Roaring through Mass. in the McLaren F1

I was about 12 years old when I saw my first McLaren F1. Saw, not as millions of others did from the cover of a Road & Track issue, but saw, as in hearing my father say, “Hey, what’s that coming behind us?”, turning around, and watching the blessed Messiah of all exotic cars pass our Mercury Sable and literally part the interstate traffic.

We were mere miles from our home in Connecticut, and I was freaking out for another 20. No, Mom, that is not a kit car! It’s the fastest production car on earth.

At that time, I knew I had seen one of just seven McLarens in the entire United States, and I knew I would never see one again. I found out later that a company in Danbury, about 35 minutes away, was importing all the F1s from the factory in Woking, England, proof that Connecticut was the center of the universe.

In 2005, I witnessed the second coming of the F1 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which was holding an exhibition of Ralph Lauren’s cars. I hardly moved from the velvet rope, despite Lauren’s impressive collection. Two sightings in one lifetime? This had to be the last time I would see an F1.

McLaren made roughly 100 road and race versions between 1993 and 1998, and it’s impossible to cite the exact number in the US today. Some people say there are more than 20; Chambers thinks there’s about a dozen. (And he should know. Jay Leno bought one after taking a ride with him.) Facebook groups and message boards claiming to document each McLaren try their hardest, but the owners of these cars rarely come up in the news unless one catches on fire or gets sold at auction for more than $4 million.

Herb Chambers Car Collection - McLaren F1

Last month, Chambers decided to drop his McLaren at his new BMW showroom in Sudbury, just 20 miles west of Boston. So I asked what anyone would in this rare moment, short of begging: can I please, please, please go for a ride? Chambers obliged, and on a sunny November I found myself holed into the F1′s left side, yanking the butterfly door shut, and trying to resist a hyper fit of feet stomping and flailing arms.

To be assaulted by such a high power-to-weight ratio, deafened by a 627 horsepower V-12, and stared at by every driver on the road is the car enthusiast’s reason for living. What, I wondered, would I do now for the rest of my life? The afterlife won’t be able to match being inside a McLaren at full-bore, running and running while the planet stands still.

For Herb and all the well-heeled car lovers with McLarens, here’s hoping, then, for a long life.

By JACK SMITH

IT’S outrageous, Herb Chambers conceded, to pay $1 million for a McLaren F1 sports car. ”It makes no economic sense at all,” said Mr. Chambers, who lives on a sprawling estate in Old Lyme, Conn., equipped with a helicopter and a helipad.

As for the McLaren’s center-mounted driver’s seat, it’s totally impractical. ”It feels just like a Formula One race car,” Mr. Chambers said. ”It makes getting a ticket from a toll booth a real adventure.”

And nobody really needs a car with 600-plus horsepower and a top speed of 230 miles an hour. ”I have to send it to Montvale, N.J., to have it serviced,” he said. ”It costs $500 to rent a runway at the local airport to road-test it.” As he said this, he glanced at the car’s instrument panel to make sure the oil and water had warmed.

”Are you in?” he asked his passenger, who was struggling with the door of the F1, which slams down like a guillotine.

Hatches and latches secured, Mr. Chambers nudged the shift lever into first gear and gently engaged the clutch as the silvery, wedge-shaped supercar rolled slowly onto a country road and toward a highway. Once the car was on the entry ramp, the genteel tappa-tappa of camshafts and valves suddenly became a high-pitched, metallic scream as the McLaren accelerated onto Interstate 95, pinning its driver and passenger to their seats. The landscape was a blur.

”There’s really no way to justify it in ordinary terms,” Mr. Chambers yelled above the cacophony about the car. ”That’s the beauty of it.”

Or, to some, the horror. Although there are cars — a vintage Bugatti or a Delahaye, say — that cost $1 million or more because they are rare or they have a certain provenance, the McLaren’s appeal is more visceral. It is built to do one thing: scream down the road as fast as is humanly, or mechanically, possible.

So, too, are other $1 million-plus rare birds like the Porsche 959, Ferrari 288 GTO and Ferrari F40, though its value has dropped to a third of that amount since 1990.

