Doug Nye: A biography of the McLaren F1

Well, that didn’t happen, partly because I intentionally dragged my feet thinking that the mere story of the car to that date would only be the preamble to what might follow. The car’s creator Gordon Murray was great fun to work with, and he was very supportive when it came to my arguments in favour of delay. I think that McLaren boss Ron Dennis really wanted something to glorify his company and its brand image, purely as a sales tool. With my historical outlook – for which read determinedly objective and completely non-commercial – I didn’t care a fig about potentially selling any of the cars – what I really wanted to record and report was the reality of what those cars became, and how they might serve their end users…

Ron’s contemporary business partner, the late (and much missed) Creighton Brown, was another supporter of my point of view. What’s the point of publishing a puff piece before the darned cars have achieved anything worth a damn? I saw no merit in sweating blood to produce such a thing. As it was book designer Rick Ward – a completely loony but intensely creative pal of Gordon’s – and I both sweated plenty of blood immediately before the F1’s launch to produce the official sales brochure for the F1 – which itself (I am happy to recall) became something of an industry standard-setter.

Where delaying the book itself was concerned, I think that – just for once – our judgement was pretty much spot on, and by 1999 we could tell the story not just of a magnificent motor car’s concept, design, development and introduction, but also of its subsequent career, its various successive versions and also – not least – of the extraordinarily successful competition career which the F1, as a dedicated and carefully-tailored road-car design, was never ever intended to have.

Since the most important result of that racing career was the McLaren F1 GTR’s outright victory in the 1995 Le Mans 24-Hour race, even Ron ended up by taking credit for the wisdom of delay – not a concept to which he would normally subscribe. But without him behind the project, it would never, ever, have seen the light of day, and without superstar design engineer Gordon Murray’s concept, capability, and stature as a project driver it would never have proved so capable.

I counted it as a real privilege to have had the opportunity to work with, and for, such people. Despite subsequent differences and the rifts of passing years, and very different times, I still regard them both with immense respect – almost diametrically different characters, certainly of widely differing likability, but study their respective achievements oh ye mortal men, and wonder…

The first I saw of the McLaren F1 – back in 1989 I think – had been merely the original MDF wood-pulp, wax and resin mock-up monocoque sitting on a surface plate in McLaren Cars Ltd’s then-new premises alongside the Portsmouth-London railway line in darkest Woking. The windscreen shape was sketched-in on that mock-up just by strings stretched between header rail and scuttle top, tied around tin-tacks top and bottom. They had their two rough prototype test-hack cars ‘Albert’ and ‘Edward’ to accumulate development mileage. Master R&D engineer Bruce Macintosh had built them from basic Ultima car kits, Mark IIIs I think, chassis numbers 12 and 13. Number 12 was used to test the Pete Weismann-designed transaxle gearbox subjected to the power and torque of a 7.4-litre Chevrolet V8 engine, while also researching alternative brake systems and the seat configuration. Chassis 13 is listed as the BMW-McLaren V12 engine test car, complete with its intended exhaust and cooling system, once the prototype power unit had been delivered from Munich. When McLaren Cars had learned everything needed from these two hapless test hacks, Ron insisted they should be sawn up and destroyed. Why? To prevent any chance of their being fly-tested by the specialist magazines as “an F1 preview” and very much to protect the McLaren brand from any association whatsoever with anything so cheapskate and dirty finger-nailed as mere “kit cars”.

Spool forward to 1998-99 as our book project neared fruition and at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, I found myself taking a weekend off from ‘Driving Ambition’ finalisation by driving the 1935 Le Mans-winning Lagonda on the hill. Now, the finest photo opportunity that the historic motor sporting world can ever provide is the top paddock on the Goodwood hill, as the cars accumulate there from each starting batch. 

I was an early runner in the Lagonda that year – a car I adore – and we burbled into the top paddock to be waved into a parking place on the grass. Other cars were completing their runs and filing in behind me, as directed by the marshals. One car I was rather nervous about was the Daimler-Benz Museum’s then freshly-restored 1 1/2-litre supercharged W165 Voiturette, one of the two famous Tripoli GP cars which finished first and second at the Libyan Mellaha circuit in 1939, taking Alfa Romeo and Maserati down a peg on what was then Italian imperial soil.

Why should I have been nervous about it? It was because Mercedes, in their non-historically-minded wisdom, had invited Ron Dennis to drive it. Now, rather uncharitably, team driver Gerhard Berger had not long before lampooned Ron’s driving finesse after The Boss had crashed the company’s F1 demo car mightily into a bridge abutment at Suzuka, with Gerhard as his passenger. I was assured at the time that Creighton Brown had foreseen a problem and beseeched Ron not to drive the car on that Japanese sales tour, but he’d been ignored. Aah well, some blokes are cut out to be drivers…and some aren’t.

Against that background, I was nervous as a tick that The Boss let loose in the confined, centre-throttle, cockpit of the 1939 twin-supercharged Tripoli Mercedes on the Goodwood hill might be akin to providing my grandson with a live hand-grenade and telling him on no account to pull out that shiny pin. Perhaps inhumanely, my prime concern was not for Ron’s well-being – but for that supremely valuable, wonderfully historic, old racing car.

So I sat there in the sun, in the cockpit of the 1935 Lagonda Le Mans winner, and waited for the ear-splittingly hard-edged note of that highly supercharged V8 approaching the top paddock through the woods. And then sure enough, there was that keening, sharp BLAAA-RATTATAT-BLAAAH! wafting up to us, and the gleaming little Baby Arrow came into sight, driven with perfectly due care and attention by The Boss. He braked and changed down perfectly, and the marshals directed him round to the right and down across the grass to park…right alongside me.

And so it was that on that Festival of Speed afternoon – up in the top paddock at the Goodwood hill climb – the author of the McLaren F1 book ‘Driving Ambition’, and the project’s principal and co-creator – sat side-by-side in the sun and had an extremely convenient and useful detailed debrief on the project’s contemporary status, what had been achieved that far, and what relatively little remained to be done.

It only struck me later how bizarre an editorial review-meeting that had been; beardie-weirdie, scruffy-overalled yours truly seated in the 1935 Le Mans-winning Lagonda LG545R, Ron Dennis (immaculately racing-overalled, gloved and helmeted) seated in the 1939 Tripoli GP Mercedes-Benz W165…and both parked in a grassy field up on the crest of the Sussex South Downs.

Still, the book won various awards, and still seems highly rated today if the Amazon Books website is to be believed. In general, the McLaren F1 was a truly wonderful project with which to have been associated. So just excuse me please for this minor retreat into personal nostalgia…

The best part of the entire thing is to recall driving the F1s back then – their centre seat command position really did make you feel King of the World – and that magnificent V12 engine by BMW was a truly wondrous power unit.

The downside of the entire deal – for me – was that McLaren’s subsequent partnership with Mercedes-Benz then made any mention of the F1’s BMW involvement at worst virtually verboten – at best only to whispered, as an accuracy-insuring aside. But make no mistake, one of the most welcome sights at any Goodwood event – then or since – has been of that supreme automotive achievement – the finest drivers’ car ever built, or ever likely to be built – the McLaren F1 and its F1 GTR racing sisters… My oh my – what a family they made.

Images courtesy of The GP Library, Drew Gibson and Jochen Van Cauwenberge.