Share your McLaren experience!

Just curious to know which ones everyone has seen or sat in or ridden in, etc.

Drove very close to one =)

I won't go into details unless you really want me to cause I've talked about it a few times already.

My only experience with an F1 road car is fairly well documented in this thread:

World's Worst McLaren F1 photos (http://www.automotiveforums.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=134080) :screwy:

The only other F1's I have seen were the long tail GTRs in 1997 when they competed in the final race of the 1997 FIA GT series at Laguna Seca. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos from that day as I wasn't really interested in photography and didn't bring a camera with me. :(

My friend took some photos, but he has moved too many times since then and apparently can't find them. If they ever turn up, they're probably fairly decent shots as we had pit passes and could get right up next to the cars.

>8^)
ER

hehe, you all must know mine by now

I was going to post your's for you at the bottom of my post actually. :lol2:

>8^)
ER

I can get 9 pics I took of the one that used to be at Shelton and #065 scanned within a week...

Earlier in the year when I travelled to the Barret Jackson car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, I saw a McLaren parked amongst a few Lamborgini's. It was a copper color and the odd thing was(since there is glass covering the engine bay and the exhaust manifold was clearly visable) there was a single turbocharger installed on the right manifold. The blow-off valve next to the valve cover supported my hunch. It was an obvious work of art. Although the car did seem small in person. Thanks.

well if it's true, i'm disappointed. The McLaren was normally aspirated for a reason. Turbos don't give a linear power delivery and for a number of years now (ever since the 2002 turbo actually) it has been BMW policy to not use forced induction. Anybody know which vandal owns this car?

Earlier in the year when I travelled to the Barret Jackson car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, I saw a McLaren parked amongst a few Lamborgini's. It was a copper color and the odd thing was(since there is glass covering the engine bay and the exhaust manifold was clearly visable) there was a single turbocharger installed on the right manifold. The blow-off valve next to the valve cover supported my hunch. It was an obvious work of art. Although the car did seem small in person. Thanks.

i'm sorry but i don't believe that until you supply some proof. that car was at concorso italiano and had hundreds of photos taken of its engine bay and this "turbo" wasn't visible in any. Sorry if i sound rude, i'm not meaning to be.

this is not my experience:
http://www.turnermotorsport.com/1_LM_on_ramp.MOV

If any car had a turbo in it, it would probably be Dan's. As we've seen, he has really messed around with it. I guess it's possible for it to have a turbo in it, but I need proof

i highly doubt he would put a turbo, but who knows, he put all that other crap in it.

Re: Turbo

Knowing all the toys that Dan put in his F1 this seems plausible, but not necessarily believeable.

Who puts a turbo on a 627 HP engine? Does an engine this powerful really need one? Add to the fact that you can get McLaren to do an engine upgrade for you which doesn't involve forced induction.

I don't know how old this picture is:

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/bsoskey/manifold.jpg

...but when I look I don't see any turbo.

I can say with considerable certainty, that Dan's car has never and never will have a turbo. He is quite dedicated to maintaining the original status of the car and the true spirit of the car. The wheels that have been featured on the car at the SEMA Show two years in a row were purely for promotional purposes and were not driven more than 1 or 2 miles as the wheels do not properly fit the car whatsoever. Most of this has been mentioned in another thread, but was worth clearing up here as well.

not to be rude but McLaren F1 Guy, can u take that rediculous car out of ur sign? Saleen S7 wheels on a mac? please noooo ;)

replaced it with a pic I took - sorry it's so blurry, but from scanning it on a low quality scanner, shrinking it, and uploading it, it ended up being very low quality.
I posted above that I can get 9 pics I took scanned...today I sat in front of my friends brand new scanner trying to get it to work for an hour and only managed to get one scanned, the one in my sig now. On friday I'm gonna go back and try to figure the scanner out

haha. much better ;) . Do u have the shelton pix yet :D

by friday I should have a shelton pic or two, but unfortunately, it'll probably be about as blurry as that one :(

damn. send em to me and i'll do them :)