Soon to come, if not already plying American roads, are street-legal versions of the Porsche GT1, the Mercedes CLK-LM, the Nissan R390 and the American-made Panoz GT-R1, each sleeker, sexier and scarier than anything ever built for the masses.

One reason car makers sell barely domesticated versions of all-out race cars (yes, the McLaren F1 began as a road car, but it also won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1995) is the ”homologation” rules of racing: to compete in the GT1 class, a minimum number of cars must be sold to the public.

For the last few years, that minimum has been one, but given the economies of scale, if you’re going to build one for the street, why not build a couple dozen?

Though Madison Avenue hypes sex appeal and power in the most garden-variety conveyances, mainstream auto manufacturers are reluctant to admit that the most exhilarating and testosteronic cars of all even exist. With good reason, said Dick Fritz, who managed Ferrari’s racing team in the 70′s. ”European car makers are leery of American litigiousness,” he explained. ”If something happened, it would be easy to convince a jury that cars like these shouldn’t be on the road.”

The majority would not be if it weren’t for Mr. Fritz’s company, Ameritech, which specializes in making race-bred road rockets comply with Federal safety and environmental regulations. That means more than adding license plates. Mr. Fritz designs and installs American-mandated catalytic converters, evaporative emissions controls, on-board engine diagnostic systems, passive restraints (air bags), impact bumpers, side impact reinforcements, headlights, center-mounted stop lights and ”various warning buzzers and lights.” This road prep may cost $100,000 or more.

WHICH raises the question, Who buys these cars?

”Typically, these are dynamic, high-powered guys in their 40′s and 50′s,” said Mr. Fritz, whose clients include Ralph Lauren, Clint Eastwood and David Letterman. ”They’re not old money. Most of them have started their own businesses and they have a lot of toys: airplanes, racing boats.

”Most of them are good drivers, but,” he said with a wince, ”some aren’t. Frankly, it’s scary to think of a McLaren or F40 in the hands of a bad driver.”

Fortunately, he noted, it generally takes more than money to acquire a supercar. ”The factories don’t want one of these cars to wind up in the hands of somebody irresponsible,” Mr. Fritz said. ”It’s usually by invitation.”

Herb Chambers was in Biarritz, France, when he got his. ”The McLaren factory told me to charter a plane and fly to England to look at the car,” he said. ”If I bought the car, they’d pay for the plane. That sounded fair. I wanted to see if it was really a $1 million car.”

His skepticism was well founded; in the late 80′s, rich car buffs were paying $1 million or more for the Ferrari F40 on the presumption that it was worth that much because somebody else would eventually pay more. But during the recession of 1991, the Ferrari frenzy cooled and prices fell to a level of $300,000 to $350,000, where they remain.

Mr. Chambers fits Mr. Fritz’s portrait of a typical client. The 56-year-old Boston-born entrepreneur never went to college, but joined the Navy, hoping to become a fighter pilot. (He admits to having a hankering for speed.) When he got out, he used $1,000 to start a copy-machine repair service; when he sold A-Copy in 1983, it was the largest copy-machine sales and service company in the United States.

Into the void came cars. ”I decided I always loved cars, so why not buy a dealership?” he said. ”I bought my first in 1985. Now I own 13 locations with 23 franchises in three states. I love the business. You can really feel something for a car; it’s hard to get excited over a copy machine.”

Mr. Chambers had already owned a succession of Ferraris and Rolls-Royces. Nonetheless, he had never seen anything like the McLaren. ”I fell in love with it the moment I saw it,” Mr. Chambers acknowledged as the F1 rolled up to his helicopter and stopped.

”It was simply spectacular, but there was nothing gaudy about it,” he exulted. ”Everything is done to enhance performance, with no thought to cost. For instance, most car makers won’t cut weight by 10 percent if it costs them 200 percent more to do it. But McLaren does.”

THE weight-saving strategies include a body sculptured from carbon fiber, a featherweight tool kit with pieces cut from gold-plated titanium and a miniature battery. Together, they produce a car weighing 2,840 pounds, nearly 400 pounds less than a Corvette.

