lights are bit outdated now but, other than that, he likes to think the car has stood the test of time pretty well. The one thing he can’t get over, though, is how much the cars are changing hands for these days. Ralph Lauren paid a reputed £2.5million for one of the five F1-LM road cars a few years ago but even a standard F1 fetches close to £2million today, or more than three times more than they cost new.

Murray says it was the £1million Veyron that redefined what customers were willing to pay for their supercars, and the value of a McLaren F1 has increased as a result.

What is somewhat galling for Murray is that while McLaren struggled to sell 65 road cars over the three-year production run at a list price of £600,000 (around £900,000 in today’s money) it looks like Bugatti will end up building around 450 Veyrons by the time production finally ends in 2011. Looked at that way, you could argue the McLaren F1 was a bit of a bargain…

What's next…

■ Gordon Murray Design is working round the clock to sell the concept of ‘iStream’ construction and the T25 city car, but both Murray and his main financial backer want to develop a lightweight sports car in a similar vein to the original MX-5. This would most probably be mid-engined and ultra lightweight – Murray thinks the Lotus Elise is becoming overweight at 875kg in its latest iteration, as well as getting expensive. Target price for the Murray sports car would be £12,000 in today’s money.

Next up would be an F1 successor, designed specifically for today’s road conditions. It would put the driver first again so we can expect a central driving position, few electronic aids and a kerb weight under 1200kg (according to Murray, no car that weighs more than this can properly be described as a sports car). It won’t be as fast as the F1 though, as he believes that a top speed of over 200mph today is completely pointless.

Will it happen? Well, first a couple of licences for the iStream and T25 need to be signed, but then, according to Murray, work will start in earnest on these two very exciting projects. evo.co.uk 017

M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

A wing, a prayer and a can of WD40 In 1995, the F1 went racing, culminating in an assault on Le Mans. Richard Meaden

Far left: three generations of the GTR racer, from 1995, 1996 and in long-tail form from 1997.

Left: victorious at Le Mans 1995. Below: the winning car today

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reports on how one of the most famous of 24-hour victories very nearly didn’t happen he story of McLaren’s debut win at the 1995 Le Mans remains one of the great legends of La Sarthe. Even now, some fifteen years after the event, the significance of what happened during those 24 hours remains truly remarkable.

Lest we forget, the F1 was the world’s most famous car in 1995. Everyone was buzzing with excitement, rapt by its power, price, pace and peerless quality. That would have been enough for most supercar manufacturers, but not McLaren. Having taken the decision to develop a racing version and supply it to privateer teams for the BPR GT1 Endurance series, an assault on Le Mans was inevitable.

Perhaps because chance of an overall victory against the Courage and Kremer prototypes was thought to be slim, McLaren’s support for the programme was deliberately low-key.

Independent teams would run the cars, as they did in the BPR endurance series, but McLaren did co-ordinate a 24-hour test at Magny Cours in order to expose any weaknesses in the package and subsequently develop upgrades, which would then be made available to all the teams running F1s.

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The car used for this test was owned by McLaren, but thanks to sponsorship from the Japanese cosmetic surgery practice, Ueno Clinic, sufficient budget was found to run the car at Le Mans too. A team was duly formed by a small nucleus of McLaren employees, who bolstered their ranks with experienced endurance racing engineers and known associates of McLaren.

One of the key members of the newly-formed Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing team was Graham Humphrys, then race engineer, now director of GT1 Design and a driving force behind Aston Martin’s Nürburgring racing efforts. Working alongside Paul Lanzante and Geoff Hazell (who ran the McLaren GTR programme), it was Humphrys who effectively engineered the No.59 car, making all the calls relating to its pre-race preparations and maintenance during the race itself.

Though the car’s progress appeared imperious from the spectator banking (I know, I was there), the Ueno Clinic F1 almost didn’t complete the first hour of the race. Humphrys explains: ‘We had a torrid time in the build-up to the race.

