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10-25-2019 06:03 PM |
Interesting tidbits about the McLaren F1
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a7958/it-is-impossible-to-total-a-mclaren-f1/
https://hips.hearstapps.com/roa.h-cd...head_on-lg.jpg
Quote:
A routine oil change service costs about $8,000, and annual running costs are estimated by McLaren to be about $30,000 per year.
The last one of about 100 built from 1992 to 1994 sold for $11 million.
Bryan Murphy, a technician who cared for three customer F1s, reports that a nail in one tire cost $6,000 to repair because the McLaren factory insisted on replacing both tires on the same axle. The McLaren factory scrubs every F1 replacement tire that it supplies to owners on a test track.
Ralph Lauren sends his three McLaren F1s to the main Woking, Surrey, U.K., McLaren headquarters for their service, which is officially required once a year. Factory shops are also located in Germany, Japan, and Australia as well as two in the U.S.
McLaren says service can take one to six weeks, with the quickest "door-to-door" being air-freight at 10 days, or seven weeks if shipped via sea. McLaren has two full-time F1 techs in the UK headquarters.
Routine service is required annually; the rubber fuel cell service every five years requires the powertrain to be removed. Wheel bearings, hubs and locating pegs need to be replaced regularly.
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This article is older and has probably been posted before, but just in case.
It's also got some really great photos.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a10368266/the-complete-oral-history-of-the-mclaren-f1/
(not the full article, just some excerpts)
Quote:
The car weighed 2425 pounds dry. It came with a built-in 14.4k modem for sending diagnostic information to the factory, at a time when most of America didn’t have an Internet connection. McLaren famously flew mechanics around the world to service it. Murray had never wanted to take the car racing, but customer demand prompted the creation of the F1 GTR, essentially a production F1 with a roll cage. FIA rules left the model 27 hp down on its roadgoing sister, but it won Le Mans anyway. And pretty much everything else they threw at it.
The F1 was unveiled to the public 25 years ago, in May of 1992. Astonishingly, every supercar since has been something of a dilution. The Bugatti Veyron is faster but more complicated and distant. Porsche’s iconic Carrera GT is a decade newer but slower to 60 mph and more difficult to drive. Even McLaren’s own 903-hp P1 hybrid, which just left production, is 14 mph slower and a third of a ton heavier.
MARK GRAIN (Senior technician, McLaren Cars/Motorsport): There was a German customer, a businessman. He lived in Cologne, commuted in the car every day. He said, “Oh, I’ve got a problem, this warning light. I’ve looked in the manual, can’t find anything. Can you send somebody out, see what it is?”
So one of the guys went. It turns out it was the engine cover lifting slightly. The warning light for the engine cover.
But the only time the car ever did it was 185, 190 mph. “It does it on the way to work, and it does it on the way back.” Every day.
LENO: It makes the greatest noise ever. And there’s no flywheel—you turn the key off, it stops right now. You don’t get that half a second of rrr. The only analogy I can make: One time I did a concert with Paul Simon and Paul McCartney. There wasn’t a guitar strum, a string—the song ended right now.
LENO: That’s the real key to the car: It’s incredibly light. The nose does get a little light at extremely high speed. It’s not as planted as, like, a P1, but then, it’s 20 years earlier. Being carbon fiber, you have the occasional clunk—you hit a road marker, you feel it ripple through the chassis. You drive a new NSX, and that’s like a solid billet. You realize the car weighs the same as a Miata?
HENRY WINKWORTH-SMITH (McLaren Special Operations Heritage Manager): There are more cars being used now than when I started 10 years ago. People have suddenly gone, “Actually, I can’t get this experience in anything else.” And because the values have climbed, people haven’t been quite so worried about increasing mileage.
LENO: It’s funny, because everybody talks about no ABS, no stability control, no traction control. Yeah, like an MG! Or a Triumph from the Sixties. And it will get away from you—you go 70 and downshift into third and nail it, that rear end’s gonna break loose, unless there’s heat in those tires. It’s a bit like a loaded gun—you have to know how to handle it, all the time. Not like cars now.
