Late last year, Sam Smith drove a McLaren F1 for R&T's 51 Coolest Cars of the Last 50 Years. The piece he wrote was published in the March/April issue, but due to space constraints, a lot had to be left out. What follows are excerpts from his notes—an unfettered look at what it's like to drive one of the rarest, fastest, most expensive supercars ever built.



My first encounter with it was the day before, in the shooting studio. I sat in it with a pair of sunglasses, miming pulling out of the studio for the photographer. I got instructions on how to slide into it—first, you sit in the left seat. Has to be left, so you don't put your leg over the shifter, because that's just déclassé. You fall into it, and you're in the back, you feel like you're riding on the rear bumper, the dash is a million miles away. And you sit there, and you don't want to move, you just want someone to take you around Imola or Monaco at full warp and experience it.

From the left seat, the car just feels safe and weird. But then you move over. The tiny dash. The wheel, which is more perfect than any other wheel has ever been. Save a few tiny details, everything looks specifically built to be here. It has the window switches from a 1990s BMW 7 Series, but everything else looks like it fell from the moon. The entire car is just jewelry. But not, like, Pagani jewelry. It's a kind of deeply aerospace functionality, the inside of something built by Lockheed's Skunk Works with the government looking on and black helicopters circling overhead. It's like Space Shuttle porn. Purpose squared.

FACTS

Just 64 road-going cars were made. It was McLaren's first attempt at a true production car (the M6GT Can-Am project didn't count).

Peter Stevens did the design. BMW's legendary Paul "Camshaft" Rosche was responsible for the engine. Murray went to BMW, and Rosche, whom he knew from his time at Brabham. (BMW provided turbocharged engines for Brabham F1 cars in the early 1980s.)

Average value of a street F1 now: $8–9 million.

Rough-guesstimate value of the car we drove, McLaren F1 #0001: $10 million.

1137 kilograms, or around 2500 lbs. Carbon-composite structure.

627 hp, 479 lb-ft.

No ABS, no power steering, no stability control or other driver aids.

At the time it was launched, it was simply the fastest, quickest car money could buy. The factory turned out three cars a month—each one took some 2250 man-hours to construct.

There's just this weird serenity there. The nose falls away and the car feels small and manageable and for a brief moment, you think to yourself, 'Oh. This is just a car'. It isn't one of the first McLaren F1s built. (Smith drove McLaren F1 #0001.—Ed.) You forget about it sitting in the McLaren factory showroom, which it did. You forget about it being driven by engineers and company heads and whatever. That's part of its genius. You desperately, badly want to use it. Most exotics, you want to get in touch with them, have them smack the shit out of you, grow to know them, then go back to real life. You sit in an F1, you want to drive to Africa and back with the windows open and the mufflers gone.

The starter. An assistant started the car to move it around the studio, and it's the same V12 starter noise you hear in everything else V12, high-geared and fast and whiney—whireeeereeeeerooooooooVROMMMMMMMMMMMM. And the engine is running, a little unevenly when it's cold. It just has this ugha-ugha-ugha lope that quickly goes away when warm, just the tiniest hint of unhappiness.

It is delicate and ferocious and feminine all at once. The wheels seem too small by modern standards, the tires with their fat sidewalls, until you've looked at the car for more than five minutes. Then, magically, the proportions just click, and it all makes sense, and there's something surreal, almost kit-car-esque about it. It seems to revoke the possible. It makes your brain click into denial mode: This shouldn't exist.

The shift lever looks like it opens bomb-bay doors. Reverse lockout is the missile switch—armed cover—with the arrow on the right console. Everything is a button with labels next to it. The door handle—I legitimately couldn't find it at first, and the guy who was minding it wasn't there, and that first shot, I was actually stuck in the car. Turns out it's under the seat. Of course it is. Because McLaren.

There's an ignition plate on the console with the car number and an etching of its shape. The words MCLAREN F1. Like you're ever going to forget.

Meeting your heroes: It just felt magical. I didn't know what to say—I was honestly dumbstruck. It's this weird feeling of finally having done something I've lusted after for years ... I couldn't put my finger on it, but holy hell, it happened. The day before, I drove a 288 GTO (amazing, lived up to the hype, like a Lotus Elise built by sadists with a penchant for opera). I sat in an F40, and I was scared just sitting there, because I didn't fit it, because it was impossibly tiny and very obviously meant to do dangerous things and there was yellow-weave carbon everywhere and the cabin was the size of a small trash can.