JJ (Lehto) was phenomenally quick whenever

Pictures Matt Howell

r oc a M Ld a rreac n fe1r:s 2: 0f eyreraarrs i g t o r e t u r n s

he drove the car, but he’d bent a few wishbones by clouting the kerbs in qualifying. Then he buzzed the motor, which meant we had to speak with the BMW guys, who were looking after the engines. If an engine exceeded 9000rpm they felt it was compromised, and that was their view of our engine. There was a spare, but I had to make the call to Ron Dennis to tell him we needed to have it. He listened intently, asked if anyone else had a similar need for the motor, and then gave us the okay to use it.

‘The engine swap meant we were working late into the night. Actually we were still working in the early hours of race day morning. At around 2am I can remember us scrabbling round the paddock trying to load the car onto a flat-bed transporter – we even enlisted a few drunk spectators to help us push it onto the truck – before taking to the aerodrome across the road from the main entrance for a shakedown test.

‘To make matters more stressful we had also identified a potential gearbox problem. Our other drivers – Yannick Dalmas and Masanori Sekiya – had both said they felt there was an issue between third and fourth gears, both on the up and downshift. JJ said he hadn’t noticed, but that was JJ… Anyway, I went to the gearbox man and said I wanted the back taken off the ’box so we could take a look, but he’d built the

‘JJ Lehto was awesome during that long, treacherous night. At times ’box himself and stubbornly refused to consider it had a problem. As you can imagine, things got a bit heated, and after much shouting at each other he eventually relented. When he came back some hours later to say that the selector fork was bent and the synchro was shot he was somewhat contrite. It wouldn’t have lasted another hour. Funnily enough, after that flareup we’ve been best mates ever since!’

The race started dry and the WM Peugeots streaked off into the distance, closely followed by the other prototypes. Then the rain came and the race changed completely. It was said at the time that it was the weather that saved the McLarens, for a dry race would have put too much strain on the F1’s transmission. Humphrys again: ‘Yes, the rain meant the cars weren’t worked as hard as they would have been in a hot, dry race, but JJ was awesome during that long, treacherous night. At times he was 30sec a lap quicker than anyone else…’

I can vouch for Humphrys’ eulogy to Lehto, for despite the miserable weather John Barker, Roger Green and I stood transfixed on the

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The racing version of the F1 was only slightly modified from the road car. The regulations meant its engine had to be pegged at 600bhp so the GTR was actually slightly less powerful than the road car.

Other changes included a steel roll-cage, a quicker steering rack, and the removal of the rubber bushing from the suspension, while the brake discs and calipers grew in size behind the OZ Racing wheels

he was 30sec a lap quicker than anyone else’ inside of Tetre Rouge for lap after spellbinding lap, stunned by the Finn’s commitment and car control. Where others would tiptoe through, right foot audibly hovering on the throttle pedal, JJ would spear into view then dance the F1 through the fast right-hander, hard on the power, revs rising as that mighty, rasping BMW V12 span the rear wheels, then the note hardening as JJ’s quick, adrenalin-fuelled wits applied just enough corrective lock to balance but not wholly correct the slide. It was by any yardstick one of motor racing’s greatest drives.

Humphrys takes up the story once more: ‘Those stints are what built the victory for us, but again things could so easily have gone wrong. We knew that other teams were experiencing gear selection problems. You could hear their tentative shifts and occasional missed gears as they passed the pits. When our drivers also reported the problem we knew it was something common to all the F1s, but what could we do? At the next stop we checked everything, but couldn’t see an obvious problem.

Then I remembered the linkage mechanism was

exposed in the transverse ’box’s casing. Although they were partially shielded by a panel and a liberal coating of silicone grease, the rain and grit was being blasted at the linkages, forming a very effective grinding paste and gumming the whole thing up. I can remember thinking ‘we’ve got to do something about this’, and decided to pump as much WD40 as possible into the area where the rainwater and grit was collecting. We did it every stop from then on. Not only did we not encounter any more selection issues, but the gearbox was sweeter at the end of the race than it was at the beginning!’

The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did the Ueno Clinic car’s win (by a solitary lap from the Courage prototype racer of Bob Wollek, Eric Hélary and Mario Andretti) mean McLaren had conquered Le Mans at the first attempt, but it was also the first win for a Japanese or Finnish driver. To ram home the fact that car 59’s triumph was no fluke, F1 GTRs also occupied 3rd, 4th, 5th and 13th positions.

