Key considerations
- Available, sort of, for more money than you’ll ever have
- 6.1-litre V12 petrol, rear-wheel drive
- Only room for three
- Clutch is a bit annoying
- Air-con doesn’t really work
- Headlamps not great at night
Yes, we know that the chance of anyone actually using a guide to help them buy a McLaren F1 is about the same as Santa Claus coming down your chimney, brushing the soot out of his beard and presenting you with the winning Euromillions ticket. You never know though, it might happen, and if it does you might find it tough to suppress the desire to rush out and buy an F1. In that scenario, this guide might prove useful. The rest of us losers will either have to treat this story as a bit of seasonal fun or just not bother to read it. If you are that winner by the way please feel free to ask Nic or Matt at PH Towers for the author’s email address and bank account details.
First question, is the F1 really the greatest roadgoing car of all time, as it is often dubbed? Like trying to nominate the best footballist or tennis player of all time, that's an impossible one to answer. Time moves on, as does technology, and perhaps most significantly standards. Would Lionel Messi have been the footy GOAT if he had come up against Norman 'Bites Yer Legs' Hunter or Ron 'Chopper' Harris on a weekly basis? He might have ended up as the best player in the fracture clinic, but the best player ever? Maybe not.
Who knows, or indeed cares about these barmy comparisons? What we can say with some degree of clarity is that the F1 was the GOIT, i.e. Greatest Of Its Time, that time being 1992-98, when it was being built, and for quite a few years after that too. Today, more than thirty years later, it still has the power to startle or make jealous owners of much more modern, much showier supercars. So how did it all come about? Well, at Milan airport after the 1988 Italian Grand Prix four members of McLaren’s top brass had a chat about how to big up the McLaren legend. They were already doing well in Formula 1 so the idea they came up with was to design and build the world’s finest road car.
McLaren’s technical director Gordon Murray, the perfectionist’s perfectionist, was the obvious man for the job. His recipe was simple. Keep the weight down and the power up, use the best for everything and compromise on nothing. That sounded all right to McLaren boss Ron Dennis, the perfectionist’s perfectionist’s perfectionist, so the F1 had a carbon-fibre tub chassis, carbon bodywork, double-wishbone suspension all round, and exquisite materials throughout including titanium for the six-piece throttle pedal, some suspension structures and the spanners in the owner’s toolkit. Then of course there was the headline-grabbing, Dave Spart-frothing 24-carat gold leaf heat-reflection lining for the engine bay.
And what an engine there was in that bay: a ripping, rippling, naturally aspirated 6.1-litre V12 designed by Paul Rosche to generate the highest power output for its size, and built by BMW, the only manufacturers who were prepared to work to Murray’s uncompromising standards.
At 1,138kg the F1 was 62kg lighter than the subject of last week's guide, Hyundai's i20N, with 417 more horsepower than that very sprightly supermini and 276 more lb ft of torque. Unsurprisingly therefore the F1 was quick, and ridiculously so by '90s standards, rasping through the 0-60mph in a knuckle-whitening 3.2 seconds. More eye-opening than the low-speed acceleration numbers however was the scarily unrelenting nature of that acceleration. 0-100mph came up in 6.3 seconds, 0-150mph in 12.8 seconds and 0-200mph in 28.0 seconds. It was the sort of performance any sane person would think twice about unleashing on an airport runway, let alone a public road.
F1 variants eked out in very limited numbers. In 1995 the 1,062kg, 670hp/520lb ft LM model was released. In 1996 the GTR arrived, followed in 1997 by the GT, the final and rarest F1 of all. They will doubtless make another PH story sometime, but today we’re concentrating on the standard roadgoing F1s.
We’re not going to get into how many of those were made. You will find various suggestions on the internet. Choose 64 or 72, or any number in between, and we won’t argue with you. As you know, prices for a thing go up when demand exceeds supply, especially for a thing that is by general agreement a leader in its field of things. Even if we take the popularly touted figure of 106 as the actual number of all F1s made, including racers and prototypes, the number of massively financially qualified and potentially interested buyers in the world far outweighs that.
This disconnect between supply and demand has had, and continues to have, a considerable impact on F1 values. In 1992, the F1 was priced at around £600,000. They stayed at that sort of level until as recently as 2006 – but then, as the global financial crisis loomed and moneyed folk were looking for safe investments, prices skyrocketed. Between 2006 and 2008 F1 prices trebled to £1.5 million. By 2014 they’d gone up to £5 million.
