"What you are about to read is not simply the fastest road test in history. It is, in all likelihood, the fastest road test there will ever be.

"Until we strapped our equipment to the McLaren F1 no one knew how fast it would go. Now we know it all, because we have driven it beyond 210mph, timed it to the last hundredth of a second. And here it stops.

"McLaren will never release another of its amazing £540,000 supercars for road testing to anyone, anywhere in the world."

Those were the words that introduced Autocar's review of the McLaren F1 in 1994. To this day, it remains the definitive road test of the most iconic British supercar of all time.

It was such a hammer blow that it took McLaren 21 years to produce a supercar capable of coming close to the F1.

In May 1994 we took the fifth McLaren prototype, codenamed XP5, to two proving grounds – Millbrook and Bruntingthorpe – to attempt to generate a full set of performance figures. That same car was driven, four years later, by Andy Wallace at Ehra-Lessien in Germany to record a world record-breaking 243mph.

Here, we republish that original Autocar road test from May 1994. It must be noted that the F1 was superceded by the limited-run hybrid P1 and lost its performance title to firstly the Bugatti Veyron and most recently the Chiron.