The legend of the F1 – and the magical qualities of WD40 – was now complete.

Specification Engine Location Displacement Bore x stroke Cylinder block Cylinder head Fuel and ignition Max power Max torque Transmission Front suspension Rear suspension Steering Brakes Wheels Tyres Weight (kerb) Power-to-weight 0-60mph Top speed Basic price Year Number built

V12 Mid, longitudinal 6064cc 86 x 87mm Aluminium alloy Aluminium alloy, dohc per bank, four valves per cylinder, variable inlet valve timing TAG 3.12 management and injection, two coils and injectors per cylinder 600bhp @ 7500rpm n/a Six-speed manual gearbox, rear-wheel drive, limited-slip diff Double wishbones, coil springs, dampers, anti-roll bar Double wishbones, coil springs, dampers, anti-roll bar Rack and pinion Ventilated carbon-ceramic discs, 380mm front, 356mm rear 10.85 x 18in front, 13 x 18in rear, magnezium alloy OZ Racing Michelin 1050kg 580bhp/ton n/a 231mph n/a 1995 Nine

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Road racer : the F1 GTR

M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

Nick Mason’s F1 started life as a racer but was converted into a potent road car and trackday toy. Mark Hales gets to grips with it

I

’ve driven McLaren F1s a fair bit…

Maybe I’d better qualify that statement.

I’ve driven versions of the F1 a fair bit.

Ray Bellm’s FIA GT championshipwinning short-tailed model at Brands Club circuit in 1996 was a brief, full-on race model interlude, and if it wasn’t quite as crushingly imperious as I’d expected a title winner to be, there was no doubt it was exciting.

I’ve steered Nick Mason’s converted, roadtyred, emission-compliant F1 GTR a great deal more often, but, truth to tell, I haven’t really felt comfortable in that either. Having driven several more GTs in between and since, I can see that a 600bhp race car made out of a road model – especially a beautifully crafted, fully type-approved one – is not easily done. Even F1 designer Gordon Murray is on record saying that if he had been asked to design a pure racer, he would have done so. At some point I really should drive a standard model.

Mason’s car is chassis number 10R, originally the McLaren race team’s dedicated test mule, used to develop parts and set-up, and had done thousands of laps but no races. Swiftly superseded by the long-tailed model which Murray was then forced to develop, 10R became part of McLaren boss Ron Dennis’s collection and looked set to remain there. Mason, though, had always wanted an F1 and a decade or so later, quite by chance, he came to own a 1970s McLaren Indycar – a model missing from Dennis’s collection. Murray was asked to drop some hints, and the deal was eventually done.

That deal included a complete rebuild to McLaren standards and a specification that retained the racing stuff like the rear wing, uprated suspension and straight-cut gears but which added the road car’s genuine highway legality, catalytic converters and some items of trim. A sort of ultimate trackday car which could be driven to the circuits if necessary. Or not, as the case may be.

No doubting the sheer excitement available from an unrestricted 620bhp-plus in a little over a ton, but I was surprised it was a thrill that had to be approached so carefully. The unassisted steering was an initial surprise, and although it didn’t seem to make the nose point exactly, the lack of interference meant it sent plenty of messages back. It twitches and tugs over every change of camber, the more so with that diagonal rocking sensation you get with most mid-engined cars. A bit like a small boat on an occasional swell. Or a Porsche 911.

Pictures Andy Morgan

Then there’s the unassisted brakes, which need a very firm push and which start to grumble after only a lap or two, and the slightly sticky gearshift which needs a loose grip and confident aim rather than a tense fist. It’s definitely not a car which invites you to take it by the scruff and drive fast and loose…

The most obvious conclusion is that the tyres fitted to the McLaren in 1995 simply can’t handle 479lb ft of torque and 600-plus horsepower. Breaking traction is just so very easy and, once done, the wheelspin builds so quickly that the car is sideways in an instant.

Having got there, the only defence is to ride it out and keep the power on while using both hands to turn the wheel in the opposite direction. That’s OK on track where there’s nothing coming the other way and where my

‘Wheelspin builds so quickly that the car is sideways in an instant’ loose-tail antennae are turned up to 11, but it’s not something I’d do by instinct on the public road where backing off is an instinctive reaction which only makes the problem worse. That wonderful 6.1-litre engine applies drag to tyres that have already lost grip, so it’s rather like yanking on the handbrake halfway through a slide that’s already started.

