What would happen if a car were created without rules or limits? That car would be the world’s first hypercar. It all started when a well-known designer at McLaren, Gordon Murray, fell in love with the Honda NSX. To him, the Honda NSX was a sweeter fruit than the Porsche 911. He wasn’t just any designer; he is still considered the pioneer of racing car design.
At the time, unlike Porsche and Ferrari, McLaren wasn’t selling any road-legal cars. Mansour Ojjeh, the financial backbone of the McLaren Formula 1 team, suggested to Gordon Murray and two of his fellows that McLaren could do better than just making race cars. “Let’s do a road car. The best road car in the world,” he said.
Together, they set out to discuss the details of this idea, which would be called McLaren Cars Limited. However, the genius Gordon Murray, sitting in a corner with a sheet of paper, was crafting the prophecy of the F1 that would become one of the most excellent engineering manifestos ever written, all while the others were debating whether it was a good idea or not.
Who was Gordon Murray?
Ian Gordon Murray, the son of a Scottish Motorcycle racer, was born in 1946 in Durban, South Africa. At the time, his father worked at Peugeot in the day and helped people build race cars at night since not everyone could afford to buy a fast car then.
Every Sunday, he would take the young Gordon Murray to watch the cars he built race each other. Gordon Murray studied engineering because of his father, but he wanted to do something else: race cars. Of course, you need a racecar to race cars.
Not having the money to buy one, he bought a crashed Ford Anglia at the age of 21. He built its engine in his bedroom since he didn’t have a garage. The chassis was welded together on top of his mother’s flower garden. He even shaped the body panels with his fertilizer-covered shovel. What’s your excuse? All this resulted in the creation of the IGM Ford or T.1.
His Career
After winning a lot of races in that car, Gordon decided to pursue his passion for racing engineering. He sold his car for a plane ticket to England and started designing championship-winning Grand Prix cars. He wanted to work at Lotus, but instead, he got to work at Brabham, where he was named lead designer. There, he was responsible for the creation of the BT46B, often called “The Fan Car.” It had a giant fan at the rear that produced insane downforce by sucking the air from the bottom of the car.
His only goal was to out-engineer everyone else and win. In 1987, he left Brabham to work at McLaren, where his designed cars broke records as usual. His designs even earned Ayrton Senna his first championship.
The Manifesto
According to Gordon Murray, the McLaren F1 must weigh at most 1,000 kg. The majority of the car’s weight should be between the front and rear wheels. However, it shouldn’t have the problems associated with a mid-engined car, like oversteer. It should be able to survive on public roads, stable at high speeds but still driveable and comfortable at lower speeds.
All he wanted the McLaren F1 to have was the reliability of the Honda NSX, the beauty of the Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale, and the speed of the Porsche 959. What the manifesto needed to have was something about the top speed or 0-60 mph times because Murray specifically wanted the F1 to be an ultimate road car, not a racecar. For a car that dominated these performance figures for years, they were never even a part of the plan.
Attention to Detail
The car was about to be built with composite materials like carbon fiber, titanium, and gold. It would have three seats, and the driver’s seat would be in the middle because the driver should be fully in control, just like he would be in a racecar.
It would have no driver assists because that would temper the driving experience of the intended ultimate driver’s car. Gordon Murray was confident that he could engineer the perfect chassis, but he needed to maintain the expertise to build an engine for it. But he knew what he wanted from the engine.
He wanted 100 hp per liter and an engine size of 5.5 liters that would make almost 550 bhp. A V12 pushing past 7500 rpm and that too naturally aspirated was Gordon’s vision of the ultimate road car experience. He wanted the engine to be under 250 kg or 550 lbs, and if that wasn’t enough, he wanted it to run forever and have longer maintenance intervals.
Pursuit for Perfection
Murray contacted Honda and Isuzu and even considered asking Ferrari to build their engines. But Honda ghosted him, Isuzu apparently had yet to prove itself, and Ferrari engines were unreliable. That’s where Murray’s old friend Paul Rosche, who used to design BMW racing engines, said, “I’m in!” In almost no time, Paul created the 12-cylinder beast of an engine called the S70/2.
It was made with forged aluminum. As much as the 6.1-liter engine and 627 horsepower impressed Murray, the engine was almost 20 lbs heavier. It had dry sump lubrication, which meant the oil would lubricate the cylinders even under extreme cornering. Each cylinder bank had its water pump, and each specifically forged aluminum piston had its ignition coil.
Holy Grail of 90s
We’re talking about the early 90s here, and at that time, this was the holy grail. An engine like this didn’t exist. The engine was placed behind the rear seats, wrapped in gold, to keep the temperature down. The exhaust pipe was made out of Inconel, a unique lightweight aerospace material that can withstand high temperatures and is very strong.
This is because the exhaust, like most things in the McLaren F1, had two purposes. It would exhaust the gases and be the rear crumple zone in the event of a crash. Like everything else about the F1, conventional logic was ignored. For example, the McLaren F1 doesn’t have a flywheel despite the clutch being only 200 mm.
Overall, the McLaren F1 was as rigid as any other car but weighed less than a Honda Fit because the engine was integrated into the suspension.
Choosing Perfect Design
More than 1,000 models were built until the best four were chosen, which were then further exposed to thousands of wind tunnel tests. The team wanted the model with the most downforce and the least resistance. Finally, in 1991, the final shape was made out of clay and set next to the Honda NSX. That is precisely what Gordon Murray wanted: a smaller but faster Honda NSX. And he had succeeded in building that.
Final Product
The supercar competition in the 1990s was fierce, with the Ferrari F40 and the Porsche 959, but the McLaren left them in their dust. It was so fast that it was nearly impossible not to break the law. Yet it was still comfortable enough for your mom to borrow it for a grocery run.
The seats were adjustable, and the rear seats had proper legroom. There was more torque at 1500 RPMs in the F1 than most cars have at the redline. There wasn’t any competition. It accelerated as hard at 150 mph as regular cars did in first gear. All of this fury for a vehicle that was never meant to be fast but, instead, a good car first. It even did 8.5 km in 1 liter of petrol. There are only 60 McLaren F1s out there right now, and they still don’t have much competition.
Automotive journalists at the time, took the McLaren F1 to over 200 mph. Screaming at 7500 RPMs in sixth gear, they sensed the engine still had further to go. They just ran out of tarmac, and the car ran out of gears. It wasn’t meant to break top speed records, yet his F1 has the longest-held top speed record on the Volkswagen test track in Germany. Andy Wallace achieved a 391 km/h speed on this track in 1998 and shattered the world land speed record. It became the fastest naturally aspirated production car ever to be built.
Conclusion
It was rarer than the Ferrari, more expensive than the Lamborghini, and faster than the Porsche. Gordon Murray had made art, a masterpiece of engineering, beyond what anyone at the time could have imagined possible.
A machine so delicately balanced, so poetic in its delivery, it was well-behaved but capable of savage brutality. That is the history that made the McLaren F1 the most incredible hypercar of all time.