I love attention to detail and the design of the F1 was an opportunity to take my fetish to new heights

There can’t be many times in automotive history when one engineer has had the finance and the freedom to create a factory, a team and a car from a completely clean sheet of paper. Being put in that position by the foresight of Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjeh was indeed a dream come true for me, but what heightened the experience was the fact that I had long harboured a desire to design a sports car with a focus and purity that exorcised all my pet hates in performance cars, and to push supercar design to a new level.

Luckily for me, most of the supercars around in the late ’80s were too big and too heavy, and generally they were heavily flawed as driving machines by poor packaging and compromised ergonomics. Some of my pet hates on the ergonomics side were terrible pedal offsets and lack of clutch footrest caused by wide front tyres and wheelarch intrusion, instruments not properly visible through small steering wheels, obscured forward vision from over-thick A-pillars, and cant rails so close as to obstruct natural head movement whilst cornering.

A central driving position removed all these and in addition reinforced the fact that this car was to be the ultimate driver’s car. Other benefits were perfect weight distribution and, of course, room for two passengers.

The engine was another area where I applied the no-compromise rule. After driving several turbocharged supercars and not being too impressed by the lag and general throttle response I decided we should aim for a normally aspirated engine – a V10 or V12 of around 4.5 litres and 450bhp.  Other requirements for the engine were dry sumping, light weight, short block length and ultra-low crank height.

The bespoke S70/2 BMW V12 designed by the engine genius Paul Rosche exceeded all my expectations and in my opinion is still the best high-performance engine ever built. The V12 is unrivalled in its size and weight for a 6-litre high-performance engine but it was also unique in that it has no flywheel and that it was the world’s first road car with a carbon clutch, giving the motor incredibly fast pick-up speed – blip the throttle in neutral and it feels like a 1000cc motorbike engine! It was a great experience working with Paul Rosche and his team, developing an engine to a specification for the type of driver’s car I wanted to build.

The transmission design and development was a similar challenge and also good fun. There wasn’t a gearbox available to modify that was small enough, light enough or that could handle the torque, so once again it was back to a clean sheet of paper and this time we enlisted the help of Californian gearbox wizard Pete Weismann. We had to develop new synchromesh with Getrag in Germany to meet my very ambitious throttle-to-throttle gearchange time target.

I had great fun with the aerodynamics, freed from the shackles that were then current Formula One regulations. I set out to achieve a level of active aerodynamics undreamed of in Grand Prix circles – automatic brake cooling, centre of pressure control, downforce enhancement called up by the driver, automatic downforce doubling under braking and, most fundamentally, full fan-assisted ground effects – and which was not yet known in the automotive industry.

Other areas where I had fun developing things in a completely different way from the norm were the audio system and the de-misting. We worked with Kenwood for two years to make sure that the sound system used exactly the correct loudspeaker substrates and reflex volumes for the base. I also designed the controls to be the absolute minimum in number and to be large enough to manipulate by feel.
The air conditioning system was designed to be for the occupants only as I hated the hot, dry-eye syndrome suffered in most cars with the controls set to defrost. We developed a DC/DC converter to produce 58 volts and drive plasma-sprayed laminated glass for the front and side glasses, which defrosts in seconds and leaves the air con to handle the people.

We also developed a remote diagnostic system using satellite communication and a modem link to help with the problem of servicing cars that are scattered all over the world.

So I used my clean sheet of paper well to solve all my pet hates in supercars and also to achieve my ambition to create the world’s best driver’s car – but one target I failed to meet was the maximum weight.

My fanatical approach to weight-saving by design meant that in the F1 we had the lightest fully equipped supercar by some margin, but at 1130kg we missed my original target by more than 10%. This was partly due to us not getting the carbon brakes working in time for Job One, partly due to the fact that 1000kg was a very ambitious target and partly due to the fact the ‘productionisation process’ added over 50kg.

But where we failed on the weight, we made up for it in other areas. It was always my philosophy that the car should be small enough and practical enough to use as an everyday car. We certainly stuck to our size targets, except for a clay model mistake which grew the car from 1800mm to 1820mm wide, and the car has masses of luggage space and can be driven in traffic at very low speeds, thanks to its light weight and the normally aspirated V12.

I always enjoy styling and the F1 was no exception. I have been lucky enough to style all my cars (apart from the SLR) and in the case of the McLaren F1 I enlisted my old friend Peter Stevens to give me a hand.

I wanted classic (but not retro) lines right from the beginning – in fact I had very definite ideas about almost every aspect of the car’s shape – but I made sure we disciplined ourselves not to style before the engineering, packaging and homologation problems had been resolved and the wind tunnel had dictated the basic shape.

I wanted the car to be more ‘mechanical’ towards the rear, like a Grand Prix car, and as it happened we needed so many heat chimneys and vents this was not very difficult to achieve! Designing the interior was even more enjoyable. I took ages over the instrument panel and secondary control design: everything had to be very functional, very clear and very ‘engineered’. I love attention to detail and the design of the F1 was an opportunity to take my fetish to new heights.

Developing the car for ride and handling was a very personal process, as I did more than half of the development driving myself. We had the luxury of working with both Michelin and Goodyear to design tyres specifically for the car. I specified very low spring rates and natural frequencies for the car and I insisted on using 17in rims so that we had something to play with, to try to avoid the teeth-rattling secondary ride most contemporary supercars had with their 18in or 19in wheels.

The result was a car that rode well enough to use on most road surfaces every day but was a little too soft for track use.

This didn’t worry me particularly as I had stated right from day one that this should be a road car only and that if I began thinking race car I would compromise areas of the vehicle design and end up with a sports car that did both jobs badly. What I didn’t realise is that because of my racing background, I subconsciously built all the good racing stuff into the design – such as low polar moment of inertia, low centre of gravity, uncompromised pure suspension geometry, rigid chassis etc – so when we were bullied into turning our road car into a racing car by two very determined customers, we actually had very little to do.

To create the GTR I had only one day in the wind tunnel to sort the aero and body kit. We added a rollover bar, racing instrumentation, a fire extinguisher and we went racing.

Beating the prototypes to win Le Mans in 1995 with a road car, synchromesh gearbox and all, remains one of my best memories – winning that race first time out is, in my opinion, more difficult than winning back-to-back Formula One Championships.

Looking back on the F1 story today, I still feel the same way about the car as I did then. There is nothing I would change from a conceptional point of view, although, 15 years on, the car would benefit greatly from modern brakes and modern lights – I would still not be tempted to add power steering or power-assisted brakes. Driving the car today is still an ‘event’, even though I have done tens of thousands of miles in an F1.

Rather than redesign the F1, I think it would be far better to design a supercar for this century which applies all the fundamental F1 design principles but delivers the driving thrill from light weight rather than horsepower – so keep watching this space...!

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Introduction

Picture gallery

The specialist: Dean Lanzante
The Le Mans authority: Brian Laban
The racer: Mark Hales
The designer: Gordon Murray
The owner: Nick Mason