The racing slicks on Bellm’s car certainly helped the back end and they also allowed the front to be made sharper. A race car has the smallest gap between the front spoiler and the ground that the regulations will allow because air flowing underneath will only lift the nose and spoil the turn-in. Unfortunately, a two-inch gap would fall victim to the first speed-bump or urban kerb, added to which a super-pointy front end would only make any rear-end problems happen sooner rather than later. Murray is on record saying that for the road model he had no option but to raise the front.

On track, Nick’s car feels slightly nervous in the slower corners, then once the air below has found its way under the splitter and is flowing

over the rear wing, it feels a bit vague in the fast ones. I always seem to end up waiting for the next straight, searching for intelligible messages from a wheel which is already alive in my hands.

At Goodwood, a couple of times I got the F1 settled into Lavant, the double corner leading to the main straight and gently prodded the accelerator, then some more. Halfway through, the wheels began to spin, the revs rose and I was way out of shape in the blink of an eye. It was pretty much what a 1963 Shelby Cobra does – except that the F1 stayed much flatter and tidier during the recovery.

Whether this is how it has to be, and the road model accepts as much but wraps it all in a softer, smoother package just like Gordon knew it should be, is something I need to research. But I can’t help feeling that such a specialised and powerful GT will never be comfortable halfway between road and race specs. Sticky trackday tyres like those fitted to GT3 RSs might be a partial answer. Dean Lanzante, who looks after the car for Nick, reckons he has a pile of parts that would make this particular F1 a happier compromise. I’ve suggested we go somewhere and find out. If and when we do, I’ll report back.

Below: Mason’s GTR keeps the race car’s rear wing and stiffer suspension but is fully road-legal. While the racer was limited to 600bhp, with the air restrictors removed the V12 (below left) makes in excess of 620bhp. Above: Hales unleashes it all at Goodwood circuit

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M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars

‘We never told Ron about the indicators!’

Peter Stevens, the man who designed the F1, recalls how he got involved and relates some of the untold

Below: Stevens at work in his studio. Clay model (right) is a souvenir of his McLaren days.

Far right: early F1 (note highmounted mirrors with built-in indicators, later dropped) with Stevens’ muchloved Fiat 500

stories about the car’s development. Henry Catchpole takes notes

HC: When did you join the team?

PS: I read in a magazine that McLaren was planning a road car and thought ‘oh that’s nice’ but at the time I was working at Lotus and on the Jaguar XJR15. Then Gordon phoned me up [they’d worked together at Brabham] and said he wanted to have a chat. So we met up and sat on the roof of my girlfriend’s flat and we drank quite a few beers and he said ‘how could they find a designer for the car’ and we had some more beers and by the end of the evening we’d decided it should be me.

For the first year I was dying to draw what a McLaren road car might look like, but I very deliberately disciplined myself not to draw one.

With so many projects, people start with the sketching and then try to force that over the car.

Then it’s downhill to disappointment.

When I actually did the drawings the wheels were in scale and it was all quite calm because the management, investors and directors weren’t used to the normal industry way of drawing something a bit barmy in a cartoon fashion. Also with the F1 we thought we’d be in production for ten years, so I knew there was no point doing something flash and Buck Rogers because two or three years later it would look old-fashioned.

The bit that I was very diligent about was the way the highlights and reflections worked. Ron couldn’t understand why we spent such a long time tuning the surface so that there were some lines where the light would just beautifully swoop along.

HC: Was the form compromised by function at all?

PS: Not in the least. The only thing was, we were all sure you could do anything with carbon when actually it’s about as handy as boiler-plate and to do very sharp, subtle, intricate things doesn’t really work.

HC: The rear lights were from a Bova coach?

PS: Yeah, they were. TVR had used them and we thought ‘oh well, that’s fine, they’ll have been homologated for a car’ and then we discovered TVR had never homologated them! Even at the time, to tool up for a tail-light was probably £500K and, despite what people thought, there wasn’t limitless money. But I didn’t want recognisable off-the-shelf things and I think they didn’t work out too bad. The indicators were from the Elan in the end because I wanted the slimmest possible. We never told Ron that, because if he’d known they were Lotus bits...