That was just the start. In 2017 Lewis Hamilton reportedly paid £14 million for chassis number 44. In 2021 Gooding & Co auctioned a 241-mile 1995 car for $20.5 million, equivalent to just under £15 million at the time or £16 million-plus at 2023 exchange rates. We’re not aware of any F1s being sold since for any more than that – but that doesn’t mean such sales haven’t been made. A black-on-black F1, chassis number 005, was advertised for sale recently by DK Engineering. A ‘sold’ sticker was then put on the ad. Was it actually sold? Who knows? No price was, or has been, disclosed.
An estimated total value of £250 million was placed on a collection of 13 cars that was put together in 2022 to celebrate the F1’s 30th anniversary. That suggests an average value per car of just over £19 million, which sounds a tad low when you hear that the collection included five GTR racers and three Longtails as well as five road cars.
It’s all conjecture anyway because buying a used F1 in 2023 is not quite as easy as buying a Ford Fiesta. At the time of writing, the number of F1s on public sale anywhere in the world, not just on PH Classifieds, was zero. If you do manage to source one directly from McLaren you’ll be getting something on which McLaren’s MSO special ops department will have spent three months restoring to as-new condition, retrofitting any equipment you wanted that the first buyer hadn’t ordered, and finishing it off with a four-hour valet. That’s how it worked in the past anyway. For this reason, there aren’t many F1s around now that are the same colour or spec as they were when they were new.
SPECIFICATION | MCLAREN F1 (1992-98)
Engine: 6,064cc 48v V12 naturally aspirated petrol
Transmission: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 627@7,500rpm
Torque (lb ft): 479@4,000rpm
0-60mph (secs): 3.2
Top speed (mph): 240
Weight (kg): 1,138
Wheels (in): 9 x 17 (f), 11.5 x 17 (r)
Tyres: 235/45 (f), 315/45 (r)
On sale: 1992-1998
Price new (1992): £600,000 approx
Price now: from a lot of millions
Note for reference: car weight and power data are hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.
ENGINE & GEARBOX
As his new GMA T.50 illustrates, Gordon Murray knows how to make a car sound epic. Naturally aspirated V12s will always give you a head start on that score and the dry-sump BMW M Power unit was as mighty as it sounded, especially on the clamber up from maximum torque at 4,000rpm.
Starting the beast involved turning the ignition key, lifting a flap and pressing a button. Nowadays that’s par for the supercar course but it was a thrilling novelty in 1992. The response to the throttle was electric, but this was in the days before double-clutch gearboxes so there was a slight mismatch between the engine and the transmission. The helical-gear six-speed box was a joint effort between Californian racing transmission specialists Traction Products and BMW, who supplied bearings and synchros for it from their V8-engined E34 5 Series.
The F1 was the first production car to adopt the then-current Formula 1 practice of a very small aluminium flywheel and carbon clutch. This caused some problems in the early days. The AP carbon three-plate clutch was quite draggy and the box was steady rather than stellar. The gearchange feel was meant to be as close as possible to that of the Honda NSX, a personal favourite of Murray’s, but during early development testing Mika Hakkinen drily described the prototype F1’s shifting as ‘punchy’. It was sorted out to Murray’s satisfaction in time for production.
The TP/BMW gearboxes were built by FF Developments, the Coventry-based all-wheel drive specialists who were heavily involved in some of the world’s winningest Group B rally cars and who were eventually bought by the automotive consultancy group Ricardo.
The F1’s shift gate remained narrow enough to merit some caution in use and the clutch needed to be adjusted on a regular basis, in some cases after just 5,000 miles, which was not popular among owners. Just behind the gearlever was a flap with a red rearwards-pointing red arrow on it. Sliding that back gave you access to reverse gear. The housing for the gearbox was supposed to be made out of magnesium but it got so hot at high speeds they had to backtrack to aluminium.
And high speeds were very much available. The first five gear ratios were closely stacked to deliver strong acceleration to 160mph, with 6th being a long-strider cog that was good for 33mph from every 1,000rpm. It wouldn’t be until 1998 that Gordon Murray's top speed estimate of ‘at least 230mph’ would be exceeded by over 10mph in an XP5 prototype with different gearing and a new rev limit of 8,300rpm, 800rpm above standard spec.
The world of used F1s is very, very small and very, very private. It’s difficult to imagine any potential buyer insisting on seeing the service history before buying a car. To some extent, it’s irrelevant as the cost of fixing even the worst imaginable problem will still only represent a tiny fraction of the car’s value.
