McLAREN F1 LM

Let's ride along with our British sister publication, CAR, for this pavement-ripping test of all-out automotive athleticism.

Few automotive performance benchmarks enjoy the cache of the hallowed 0-100-0-mph scramble. Although you won't find it formally listed in any FIA record book, that specific sprint-and-stop exercise has remained at the heart of countless bench racing debates for decades. Some credit Carroll Shelby as the first to formally throw down the gauntlet with his awesome Cobra contingent. Shelby's best efforts netted a claimed 13.8-second clocking. That often-disputed figure has since been lowered considerably, with the most recently documented record time being a 12.41-second clocking turned in by a Caterham Seven JPE, a blisteringly quick and agile spiritual successor to Colin Chapman's original Lotus of the like numerical designation.
But records are meant to be broken. When the chance came to subject a McLaren F1 LM-a vehicle many contend is the ultimate street-legal supercar ever produced-to this ultimate challenge, we eagerly tagged along for the ride of a lifetime.


The recipe for this outrageousness was straightforward. Start with a McLaren F1 LM, one of only five LM commemorative versions ever produced of the fabled road racer. Add in veteran McLaren driver Andy Wallace-one of the elite cadre of drivers who contributed to a McLaren juggernaut that took first, third, fourth, fifth, and 13th places overall and stormed to a 1-2-3-4 sweep of the GT category at the 24 hours of Le Mans, when the car debuted there in '95. Toss in a full factory support staff, sophisticated Datron timing equipment, and a suitable venue in the heart of East Anglia and you've got the makings of a great day, indeed.
Although the world's most astonishing road car in its most astonishing guise has absolutely nothing to prove, there are some challenges that even the biggest boys can't resist. To that end, the aforementioned contingent of man and machine duly arrives on the two-mile bomber runway at RAF Alconbury with a mission to reduce the Caterham to snail status. At the same time, and for the only time in its history, the F1 LM will post a full set of performance figures, revealing exactly how quick it is-and by how much over a "standard" McLaren F1 road car. We won't engage you in too much suspense-building here, because the Caterham's record never had a chance.
"Using this car for the 0-100-0 record is a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut," says driver Andy Wallace, whose long love affair with the F1 LM dates back to its earliest shakedowns on the temptingly empty lanes around the Pembrey circuit in south Wales. "I think anybody could break this record in this car. It's so stable you hardly need to have your hands on the steering wheel."
But Wallace's easy confidence finds no reflection in the anxious faces of the McLaren crew, who fuss around with the intensity of a team whose strategy has yet to be proven. The tire warmers go on early, even though it's a blisteringly hot day, and the crew makes frantic final adjustments to the chassis balance, suspension, corner weights, brakes, and tire pressures. Wallace, strapped tightly into his carbon-fiber cradle, seems becalmed with all his wheels off and the car up on jacks. He wants to get on with it. The V-12 engine is already ticking over with a whining beat, warming up the gearbox to ease the two split-second upchanges that a world record will require.
Wallace has a love-hate relationship with this gearbox. He was leading Le Mans in '95 when the clutch failed, leaving him flailing for gear selection with the last hours ticking away. "We would have won, but it became almost impossible to smash it in or out of gear," he grins ruefully. "But then the pit at Le Mans is always full of people saying they would have won-if only. We ended up third after leading for a long time. Not too miserable, I guess."
As Wallace's words trail off and the tension continues to build, we ponder the glorious string of events that led to the rise of the F1 LM-and to this, its greatest moment of reckoning.
The McLaren organization certainly needs little introduction. Begun by New Zealander Bruce McLaren back in the '60s, it quickly became a major force in international motorsport. Over time, McLaren has evolved into what is arguably the most successful racing and development operation on the planet, thanks in major part to its longtime overseer Ron Dennis and the phenomenal design talents of one Gordon Murray. Back in 1988, the pair set out to build the greatest roadgoing sports car in the world. Four years later, the resulting McLaren F1 stormed onto the scene to universal adulation. Motoring journalists struggled for superlatives to link the figures together. At nearly $1 million, awesomely expensive; at 231 mph, unimaginably fast; and, at 0-60 mph in 3.2 seconds, devastatingly quick. Automotive history in the making. The ultimate road car.
A road car, then, and definitely not a racing car. At the very start, Murray had begged Dennis and fellow McLaren boss Mansour Ojjeh: "Please don't come back to me later to tell me you also want it to be a racing car, because I'm fighting all my background experience and instincts here to make it a true, pure road car. And that will compromise it forever as a racer."
Trouble is, you can't build the ultimate road car and then expect people not to want to race it. "From the outset, I'd been concerned consciously to design a roadgoing sports car, not a circuit racer," says Murray. "But while there are marked differences of principle, many fundamentals also remain the same. And when customers asked us for cars they could race, it was those fundamentals that made it possible."
Fast forward to Le Mans in the summer of 1995, where all seven of Murray's new F1 GTRs qualified for McLaren's debut in the classic enduro event. The conversion had been reluctantly approved by Dennis on a shoestring budget, resulting in a package that was basically a standard F1 stripped of trim and equipment, with rear wing, modified underfloor diffuser, side skirts, rollcage, and racing instruments. It was 90 kilograms (200 pounds) lighter than the road car, slightly down on power (600 horsepower against 627), but massively up on torque (527 pound-feet against 479), and it created so much downforce it could run along the ceiling at 100 mph.

