Herb Chambers McLaren F1 sports car

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.