But if you did want to see the service books you would find them in a rather lovely leather attaché case alongside a hardback owner’s manual signed by Gordon Murray. This was tailored to each car and set out all the paint codes, chassis and engine numbers, pedal positions and settings relating to it.
CHASSIS
Each F1 carbon chassis took 3,000 man-hours to create. Its lightness made the F1 remarkably easy to drive at normal speeds, but the mental load on the driver increased the faster you went or the harder you tried. Same for any car, you might say with some justification, but life could quickly get quite a lot more challenging at F1 speeds. By today’s standards, the 235/45 front tyres look alarmingly narrow, especially with no engine mass to help anchor them to the road, but they absolutely needed to be skinny to retain some manageability in the steering, which was unassisted for purity. There was a limited-slip differential but the suspension allowed a fair amount of weight transfer under power and braking, adding another fascinating piece to the F1 driving jigsaw.
It all added up to a challenge, and a great one. ‘Twitchy’ and ‘alive’ were two sides of the same coin: with the right mindset the early warning element implicit in relatively small contact patches could easily be seen as a good thing. Experience and talent behind the F1’s wheel were useful. Neither provided a guarantee of safety, but for the committed driver the potential of the F1 to bite and the never-ending learning experience that it graciously provided was absolutely central to its appeal. Rowan Atkinson, who is no fool, crashed his F1 twice over a 17-year, 40,000-mile ownership period. The next owner of that car was still more than happy to pay £8 million for it in 2015 and will no doubt be even happier today when they check out current values, if that sort of thing is important to them. Which it probably isn’t.
Some journalists felt that the F1’s Achilles heel was its braking power, which they thought relatively mediocre for the weight of the car. The pad material did have to be very hard in order for it to survive repeated braking tests at the officially sanctioned 90 per cent of V-max, which in the F1 was a very high speed indeed. The pads always squeaked in use too, at any speed, although you probably couldn’t hear it above the rest of the noise when you were really motoring.
Some thought that the F1’s weak point was its heavy steering. Others said that the front end felt slightly disconnected. One said that it should never have had a fuel bag instead of a tank because you had to take the bag out every five years. That one came from a Mr G Murray of Woking (really). And that’s why you won’t find any fuel bags on a GMA T.50. Actual owners who ‘got’ the F1 simply smiled and carried on.
BODYWORK
Put an aero kit on it and an F1 will visually pass muster with any of today’s hypercars. Without mass-increasing spoilers or wings it looked oddly bare but there was a refreshing simplicity about its unadulterated shape. State-of-the-art groundforce effects got on with the business of delivering grip. A three-position Airbrake mini-spoiler did form part of the exhaust cover. You could control that manually from the dash console or let it function automatically.
All the body panels were carbon fibre so lifting open the dihedral doors (inspired by the otherwise uninspiring Toyota Sera), the side panniers and the engine cover all required very little effort. All closures were precise and satisfying, as long as you remembered not to leave any windows open when you were opening or closing a door. When the doors were open most owners could easily reach up and grab either door handle from the driver’s seat, something you could also do in a bubble car but very few conventionally laid-out cars. The flaps to open the doors from the inside were located on the front outside corner of each passenger seat. Some F1s had remote locking, others just had regular door locks operated by the ignition key.
The separate rear exhaust cover (the one with the heat-reflecting gold under it) could be pivoted up once the main engine cover had been toggled open. More on that in the Interior section. Under the front boot cover were anodised aluminium caps for screen wash, clutch fluid and brake fluid plus your CD changer, screw-in towing eye and the aforementioned small toolkit whose Facom spanners were made from aerospace quality titanium and then coated in titanium nitride to achieve a gold finish. There was a pair of pliers in there too. We found one of these kits for sale while we were putting this guide together: a snip at £2,995, or 500 quid a tool. No sign of the wallet though. Don’t go getting any get-rich-quick ideas, now.
While we’re on this subject, that wasn’t the only toolkit you got with an F1. You also got a full 7-drawer Facom roller chest fully stocked with a wonderful selection of tools that you would of course never use.
Finding original paint on an F1 is unusual. At the rarefied prices, every F1 commands it would probably be specious to say that original paint adds value but it certainly adds extra interest. You could have an F1 in just about any colour – the $20m Gooding auction F1 was brown – and you could customise the carbon fibre weave too, for example by putting your family crest in there, though that might not enhance the resale value so much. Of course, the new owner could simply get rid of it and have their own bodywork made. It was all just a question of money. The key thing was to have the basic vehicle and the right paperwork.