Murray was nervous about its chances, fearing that a mere modified road car might make McLaren look stupid when pitted against the likes of the Ferrari F40, which was always a race car first and a road car second. But he was about to be proved as wrong as anybody has ever been, for his GTRs simply blew the opposition out of the water. Five McLarens finished, snaring both class and overall wins-in what turned to be the greatest Le Mans debut in history. To celebrate that feat, five LMs were built-one for each of the GTRs that finished the race. All were painted in the papaya orange color featured on all Bruce McLaren's racing cars from 1967 onward.
But the F1 LM was not an attempt to build some kind of race car replica. This was no cosmetic exercise in appeasing the egos of wannabe GT drivers. The LM is instead a GTR without its racegoing restrictions, which means it's 60 kilograms (about 130 pounds) lighter than the cars that stormed Le Mans-tipping the scales at a scant 1062 kilograms (2341 pounds)-accelerates more quickly through the gears, does without the inlet air restrictors and develops 68 more horsepower-for a total of 680. Although its top speed of 225 mph falls shy of the F1 road car's legendary 231-mph maximum, its astonishing grip allows the LM to corner and accelerate with devastating force.
"The hardest part with the LM is getting all that power down off the line," says Wallace, who did most of the development driving on the car and who drove the third-place David Price Harrods GTR at Le Mans in 1995. "The F1 road car is quicker in a straight line but much less stable. With all that downforce, you can floor the LM over a humpback bridge and keep it stuck to the road. But flat out, it hits a wall at 190 mph."
The exceptional downforce created by the LM is explained by the fact that the car retains the GTR's full underbody ground-effect floor, and the full Le Mans nose treatment, featuring larger cheek intakes in front of the wheels to feed the engine cooling radiators. On the GTR, there were inboard vertical slots cooling the water pipes and the engine bay via the chassis beams, but the LM has these closed off, creating even less resistance. The hood intake is also blanked off, leaving the central scoop to provide cooling for both cockpit and brakes. The car's vast grip is both aided and abetted by its 18-inch OZ alloy wheels, boasting 10.8-inch-wide front rims, which exceed the road car's grip area by nearly 2 inches. Carbon brake discs, which so delighted Murray when they were admitted under race rules, have been replaced by monster 13.1-inch steel discs.
The LM's free-breathing 6.1-liter dry-sump BMW Motorsport V-12 engine remains in race spec, with only a token amount of remapping required to achieve its final torque potential of 520 pound-feet-more than the standard car and less than the GTR. That torque curve peaks at a strangely cool 4500 rpm-a usefully languid characteristic for such a fierce piece of road kit, allowing the possibility of benign road behavior, however bizarre that may seem.
Further help comes from the gearbox, which mixes the road car's aluminum casing with the GTR's straight-cut gears to produce an action Wallace describes as "uncompromising." The gear lever and handbrake have been pared back to their raw mechanical basics, eschewing all attempts at stylized design, while the carbon-clad dash and instrumentation allow no other interpretation of the LM's deep-rooted race breeding.
The wafer-thin carbon-fiber driver's seat is flanked not by two passenger seats but by two carbon moldings, each made bearably comfortable by strips of cladding. No getting away from it, passengers: You are, effectively, sitting on the chassis. And as for conversation, well, headphones and intercom are standard because they really have to be.
You might expect plenty of standard equipment on a car costing in the region of $1.25 million, but don't buy Auto Trader with any sense of expectation. The LM is effectively priceless. And it's priceless in more ways than one, because it represents the extra mile for McLaren, which genuinely thought it had produced the ultimate road car when it finished the original F1. The car's racing success took even the great motorsport brain of Ron Dennis entirely by surprise, and provoked him into building what is effectively a high-speed roadgoing trophy of that Le Mans victory. It's what happens when the ultimate road car goes beyond the ultimate.