Earlier on the McLaren day, I sat in a Lancia Stratos, 10 minutes before I sat in the McLaren. (It was a weird couple of days.) And as special as those things were, as much as the F40 was a poster car for me ... the McLaren was more special. It meant something. It exists on a plane of its own, something that lives outside the realm of sanity and reason and car as transportation or art piece or sex object. It was oddly calming.

Great cars ooze a vibe of the period, the company that built them, the political and economic climate, whatever. They instantly pick you up on the street in the modern world and spit you out in a feeling. Amazing ones—the stuff that marks the ages—ooze the soul or talent or skill of one man. The F1 has no age, no era, no dated vibe. This is Gordon Murray, the dude, the genius, the obsessive. This is what happens when you're lead designer for one of the world's most legendary motorsport firms and someone hands you a pen and says, "Go. And don't worry about stopping."

F*ck.

The car has wormed its way into car-nerd culture so much, like the Veyron or anything else of its ilk, that people just know. I posted pictures on Twitter with a request for people to tell me what they wanted to see—what they wanted me to take pictures of and then Tweet. They ended up asking for very specific things—the gold foil underneath the engine hatch, the modem connection for servicing, the air duct on the roof. It's like a Veyron, only people seem to love it, not just respect it. You get the sense that this thing is like distant family to everyone, known by anyone with an ounce of car in their veins.

whap! Whap! Whapatacrackatawhap!

After a great deal of wrangling—it's like meeting the Wizard of Oz, or getting into Russia 20 years ago; you have to make a request to someone who makes a request, and then maybe you'll get to touch the thing. No one just up and drives an F1 without the proper paperwork and sign-offs. I went to Chicago, and on one particularly memorable, and dry, winter afternoon, I drove the car. We had to insure it for double-digit millions. I was not allowed one of those balls-out blasts around Wales that you always see in the British books. I was not allowed to drift it on a track. I was not allowed to plant my right foot repeatedly on the Autobahn and have that glorious engine howl at full madness. I drove it around Chicago. I drove 80 mph on Lake Shore Drive—speeding, but not by much. I was a normal human.

And while it may sound weird, that was enough. It should go without saying that I—we, collectively, everyone here—wanted more, but that was enough. To get an idea, to get a glimpse of what made this thing so special. What still makes it special.

The seats are just curved and odd and not really comfy or uncomfy. Murray's assertion that the car should be a road car first and everything else second—for travel, for use. Ignore the fact that you'll never get three peoples' worth of luggage in the side pods—that's just for bringing friends, temporarily.

The steering is fantastic. Possibly the best I've ever experienced, in any road car, ever. Linear and easy and light and telegraphs road and expansion joints and wobble but with very little bump change and no kickback and it just plain works and it's manual. Light enough that you can just wheel it around while parked, car off and stopped, with your forearms, not your shoulders.

The Nardi wheel is thin-rimned. Brake pedal long and surprisingly soft. Shifter high-effort—you have to be firm with it, know what you're doing, like a gated Ferrari lever. The clutch does not like being slipped, at all. It judders constantly, but Paul Frere (R&T's original road tester for the F1—Ed.) experienced it, so it must be normal, and I must not be that terrible. You get the best results from the car driving it like you would for a movie: no hesitation, ever. Then it smooths up, becomes fluid. Like an actual racing car would.

You instantly hate every modern supercar—they're just too much, too insecure. Too fascinated with themselves. The details are all plain but amazing. It's what you would keep someone from if you wanted to show them what a supercar is—it's too well-done for that. It satisfies around town—to drive, I mean, not just pose in—unlike a Lambo but like a Miata or an Elan. It lives up to the billing but doesn't make a fuss about itself. It's the most subtle extravagance I've ever experienced.

I love it. So, so much.

The German war-machine tool thing crossed with British restraint. Everything about the car just strikes you as considered. It's a sophisticated sensibility. It wants to go take the world by the collar and beat the crap out of it, then take everyone out for drinks.

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