As for power, it is immediate, with no turbo lag. This is because the McLaren eschews turbo charging; instead, the 6.1 liter V12 incorporates 48 valves and 4 camshafts to produce 627 horsepower — some 280 horsepower more than the Corvette’s — and 550-foot-pounds of torque.

The F1 remains on the ground at high speeds because of aerodynamics: the body is shaped like an inverted airfoil, with 6-inch diameter fans sucking air from beneath the car and shooting it out the back to enhance the vacuum effect.

The McLaren people took Mr. Chambers for a ride on a test track. ”When it was over, I stepped out and I was sweating profusely,” he said. ”It was the most exciting ride of my life.”

He went home with the McLaren and has never regretted it. ”There are some things in life you buy, and then you ask yourself, Why did I ever do that? I bought a Lamborghini Countach once, and two days later, I didn’t know why I bought it. It had all these wings sticking out of it. But this, I don’t even have to drive it to enjoy it. I can just stand there and look at it.”

Yet the car is hardly devoid of amenities. ”Look,” Mr. Chambers said, opening a panel between the door and the rear-wheel well. ”Each car comes with its own matching luggage with the serial number on it. They also give you a Tag Heuer watch with the car’s serial number on it.

”A watch,” he repeated — and laughed.

Jack Smith is connoisseur at large for The Robb Report, a monthly magazine.

Courtesy of:

The McLaren F1 is a supercar engineered and produced by McLaren Cars, a subsidiary of the British McLaren Group that, among others, owns the McLaren Mercedes Formula One team. The car features a 6.1-litre 60° V12 BMW V12 engine and it was conceived as an exercise in creating what its designers hoped would be considered the ultimate road car. Only 100 cars were manufactured, 64 of those were street versions, 5 were LMs, 3 were GTs and the rest were GTR models. Production began in 1994 and ended in 1998.

The McLaren F1 was the fastest production car ever built (having achieved a top speed of 240.14 mph, 386.5 km/h) until surpassed in 2005 by the Koenigsegg CCR, and then the Bugatti Veyron in 2006.

Chief engineer Gordon Murray’s design concept was a common one among designers of high-performance cars: low weight and high power. This was achieved through use of high-tech and expensive materials like carbon fiber, titanium, gold and magnesium. The F1 was the first production car to use a carbon-fiber monocoque.

A pair of Ultima MK3 kit cars, chassis numbers 12 and 13, the last two MK3s, were used as “mules” to test various components and concepts before the first cars were built. Number 12 was used to test the gearbox with a 7.4 litre Chevrolet V8 to mimic the torque of the BMW V12, plus various other components like the seats and the brakes. Number 13 was the test of the V12, plus exhaust and cooling system. When McLaren was done with the cars they destroyed both of them to keep away the specialist magazines and because they did not want the car to be associated with “kit cars”.

The car was first unveiled at a launch show on May 1992, the original prototype (XP1) remained the same as the production version except the wing mirror which was mounted at the top sill of the door which was deemed not road legal as there were no indicators at the front, McLaren was forced to make changes on the car as a result (some cars, including Ralph Lauren’s were sent back to McLaren and fitted with the prototype mirrors). The original wing mirrors also incorporated a pair of indicators which car manufacturers as well as an aftermarket company would adopt several years later. The car’s safety levels were first proved when during a testing in Namibia in April 1993, a test driver wearing just shorts and t-shirt hit a rock and rolled the first prototype car several times. The driver managed to escape unscathed. Later in the year, the second prototype (XP2) was especially built for crash-testing and passed with the front wheelwell untouched.

The engine:
Murray insisted that the engine for this car be normally-aspirated to increase reliability and driver control. Turbochargers and superchargers increase power but they increase complexity and can decrease reliability as well as the ability of the driver to maintain maximum control of the engine. BMW’s motorsport division BMW M custom-built a 6.1 L (6064 cc) 60-degree V12 BMW S70B56 engine with aluminium alloy block and head, 86 mm x 87 mm bore/stroke, quad overhead camshafts for maximum flexibility of control over the four valves/cylinder and chain drive for the camshafts for maximum reliability. The resulting engine was slightly heavier than Murray had originally specified but also considerably more powerful.