Of course the doors were good fun as well.

Pictures Mark Dixon / Octane

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M c L a r e n f1 : 2 0 y e a r s 1. 'PROJECT 2s' ‘There were some interesting things that we intended to do afterwards. I’d forgotten about them until I was rummaging around.

We were going to do something quite a bit more radical, one of them with a wing because although it wasn’t necessary and we didn’t like a wing, there were people even then asking if they could have one. So we thought we’d do something wacky like that. This suggests what might have happened with it.’ (Stevens wasn’t involved with the later long-tail cars)

2. the INTERIOR ‘There was an idea after we’d launched it that we’d just do a stripped-out two-seater and these were the interior sketches. Ron had originally wanted the F1 to be a single-seater but everyone just teased him that that was because he didn’t have any friends!’

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3. the AERO ‘This was my scheme with the aero for the F1. Because we planned it would go over 200mph we knew the aerodynamics had to be spectacularly good, so I did a lot of work in the wind tunnel with a model. I bought these little ducted fans from a radio-controlled jet, and we put those in the model and tested the aero with them on and off so that we could see the difference if, for example, the engine was drawing air or if we were drawing air from underneath. I didn’t want wings and things because I’d done wings at Lotus and didn’t think they were necessary. It was the period of writing jokey things on tyres, so you’ve got “Turns” on one and “Burns” on the other.’

Some of the priceless drawings from Peter Stevens’ portfolio, including plans for a stripped-out two-seater (right) and variations (above) which never saw the light of day – see notes, right. Left: Catchpole takes a closer look. Below: Stevens at home with 1930s Ford hotrod and classic bike

‘There’s a line round the rear wheelarch. It does this weedy little thing and just runs out. Can’t remember why I did it!’

I worked with the Porsche 956/962 and that had quite a nifty way of opening the door, but it was a bit of a flimsy old affair, a bit scary really. We didn’t want the Lamborghini way because seals don’t like to be scraped rather than squished, and then I saw this funny little Toyota [a Sera] and it had McLaren type doors. From the drawings the engineers couldn’t see how it would work so I made a wire frame model and soldered up the hinges to show it could work.

The luggage was fun too: I know Jonathan Palmer well and he came to pick me up for some race meeting in his helicopter and he opened these little panels in the side of the

helicopter to put the bags in and I thought ‘bloody hell!’ and I rushed back into work the next day…

HC: Anything you’re still particularly pleased with when you look at the car now?

PS: One of the things is the wheels. I had some good friends down at OZ and we knew we wanted the wheels to be light so I said ‘can we make some holes in bits?’ and suggested making holes in the spokes. They had quite good simple CAD even then and they looked at it and said ‘hey, this works really well because it’s just as stiff and we’ve saved half a kilo on each wheel’.

So that was very nice. Of course you can’t register the design of a split spoke with a hole in it, so in the years after that everyone did them.

So yeah, I like the purity of the wheel.

HC: And anything that you don’t like?

PS: There’s a couple of tiny little bits that I’d have done differently looking at it now. There’s a little line round the rear wheelarch and I can’t remember now why I did it. It does this weedy little thing and it just runs out and why I didn’t

take it straight… I can’t remember now! After I left McLaren I worked with Thomas Bscher on his F1 race car because there were things that I knew could have been a bit better…

HC: Such as…?

PS: Well, it wasn’t stiff enough at the back. If you did a graph of the stiffness along the chassis, when you got to the rear bulkhead it went down, so we made a little subframe for that. But also we lowered it quite a bit because we did our own windscreen where we took ten centimetres off the bottom, which meant we could run the car ten centimetres lower, which was plainly good. We also made the front inlet ducts work differently as well and made our own rear wing.

Thomas was very up for all that sort of thing.

HC: What do you think of the MP4-12C? PS: I think if you’d asked me ten years ago then I’d have thought it was alright. Unfortunately that new Ferrari has moved the game on a bit.