And now, the time has come to begin this quest for the holy grail of autodom. The LM is wired up to the Datron timing gear, its light beam directed down onto the hot tarmac, which will shortly be passing beneath it at upward of 180 mph. It's late in the morning when the 18-inch Pirelli P Zeroes touch ground for the first time, and Wallace needs no more cajoling. Setting off for a warm-up run to get comfortable with the feel and balance of the LM, he disappears into the ocean-like heat haze with a howl of V-12 and a squeal of rubber. It doesn't look clean; black lines on the runway tell a tale of lost milliseconds. And, sure enough, Wallace isn't happy with the car. "It feels very light. It's moving from side to side," he reports. "I can't get the power down without wheelspin. I can't get past three-quarter throttle in first gear."
Chins are rubbed, as if the result were a failure, but Datron's John Grist, reading the telemetry over the radio from the far end of the runway, has some news. "That was 11.6 seconds," he says. Without a satisfactory setup, with too little grip and cool tires, Wallace has already obliterated the record while not even breaking a sweat. He could go home now. But he's having too much fun-and McLaren knows the LM can do better. For a start, all that wheelspin resulted in a 0-60-mph time of 4.0 seconds. Sluggish stuff.
The Pirellis are replaced by Michelin Pilots, and Wallace's brake pedal is adjusted to give him a more comfortable platform to stand on at the 100-mph mark. Surely, with a tweaked setup, he can't fail to improve at the second attempt? After all, anybody could do this, he'd said. But no. Wallace's twitchy right foot hits the brakes with just 98.6 mph showing, and run two is aborted. Sweat is now broken.
The third run looks good, with the telltale explosion of tire smoke in the braking area seeming to last a fraction of a second less than before. With the 0-60- and 0-100-mph times (around 3.9 and 6.7 seconds, respectively) seeming fairly consistent, the brakes hold the key. But Grist is on the radio with disappointing news. "0-100-0 in 11.9 seconds," he reports. Point three down on the first run.
Wallace discusses tire pressures and corner weights with the team, trying to sort out an apparent loss of grip at the front left wheel. A 19-kilogram adjustment (roughly 42 pounds) corner-to-corner is agreed, while the crew lets air out of the Michelins (dropping from 34 to 25 psi) in a bid to put a wider spread of tire tread onto the ground.
Wallace guns the LM for run four, giving no quarter. Despite getting wheelspin in all three gears, he posts the quickest 0-100-0-mph time in history, arriving back at a standstill just 11.5 seconds after leaving the line.
And you can see from their faces that 11.5 seconds is as good as it's going to get. From across the field, you can almost hear the sound of Caterham eating its heart out. "We could never fail to achieve this with the LM," says a now really quite sweaty Wallace. "Truth be told, we could have done it with the F1 as well, despite the lack of downforce. There's almost too much power here for what we want. If this were a 0-150-0-mph test, the LM would beat anything that's ever been built. It's the nearest we'll ever come to a racing car for the road."
Record duly broken, the team turns its attention to the in-gear figures. How much quicker through the gears is the LM than the standard road car? In third gear, the F1 takes 3.1 seconds to fire from 60-100 mph, while the LM takes 2.8. In fifth, the 70-110-mph increment becomes a yawning 1.0-second chasm, a gaping hole in the F1's previously invincible curve. Once you get up to 70 mph in fifth gear, the LM opens up half a second on its road cousin, which has never in its life been even touchable.

A quiet awe seems to descend on the crew as the figures unreel. There's no surprise: This car had sat in the garage since the winter of 1995 with the whole world knowing what it was capable of, yet it had never been proved until now. With all that downforce, the LM is not the fastest road car on the planet, but it is, indisputably now, the quickest.
"Every time I drive this car, they tell me it's the last time," says Wallace. "Then they come up with another excuse. I think they love it as much as I do. It's the most astonishing road car imaginable. However hard you push it, however far out you go, it keeps coming back. The brakes are better, the handling is better, the gearbox is better than the F1. There's not a shred of compromise."
Wallace has had many good days with the McLaren in its many guises, but this ranks up there among the very best. And he's already back at the team truck sipping a nice hot cup of tea by the time a record-breaking Caterham Seven JPE-had there been one handy-would have come to a halt.