The McLaren F1′s engine compartment contains the mid-mounted BMW S70B56 engine and uses gold foil as a heat shield in the exhaust compartment. The carbon fibre body panels and monocoque required significant heat insulation in the engine compartment and so Murray’s solution was to coat the engine bay with the most efficient heat-reflector: gold foil. Approximately 25 g (0.8 ounce) of gold was used in each car.

The road version used a compression ratio of 11:1 to produce 627 PS at 7400 rpm. Torque output 480 ft•lbf (651 N•m) at 5600 rpm. Other, more highly tuned, incarnations of the F1 produced up to 680 hp. The engine has a redline and rev limiter at 7500 rpm.

From 1998 to 1999, the Le Mans winning BMW V12 sports car used a similar S70B56 engine.

Power:

There is some disagreement on the topic of power output. Most sources, including McLaren themselves, report output at “627 horsepower”. However, it is unclear whether this is metric horsepower (often represented as “PS” from the German Pferdestärke) or imperial horsepower. Since the McLaren’s engine was built by BMW, either unit could have been used – European carmakers tend to measure output in metric horsepower while their British counterparts tend to use Imperial horsepower. Therefore, the German company BMW may have used either measurement for an engine to be delivered to British company McLaren. The kilowatt (kW) is sometimes used as a reference, as it is unambiguous, but in the case of the McLaren, output in kilowatts has been given as both 461 kW (equivalent to 627 PS or 618 hp) and 468 kW (equivalent to 636 PS or 627 hp) – thus the various quotes of horsepower output given as 618, 627 or 636 horsepower.

Performance:

The car may have been relatively small, but its performance was not. With a 0 to 60 mph (97 km/h) time of 3.1 seconds and an official top speed of 240.14 mph (386.4 km/h), although without catalytic converters fitted, the F1 remains one of the fastest “production” cars ever made, until the Bugatti Veyron proved that it could reach a speed of 252mph (407 km/h), albeit ten years later.

While most car manufacturers rate their cars in terms of raw engine power, in terms of overall performance (acceleration, braking, grip and handling) a car’s weight is a more important factor. The power:weight ratio is a better way to quantify performance than the power of the engine. By this measure, the F1 was one of the most powerful production cars ever made. The F1 achieves 550 hp/ton, or just 4 lb/hp, while the Enzo (even with its significantly higher raw output) lags behind the F1 at 481.75 hp/ton (4.6 lb/hp) due to its greater weight. The Caparo T1 (designed by former members of the McLaren team) is expected to reach 1000 hp/ton, however, it is not available as of September 2006.

McLaren F1
0-60 mph 3.2 s
0-100 mph 6.3 s
0-200 mph 28 s

The Mclaren F1 has a top speed of 231 mph, restricted by the rev limiter at 7500 rpm. The true top speed of the Mclaren F1 was reached on the 31th of March, 1998 by the five-year-old XP5 prototype. Andy Wallace piloted it down the 9 km straight at Volkswagen’s Ehra test track in Wolfsburg, Germany, setting a new world record of 391.1 km/h (243 mph) (refer video clip below) at 7800 rpm. As Mario Andretti noted in a comparison test, the F1 is fully capable of pulling a seventh gear, thus with a higher gear ratio or a seventh gear the Mclaren F1 would probably be able to reach an even greater top speed (something which can also be observed by noticing that the top speed was reached at 7800 RPM while the peak power is reached at 7400 RPM).