It’s just a generic high performance sports car – it’s all perfectly nicely done, but people in the business can see that it was done on CAD. evo.co.uk 027

Pictures McLaren

M cL aren f1: 20 y e ars The 9km straight at VW’s Ehra-Lessien allowed Andy Wallace to drive the F1 to its absolute maximum speed. Note the lack of friendly Armco…

Tiff Needell went to Millbrook’s two-mile bowl to set a new UK closed-circuit lap speed record for Comic Relief.

He can laugh about it now but he ranks it as the craziest thing he’s done in a car

‘I picked the middle lane to give myself some weave space’

McLarens to the max ■ March 1998, Ehra-Lessien, Germany ‘I picked the middle lane because it gave me some weave space,’ says Sportscar racing legend Andy Wallace. ‘On the first run I got a bit of a surprise. I’d got to just over 370kph in sixth gear, my eyes were out on stalks, and then bap-bap-bap!

The engine was banging against the limiter! At first I didn’t know what it was.’

It was also the sound of XP5, McLaren’s long-serving development car, hitting 232mph, 1mph more than XP3 had recorded on the huge Nardo high-speed bowl in Italy five years before. In fact, says Wallace, the Nardo figure was a calculated speed, based on the recorded speed and with an amount added on for the tyre-scrub on the shallow banking. There was more to come from XP5, though; the 7500rpm limiter wasn’t fixed…

‘Back in the parking area the BMW engineers upped the rev limit by 1000rpm – they said the V12 could easily go to 8500rpm – and I went out again,’ Wallace remembers. ‘It was really exciting. We were doing something that no-one had ever done before.’

The Volkswagen group’s Ehra-Lessien test track in northern Germany is ideal for speed tests. Between two high-speed banked turns is a

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9km straight on one side and on the other side another 9km with slight left-hand bends.

Wallace wore a crash helmet but was dressed in his civvies. (‘Well, it was a road car…’) With the limiter raised, more speed came, though Wallace does admit to sweaty palms. ‘230mph turned out to be a critical speed. The car felt curiously unstable and I wondered if I should push on or slow down. I pushed on and it stopped. Gordon Murray reckoned it must have been a temporary vortex around the car.’

The highest speed Wallace saw on the dashmounted readout was 391kph (243mph), and a quick calculation showed the two-way average to be a new production-car speed record of 240.1mph. In all, from the original Nardo tests, the F1 was the world’s fastest car for 12 years.

The F1 wasn’t designed to be the fastest car in the world, but for 12 years it was, setting the bar at 240.1mph. Andy Wallace and Tiff Needell recall the excitement of setting records in the big Mac ■ March 1999, Millbrook, UK ‘It was a very silly thing to do,’ recalls Tiff Needell, racing driver and, back in 1999, BBC TV Top Gear presenter. ‘We were all asked to do something for Comic Relief and the theme that year was breaking records, so we decided to go for the UK closed-circuit speed record for a production car. At the time it was held by Colin Goodwin from Autocar in a Jaguar XJ220 at 180mph.’

The speed had been set not at a recognised circuit like Silverstone but on the banked, twomile bowl at the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire. On the upside, there are no corners as such – you simply circulate as fast as the car will go, or as fast as you dare. On the downside, the ‘hands-off ’ speed on the banking

is 100mph – above that, you’re turning a corner, and the lateral loads get serious above 150mph.

‘We did about six or seven batches of three laps, coming in after each to check tyre temperatures,’ says Needell. ‘We were on genuine road tyres but it was a very cold day and they were only getting warm. But it was also very windy, which wasn’t so good. 180mph seemed quite easy, but it was amazing how much scarier it was above that. The speed and the radius of the bowl meant I was craning to look out of the top of the windscreen, and for half the lap the wind was behind, then suddenly you’d be into the wind and the steering weight would change completely.

‘I thought I’d go for one last lap and at 200mph it all went a bit squirrelly on me – the rear tyres had blistered. I couldn’t really back off, I had to drive through it, like you would with a caravan that had got out of shape, at 200mph.’

Despite this, Tiff set a new record lap average at an incredible 195.3mph, with a peak speed of 201mph. ‘I’ve done some things in my career,’ he says, ‘like trying to win Le Mans, but that… that’s the craziest. I nearly killed myself for Comic Relief !’

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