McLaren F1

It was all too easy to have the rear wheels alight in third gear going out of the pits at Brands
I’ve driven Nick Mason’s McLaren numerous times, on the road, at Silverstone and Goodwood circuits, and most recently at a Brands Hatch test day. It was both exciting and rewarding but, as always, I clamber in and out with slightly mixed feelings.

There are the sensibly small exterior dimensions, which make the car practical on the road, and the fantastic attention to detail typified by the perfect panel fit and the way the doors hinge themselves gently skywards against their gas struts, then clunk shut with the finality you’d expect from a luxury saloon. There’s the central seating position, which avoids so many compromises and, whatever your dimensions, leaves feet, legs and arms all unencumbered and with as much room as you could want.

Behind you is that wonderful six-litre BMW V12 engine with its curiously off-beat rattle and utterly massive, apparently endless reserves of urge. To the right is the shift for the six-speed transmission, with its slick synchros that slide the next gear in as fast as you can move the hand, and there’s no power assist for anything, which keeps the feedback pure.

There’s a lot of performance on tap too. I did several acceleration runs against the clock at Goodwood and easily reached 180mph from a standing start without using all the back straight. And yet, driving the car, anywhere where speed limits don’t apply, always leaves me a slight sense of what might have been. There never seems to be enough mechanical grip to harness the obvious performance. It was all too easy to have the rear wheels alight in third gear going out of the pits at Brands. Then, less than a minute after leaving the pits, the front end never felt as if it had enough grip to point in and carry the speed that was surely there for the taking. Come the exit though, the big rear wing was definitely pressing hard enough that I could clamp the pedal to the carbonfibre floor. The slingshot down into the dip and up the hill to Druids was meteoric.

Back down at second-gear speeds for Druids, you had a less-than-enthusiastic front again, only this time followed by a rear end which would light up and sling itself towards West Kingsdown, leaving two black lines along the road as proof of intent.

All of which means that Nick’s GTR is always exciting but it has never felt, well… as all-conquering as I’d expected. I have driven a race model – Ray Bellm’s 1995 FIA-Championship-winning car – at the same circuit and it felt much more as you’d expect. But that one had the extra grip of slick tyres and a front end pinned to within millimetres of the road. It was in some ways less exciting but you felt that the ingredients had been put in place, turning a road car into a true racing car.

Gordon Murray says that he was at pains not to convert a racing car into a road car. He is also on record saying that if he had been asked to design a pure racer from the outset, he would have done so. Stiffening up the suspension on any car when there isn’t enough mechanical grip from the rubber is always a recipe for skids at both ends, which is exactly why you soften everything off for a wet race and why Murray specified relatively low spring rates for the road car.

And having mentioned tyres, an eagle-eyed observer at Brands pointed out that the ones on Nick’s car are now ten years old. Tyre technology has moved on a great deal since 1997 – or perhaps more correctly, the choice of tyre available has progressed. Once upon a time there were road tyres and there were race tyres and you used each for its own discipline, but now the distinction is less obvious. The most recent breed of supercars all wear road-legal track day specials as standard. Despite offers from a couple of manufacturers to provide a set for the McLaren, the appropriate sizes didn’t appear on their sticky list.

The car remains a jewel, though, and it is still truly remarkable.