Record claims
Callaway’s Sledgehammer Corvette, the road going version of the Dauer-Porsche 962 (winner of the 1994 24 hours of Le Mans as a GT) and most recently a version of the 911 Turbo produced by German tuner 9FF have all proven in testing that they’re capable of top speeds matching or in excess of 240 mph, although none of them are considered production cars, and hence cannot displace the McLaren’s record. More recently, the Koenigsegg CCR recorded a speed of 388 km/h (241 mph), a record which has in turn been shattered by the Bugatti Veyron, with a top speed of 407 km/h (253 mph), although Koenigsegg hit back with the CCX, apparently capable of 250 mph (Bugatti Veyron is still faster). Both of these are considered to be production cars, and have therefore each beaten the McLaren’s record.

As a sidenote, the 962 as well as the turbocharged version of Saleen’s S7 and RUF’s Rt 12 can hit 60 miles per hour in 3.2 seconds or less, meaning that even where certain cars (the Saleen and RUF) can’t break the McLaren’s top speed, they are capable of matching or beating its 0-60 time.

Gordon Murray wants the car to be remembered as the ultimate driver’s car. An evidence of it being the ultimate driver’s car is it’s light weight. It weighs only 1138kg while the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 weighs a portly 1888kg. Gordon Murray’s target for the McLaren F1 was a kerbweight of 1000kg (note that his primary target was weight, not speed records.), but ended up being 1138kg, an additional 138kg.

Owners:
Famous owners include:
* Jay Leno
* Wyclef Jean
* Paul Stewart (driver) – Purchased the F1 from Liam Howlett
* Elon Musk
* Ralph Lauren – Owns chassis #074, #N/A and LM3. The LM was purchased from Frank Selldorff with minor damage.
* Nick Mason
* Hassanal Bolkiah – the current Sultan of Brunei, is rumored to own 7 McLarens, including both black LMs
* Thomas Bscher – the current Bugatti president (and former FIA GT champion McLaren driver regularly used his F1 to commute from his home in Germany to Bugatti’s headquarters in France. Bscher no longer has his road car but he still has 2 GTR’s
* Michael Schumacher has a Mclaren F1. It is kept in his private garage; he always says that he doesn’t have an F1 supercar.
* Ron Dennis
* Juan Barazi
* Frank Selldorff – Owns chassis #007, the black one in the picture.
* Rowan Atkinson – Owns a burgundy F1 which he crashed in the late 90s; recent rumors have speculated he also owns a ’97 GTR [citation needed]
* Boston-area car merchant Herb Chambers owns a silver F1

Ex-Owners:
* Frank Selldorff – Owned chassis #068 and LM3. The LM3 was sold to Ralph Lauren with minor damage.
* Liam Howlett – Of electronic music group The Prodigy
* Bernd Pischetsrieder – the former BMW chairman and current CEO of Volkswagen, destroyed a silver F1
* Christopher Dawes – Former owner of Micromuse, Dawes and two passengers were killed in a burgundy F1, the only fatality of the car.
* Michael Andretti
* George Harrison (deceased)
* Bruce Weiner former owner of Dubble Bubble Gum, his McLaren has hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of add ons and is supposedly the only one to pass CA emissions standards. It is currently for sale in Atlanta, GA
* Sir Roger Bhatnagar New Zealand based entrepeneur who owned chassis XP4. Sold to new American owner.

The cost
Though not officially announced, the price of the McLaren F1 road cars has generally been pegged at $1 million. Premiums of more than $100,000 over sticker price were reportedly charged, thus making the average prices of a Mclaren F1 around $1,250,000. Used McLaren F1s are seldom publicly available. In December 2005, however, a yellow 1994 model was advertised by Silicon Valley Auto Group in Los Gatos, California, on the eBay auction site. Bidding escalated to $1,750,000 before the auction ended; the car did not sell as the auction listing noted: “Reserve Not Met”. It was re-listed, but the seller ended the auction early, claiming an error in the listing – a common technique when an item is sold off-auction instead.

F1 Rumors:

Bill Gates never owned an F1
The McLaren that went 240mph was a prototype so it is quicker than the regular production cars – While XP5 is a prototype, it was “Road Car Spec” when it did the top speed run. The only changes to the car were that the underbody was polished, the rev limiter raised/removed, the headlights taped over, and the license plate replaced with a stick on item. All modifications were “road legal” and the car had no performance enhancing modifications.