The only components that weren’t made specifically for the F1 were the headlamps, indicators and tail lights. There was an urban myth which suggested that the rear lights were appropriated from a 1982-vintage, Dutch-built Bova Futura bus. They were indeed used on that bus, but they were originally produced by Italian industrial lighting suppliers COBO for use by, well, anybody who wanted them. Lamborghini put them on early Diablos. Bova and Iveco trucks also had them.
The headlights were, by Murray’s own admission, pants. They were very basic units bought in to save money, which seems odd in light of the car’s ‘no compromise’ mission statement. You couldn’t safely drive at over 100mph when it got dark.
INTERIOR
The F1 was smaller than a Renault Megane so you never felt overfaced by its bulk on a British B road. It never felt small on the inside though thanks to the central driver’s seat design which kept your body as far away from the car’s own body as it was possible to be.
Murray had been musing on an ‘arrowhead’ 3-seat design since the late 1960s. Once you had hopped over the passenger seat (always the left one if you didn’t want to risk your undercarriage on the gearlever) the driving position was as near to perfect as you could imagine. The delicious wheel and all the information you required were presented directly in front of you with maximum tactility and clarity. There were paddles behind the wheel, not for the transmission (obviously) but for high beam flash and horn.
All the minor controls were comfortably located either within a handspan of the wheel or on the carbon fibre consoles that cosily corralled your upper legs. Toggles on either side of your body opened the doors. Doing that revealed two further toggles on each side marked ‘E’ and ‘L’. These opened the engine cover and the two panniers ahead of the rear wheels. The pannier covers were bottom-hinged, so they could bang against your leg when you opened them, but once you’d got past that both cubbies held a very reasonable amount of bespoke soft luggage. The left-hand pannier also housed the battery (CTEK trickle charger recommended for non-daily use), fuse panel, fire extinguisher and, under the removable floor, some spare fuses and a first aid kit. Under the floor of the right-hand pannier – which held two more bespoke cases plus a tyre inflator bottle, the filler cap for the engine oil tank, a McLaren mechanic’s glove and a yellow duster – was a large anodised spanner for the centrelock magnesium wheels. The car also came with a bespoke torque wrench for the wheelnut settings.
No radio was provided as Gordon Murray reckoned the transmission and reproduction facilities weren’t good enough for the car. Instead, you could listen to the lightweight Kenwood CD player or (especially if you were a side seat passenger) the apocalyptic induction noise from the roof snorkel intake. Or you could just admire the individually machined instrument needles or any of the other beautifully considered cabin details. The flyoff handbrake could be all carbon or a mix of wood and composite. The problem of where to fit the rear-view mirror for a centrally-seated driver was solved by fitting two of them. The air-con didn’t really work because of insufficient air extraction and the non-availability of a compressor that would both work and survive across an 8,000rpm rev span.
PH VERDICT
When McLaren won Le Mans in 1995, both Porsche and Mercedes bust a gut to reassert the racing dominance that had been almost casually stolen from them by the insouciant British interloper. The weapons they built to achieve that end, the GT1 and the CLK GTR, did the job they were tasked to do – but they always looked like hard work. They were never anything like as elegant and effortless as the McLaren F1, and it’s fairly safe to say that they will never achieve that same state of grace as the F1, or find the same place in peoples’ hearts as the F1.
Or reach the same values. The F1 has been described as the future 250 GTO. It is already heading into a similar stratosphere as the Ferrari, a process which is gradually disqualifying those who wanted to not only buy an F1 but also drive one without worrying about losing a lot of money. Even Gordon Murray sold his own F1 (chassis XP3, the oldest F1 survivor) because he no longer felt comfortable about driving such a high-value commodity on wet Sunday mornings.
The F1 wasn’t perfect. The high-speed handling took some learning and the central driving position wasn’t for everybody. Having your chosen partner sitting behind your left or right shoulder on a long trip could seem weird – but once you got used to it, suddenly it was all the other cars that seemed weird.
The 240mph+ F1 is still the world’s fastest naturally aspirated ICE road car. The only obvious competitor today would be Murray’s own most recent creation, the GMA T.50, but it’s not geared to go above 226mph so that particular crown looks secure for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever unless a) some major breakthroughs are made on synthetic fuels and/or b) McLaren’s new Bahrain-based majority stakeholders decide to go down some interesting new routes. Which they may well do. Until they do, the F1’s appreciation status – in every sense – is absolutely assured.
As of the end of 2023, not one F1 was on public sale anywhere on the planet. ‘Public’ being the key word there. To find out where the private sales might be happening, all we can suggest is that you double up on the lottery tickets and cross every crossable part of your body.
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