Interesting tidbits about the McLaren F1

[masraum]

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a7958/it-is-impossible-to-total-a-mclaren-f1/

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.

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)

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.

[masraum]

and a little bit more from that second article

WINKWORTH-SMITH: Whenever we service a car, there will be two road tests carried out. So we truck it to a test track, and we’ll do a seven-page test procedure, test every single thing on the car. And that goes from pulling the handbrake at 50 mph to see what the retardation’s like, to full-throttle accelerations, to really heavy braking to see what the balance is like, to rating the stereo performance at mid and high volume on a scale of one to ten.

GRAIN: One of the F1 road cars was on display at some event. The engine cover, it’s all gold foil. We’d nicked it from aerospace. [A bystander said,] “You’re doing it just because it’s a shiny color and it’s expensive, and it allows you to bill more for the car.” And a colleague replied, “It is the lightest heat-effective material we can use in that application.” Everything was there for a reason.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: Over time, [the foil] degrades. People touch it, they try and clean it, it rubs off. That’s why we replace it. It’s not actually that mental. It’s a few thousand pounds.

TSOURIS: [For jobs requiring] more than two and a half weeks of work, it’s in our best interests to bring the car back. Or try to, at least.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: These days, because of the value of the car, it’s almost impossible to write one off.

A good example is—if you do a bit of Googling, you’ll find out who I’m talking about. His car came in, and he’d had a fairly substantial shunt. The car was in two halves. It had split. The car had done brilliantly, because he’d hit it right in the middle. The passenger [cell] was absolutely perfect. We cut all the damage out of the tub, x-rayed it, crack-tested it, and then, using all the original body molds, the tooling, the layup books, and also some of the original staff that built these tubs back in the day, we rebuilt it.

DANNY ENGLAND (Composites technician, McLaren): We are, of course, the only company in the world that is physically capable of rebuilding F1s.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: And now that car is driving around, as good as it left the factory, even down to doing torsional-rigidity tests. And to do that, we had to measure it against another F1. So we stripped two other cars down to make sure it was gonna be the same.

PHIL HARDING (Development technician, McLaren): It’s not like you can go and pick another monocoque out and build a new car. It’s cost-effective to repair something worth 5 million pounds, isn’t it?

AUBERLEN: 1998, I drove a Longtail at Le Mans. When you release that speed-limiter button on hot tires, I swear to God: I was better-looking, I was taller, I felt better about myself. It’s a car that has a spirit and a soul. You’re going down the Mulsanne at 200 mph. You could see the wheels light up from the carbon brakes, the flames coming out the back.

BELLM: The first year, ’95, was just a stripped-out road car. The steering was so heavy, you could barely hold it around corners. So the first thing we did [was ask] for a new steering rack. And to this day, the steering rack of the GTR is infinitely superior to [that] of the road car.

AUBERLEN: When it first came out, it was at the top of the field, so you didn’t have to drive 20 percent over the limit all the time to try to keep up. I mean, there were times when we were probably 30 seconds ahead of the field. You’re not even racing at that point.

BELLM: When we first tested it, it was quite a handful, because Gordon Murray didn’t believe in rear anti-roll bars. It had no rear anti-roll bar—he thought you could control it all from the front. And because you had so much torque, we had to work quite hard on getting decent traction. But basically the engine was so far and away better than everything else [we raced]—F40s and Porsches, Venturis, all sorts of rubbish. Only in ’97, when Porsche and Mercedes woke up, did we start to have what I would call naked competition.

NEARBURG: One of the most hilarious things is watching [Gordon] drive his little Bugeye Sprite. He throws on this little leather bucket helmet, and he plops in that thing, and he goes ripping around like he’s on the Isle of Man or something. But he’s still a very intense, focused, driven guy. My sense is that he’s doing this stuff because he wants to make a difference.

GRAIN: At heart, he was a racer, wasn’t he? Still is.

NEARBURG: How often in this world does one guy—one guy who is supremely qualified and has all the resources that he needs—how often does that guy get to design the ultimate anything?

[masraum]

https://www.thespeedjournal.com/mclaren-f1-fully-restored-by-mso/

I'm sure having McLaren fully restore one of them is probably really cheap.

[masraum]

This link has 18 photos same as the above, but in pretty high res if anyone wants them

https://www.motor1.com/photo/4324384/mclaren-f1-chassis-no-63/

[Ayles]

[GH85Carrera]

This is the only F1 I have seen in person. It is at the Revs institute. Miller’s Collier still takes it out to drive it regularly.

[dan79brooklyn]

They should just keep making them.

[sc_rufctr]

Originally Posted by dan79brooklyn

They should just keep making them.

I agree but what would they cost new now?

Great article. Thanks for sharing. That gives you some incite to owning one.
And If I had the cash I'd have two of them parked side by side.

Jay's comment about windscreen wipers.

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

[sc_rufctr]

[masraum]

Apparently not any more.

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

WINKWORTH-SMITH: Until three months ago, we were using those [original 1990s] laptops [for diagnostics]. Our technicians were being stopped in airports and asked to prove that it was a real laptop, because [security] thought it was a bomb. They were like, “No one uses those laptops anymore.”

[Bob Kontak]

Leno talks about his F1 2:50 in.

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

This is the only F1 I have seen in person. It is at the Revs institute. Miller’s Collier still takes it out to drive it regularly.

Went to Marco Island on vacation in 2006 and drove to Naples to try to get into the Collier Museum. No dice. Was not open to general public.

Have seen one P1 in Akron around five years ago.

[Won]

It's amazing that one car can still hold such a special place in automotive lore after 27 years and counting. Probably won't be another one like it, ever

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by dan79brooklyn

They should just keep making them.

they should make an F2...

Gordon Murray is doing up a small city car in CF, last I heard

[javadog]

Those of you that have not read the official book on the F1, Driving Ambition, should try to get your hands on a copy.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by javadog

Those of you that have not read the official book on the F1, Driving Ambition, should try to get your hands on a copy.

It was really good, but I wish it was longer with more detail technical and otherwise.

[Eric Coffey]

Stephen (Captain Ahab Jr) to the white courtesy phone...

[svandamme]

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

I've installed those when they were new, those were high end and had a crap multimedia dockingmodule for video that was useless.


Surely then can replace those things with something more modern and vmware/usb serial adapter.

[Ayles]

This showed up in my FB Feed today: https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a14453949/the-only-mclaren-f1-technician-in-north-america/?src=socialflowFBRAT&fbclid=IwAR0ni9oTI0WHZK496_YOZYZ-RE-lMZcwzQJ3lH6nvrLH1kRrU2lodTLzlp0

[masraum]

Originally Posted by masraum

Apparently not any more.

Originally Posted by svandamme

I've installed those when they were new, those were high end and had a crap multimedia dockingmodule for video that was useless.


Surely then can replace those things with something more modern and vmware/usb serial adapter.

Seems like they replaced it with something back in 2017.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Ayles

This showed up in my FB Feed today: https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a14453949/the-only-mclaren-f1-technician-in-north-america/?src=socialflowFBRAT&fbclid=IwAR0ni9oTI0WHZK496_YOZYZ-RE-lMZcwzQJ3lH6nvrLH1kRrU2lodTLzlp0

Thanks for reminding me. I also saw it in the past few days, but hadn't checked it out until i saw your post here. Amazing, and some cool photos.