A Legend

The McLaren F1 was McLaren’s flagship model that was incredibly influential in the making of modern day supercars. The McLaren P1 was a direct descendant from the F1. The F1 had its original concept design from Gordon Murray. Ultimately, Peter Stevens designed the exterior and the interior. There were only 106 cars produced, only about 100 of those were actually produced and the others were prototypes. This car has been praised by hundreds of thousands of people.

This car in my opinion has dashingly good looks. I just love the feel of simplicity to it. What I also absolutely adore is the sort of retro look that it has. Considering that this car is over 20 years old it looks pretty good for its age. Let’s start at the front. There are some air vents to channel air to the radiator which stops high pressure air from building up and also cools down the brakes. The air then comes out of the vents in the doors. Above that there are those classic retro headlights. In between these headlights is the now old McLaren badge. This car is lower than a Bugatti Veyron. The hubcaps are also quite simple. In the center of the car at the top is where the air intake is. McLaren needed to specially engineer this air intake so that it could filter out water and dirt. The windows on this vehicle are pretty weird. They have a kind of window in a window design. I’m not sure if this was for practical purposes or if it was purely design. The rear is also pretty dated in that same retro respect. It slopes down semi-rapidly and then ends in a flat part. On this flat part there is the hood that flips up providing access to the engine. For the rear end lights there are two circles on each side, one red and one orange. Then, at the very bottom there are four small exhaust pipes. Overall, this is an attractive car.

For its time the F1’s engine was an insane one. It had a 3.5 Liter V12 pushing out 550 horsepower. Its maximum speed was 231 miles an hour, but without the rev limiter it could reach up to almost 243 mph. For seven years this held the record for fastest production car until in 2005 the Bugatti Veyron beat it. Those are pretty impressive statistics even in today’s standards, let alone more than 20 years ago.

The McLaren F1’s interior is also great. The one funny thing about it is that it had a different seating layout than most cars. The way that the seats were set up was that there was one seat in the middle and then two more on either side set slightly back. This was so because it gave the driver the optimal viewing position. McLaren were so luxurious that when you bought a F1 it came with a Tag Heuer watch engraved with the chassis number on it. You also had the option to get a customised golf bag that was specially designed to attach to the passenger seats. When McLaren was making this car the loss of unnecessary weight was always in mind, so to save weight McLaren halved the thickness of all of the leather on the inside which saved them just over 11 pounds. That is just one way that McLaren shaved weight off of this car. The McLaren F1 was, is, and always will be regarded as a brilliant car.