FIXING IT
JOHN MEYER (Senior technician, BMW of North America): It’s like any good sports car: If you don’t drive it hard, it’s not gonna like it. There were a lot of guys who really thrashed their cars and didn’t really have problems.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: Paul Rosche, rest his soul, said, “This engine should be designed, developed, like any other BMW series engine. It should not need an opening for 250,000 kilometers.”
LENO: Talk about getting something right the first time! There are a number of them that have [huge] miles. I’ve never known anybody to have any trouble with it.
BILL AUBERLEN (Factory racing driver, BMW): The GTR had sequential shifting, right? Every sequential I’ve ever been in is pull to shift up. Gordon’s idea was that you’re stronger when seated, so the GTR was push to shift up. Three in the morning at Le Mans, you’re almost asleep in the car, and all of a sudden—you shift the wrong way.
Luckily, the engine is bulletproof. There are stories about where a water hose fell off and they drove it all the way [back to the pits]. It’s melting everything around it, and it makes it.
MATT FARAH (Journalist): My favorite McLaren F1 story is from Ralph [Lauren, a family friend]. About the year 2000. One of his three F1s. The car wasn’t running right, so he plugs it into the wall. The car dials McLaren. Two guys in tweed jackets come over from England, they show up at his house. They go, “Okay, give us the keys.” They come back and go, “You’re not shifting high enough,” and fly back to England. That was it, the whole problem. That’s what owning a McLaren F1 is like.
LENO: We do our own servicing on the car—as advanced as it was in the day, it’s nothing compared to now. What’s funniest is that the car comes with a tool roll. The most beautiful tool set you’ve ever seen. Titanium wrenches that weigh mere ounces. The idea that, if your McLaren breaks down on the 101, you’re going to get out the tool roll and fix it.
MEYER: Because the cars are driven very infrequently, servicing is by time. Every nine months was a basic service. Eighteen months was a major service. Every five years, the fuel cell has to be replaced.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: It’s an FIA-spec bag tank, which is brilliant for crash regulations, but . . .
MEYER: The whole back of the car comes off.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: About 25 or 30 hours? It’s easy, but it takes a long time. It’s not that everything is accessible. So the fuel tank, it’s engine-out. Water-temperature sensor, it’s engine-out.
But because you’ve taken the engine out, you need to do a suspension setup. And they’re hand-built; they’re not all the same. One car might set up really easy, and the other might be really difficult. To get all the ride heights and cross weights and everything dialed in, it could take a day. You just don’t know.
LENO: There are no parts. When you break one, they will make you the part. But there’s not a lot of off-the-shelf stuff.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: We’ve got very few windscreens left, for instance. They have this special coating between the two laminates, which means you don’t have wires in them, which gives you a heated windscreen.
To be British, they’re jolly expensive. And, you know, you could put a cheaper GTR screen in, but the voltage is different, you haven’t got your wiring, and it hasn’t got the same blue tint. So we said, Okay, the only way we could do it is to invest in [ordering a complete glass set]. It’s hundreds of thousands of pounds. But it’s important to do it, to keep these cars on the roads.
LENO: When I first got it to the dealer for service, they said, “Oh, replace the wiper blade.” I said, “Well, I don’t drive the car in the rain.” They said, “It’s part of the service.” I said, “How much is the wiper blade?” They said, “$1500.” I said, “You know what, don’t replace the wiper blade! I won’t take it out if it rains.”
You’re at the point now where anything on the car . . . it’s a house.
MEYER: At one time, we had four in the shop at once. [BMW], back in New Jersey, was having a heart attack.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: I mean, insurance, kill me. We have this limit of two [in the shop at a time]. We had 14 in here at one point. I got a big telling off for insurance. I think the [extra] cost to us was substantial.
LENO: It’s still a car. It’s still a 20th-century automobile in the sense that you see where everything is. We broke a shifter fork on it; we made a new one. It’s just a shifter fork. It’s aluminum. It’s not that unusual. That’s the funny thing about it. All these cars have taken on this mythical status, but they’re still cars. More cleverly put together than most, by a long shot, but it’s still a car.
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