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McLaren F1: the best car ever
![McLaren F1](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/images/2017/04/11/McLaren-F1-doorsopen_1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqa3HjfjVxcdzvJqfCI1bj1kEHx9k3S0NbO-v0TgyXYPQ.jpg?imwidth=680)
Strange though it may seem to those who remember it as well as last week, the McLaren F1 was formally unveiled at The Sporting Club in Monaco some 25 years ago. Or at least a very convincing clay model of what would become the F1 was put on display.
Its story, however, began in Italy four years earlier even than that and thanks, in the main, to a delayed flight from Milan.
The 1988 season marked the high point of the McLaren Formula 1 team's life to date. Sixteen races and, with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost on the payroll, McLaren won all bar one. The race that denied them the clean sweep was the Italian Grand Prix at which, somewhat spookily, Ferrari finished first and second, less than a month after the death of its founder.
![McLaren F1](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/images/2017/04/11/TELEMMGLPICT000123586435_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQD8PL_taclazuXpcM71SXlIF6te-MCx-79KA1kIAGcM.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Waiting for the plane home the next day in Linate airport were Group McLaren bosses Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjeh, design chief Gordon Murray and its marketing director, the late Creighton Brown. As they waited, talk soon turned to an idea for a revolutionary car design Murray had first sketched out back in the Sixties.
It would have a central driving position like a Formula 1 car, but flanked by passengers in an arrowhead formation. At the same time Dennis had long wanted to produce a McLaren street machine to do to Ferrari on the road what it had been doing to it on the world's circuits all season.
Murray was not then, and is not now, a man who feels the constraints of convention, nor did McLaren feel any of the budgetary limitations in what was, at the time, a stampeding global bull market. The stage was set for the creation of perhaps the most remarkable road car of its or any other era. And its wacky driving position would be just one of the more notable design revolutions it would contain.
Although Murray was determined the F1 should completely redefine what a road car could do and raise performance to a hitherto unimagined level, his vision was far more sophisticated than that.
![McLaren F1](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/images/2017/04/11/TELEMMGLPICT000123586429_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqy81pHNlW26k7kWS-Prb1CgMpASvp6f-mzlJWgOgC9IQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Until the F1, the world's fastest cars were wildly impractical brutes, sacrificing space, ride and refinement in their relentless pursuit of speed. And while faster by far than all of them, key to Murray's design was a car that could be used. So not only would it carry three people in place of the usual two, it would take their luggage too. It would have air-conditioning, a bespoke music system and it would ride beautifully.
It would also be the first road car to be created entirely from carbon-fibre. Others like Ferrari's F40 had already used carbon components, but the F1 was the first to use the material both structurally and for its bodywork. Had Murray been able to make them work, it would have had carbon ceramic brakes too, but the idea was too far ahead of the available technology.
At the time, McLaren's racing cars had Honda engines, so Honda was first in the frame to provide the powertrain, but it was BMW who ended up with the job, creating a new 6.1-litre V12 engine just for the F1. And if you think carbon fibre was an exotic material, be advised the engine bay was lined in 24-carat gold, not as some kind of ostentatious wealth statement, but because it's the best heat deflector in the business. The engine's exhausts, like the car's pedals and even its toolkit, were made from titanium.
Frustratingly for those crowded around the car at The Sporting Club in 1992, it would be another two years before a car would be delivered, time in which the F1 would be tested, literally to destruction. Five prototypes were built, the first ending its days cartwheeling into the Namibian desert at over 150mph in a testing accident before burning to the ground. Remarkably the BMW test driver, dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt, crawled from the wreckage unhurt before the flames took hold. In more formal surroundings, another prototype was able to drive away from its own crash test, a unique achievement at the time and further proof of the strength of that carbon construction.
But how fast would it go? On May 2 1994, the day after the death in Imola of Senna, a man who had won all three of his F1 world titles in McLarens, two prototypes were provided to the road test editor of Autocar magazine for the only fully exhaustive independent evaluation of the car ever conducted.
![Gordon Murray in McLaren F1](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/images/2017/04/11/TELEMMGLPICT000123507929_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqUdpOC9bYgtt5lYSWGPsSUtfgDDmpqORuNWAz3-G8oxQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
By lucky hap, that person was me. The numbers achieved that day - 0-60mph in 3.2sec, 0-100mph in 6.3sec, 0-200mph in 28.0sec - represented the single greatest advance in road car performance there had ever been or will likely ever be. Even today it sounds quick, and that's before you consider the car had no traction control, no launch control, no sticky tyres and no seamless paddle-shift gearbox, refinements enjoyed by all the modern hypercars.
There was insufficient space in the UK to record the car's maximum speed and McLaren insisted that was never a design target, so it would be another four years before the company bothered to find out. But in 1998 at a VW test track in Germany and with former Le Mans winner Andy Wallace at the wheel, a standard F1 road car did 240.1mph.
![McLaren F1 GT - racing version - at Goodwood Festival of Speed](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/images/2016/06/26/Goodwood-Festival-McLaren-F1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqD3d2dmOlWYuQkR76XZjLQGH28ZiNHzwg9svuZLxrn1U.jpg?imwidth=350)
So fast had the F1 proven that McLaren found itself under immense pressure to make a racing version, a move Murray resisted, insisting that if he'd intended it to race he'd have designed it a completely different way. But he relented, creating the F1 GTR which duly won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1995 - allowing McLaren to join Ferrari as the only brands to have won the race at the first attempt - and went on to be a dominant force in sports car racing.
Surprisingly then, McLaren struggled to sell the F1. By the mid-Nineties the global economic situation had transformed for the worse and, at £627,000, the F1 cost more than half as much again as the next fastest car in the world, the £403,000 Jaguar XJ220, and Jaguar couldn't sell those either. In the end just 64 standard F1 road cars were built, with race versions and modified road cars bringing the total production run to exactly 100 cars.
One more reason why, if you'd like an F1 in your life today, you'll need close to £10 million - and posibly a great deal more - to put it there.
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