Got all my good McLaren pics scanned!!! :biggrin: OK, here they are:

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2365,%20front%203-4,%20guy%20in%20window,%20I%20TOOK%20THIS%20ONE.jp g I have the above photo enlarged and hanging in my room

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2324,%20front%203-4,%20I%20TOOK%20THIS%20ONE Yep, the one that used to be at Shelton

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2324,%20side,%20I%20TOOK%20THIS%20ONE.jpg Shelton again

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2324,%20front-side,%20low%20angle,%20I%20TOOK%20THIS%20ONE.jpg The car at Shelton again, I was exiting the dealership and noticed I only had 1 photo left so quickly snapped this one

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2365,%20rear%203-4,%20I%20TOOK%20THIS%20ONE.jpg Back to Park Lane for this one, sorry it's blurry, I think my hands were shaking because I was in absolute amazement of the car (I was even the first person in the dealership that day besides the lady who works there :) )

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2365,%20head%20on,%20I%20TOOK%20THIS%20ONE.jpg Head on of #65

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/151103-%2324,%20very%20close%20up%20of%20rear,%20I%20TOOK %20THIS%20ONE.jpg The badging on #24

Whew, I'm exhausted, took me an hour to scan and get all of those on disk, then I had to come home and it took me another hour to upload them and add the finishing touches, such as sharpening, brightening, etc. I'd be amazed if these work and weren't all red X's, with my luck thats what they'll be

EDIT: OK, I viewed it after the original post and it was all X's, I made a few changes to the URLs and it should work this time *fingers crossed*

Yeah, uh... Houston, we have a problem... :D

BTW: You can upload them into mini magic's premium forum on SC.net - ask if you need some help.

EDIT: Ok, fixed for the most part. Were these scans of wallet sized photos though?? Even a 4x6 print should produce a better scan than that.

>8^)
ER

I edited it, NOW it should work (although the pic of the badging on #24 isn't showing up for me)

dude. 2 things: it shouldn't take an hour to scan all them. i can scan about 60 4x6 photos in an hour with mine and 2nd, there has to be an option to make the scans big. what scanner is it and what software are u using to scan them?

Hows this: http://community.webshots.com/album/100050103qyyhFJ

still tiny man

Are those your originals?? If so, you can save yourself some time when scanning by selecting a scan area that way it won't give you the whole page of white below the source material. That will definitely speed things up.

You can also lay out a bunch of pictures to scan at one time, but if the scanner uses image correction in its software you'd probably want to scan them individually so it compensates for each photo seperately. You should also try increasing the resolution you are scanning at. It looks to have been quite low if those are your originals. I'd try somethign like 300dpi on a photograph and see how it looks.

Did you take these with a disposable camera? That would explain the overall quality of the pictures. The ones from London look decent because there is a lot of light, but the ones inside Shelton are only good in the areas where your flash hit. The flash on those tiny throw-away cameras is not very good unfortunately. In a darker setting, you either need slower film (400-800 iso) which unfortunately produces grainier images, or the ability to slow the shutter speed of the camera.

Anyway - I hate to be a downer, but I was hoping for better photos of the car at Shelton. I've obviously got a ton of shots of the car from London so no disappointment there. One suggestion is that you might also try taking the negatives and the printed photos to a real camera store and ask them to see if they could reprocess them and improve on the prints for you. If they think they can improve the quality during their process, you should also ask them about scanning the final product for you. Most good camera stores have the ability to scan pictures or slides and give them back on a CD.

>8^)
ER

i love the 1st shelton one with the green reflection. POST BIGGER :)

I've had quite a few McLaren encounters. I live in Midland and go by and see the silver F1 quite often. Sat in several times and have many photo's of them. One of me sitting in it as well :naughty: .

William

Welcome aboard Will - sounds like you have had some great experiences with that car. There really aren't too many photographs of it floating around, so feel free to share any that you have. Also, if you've ridden in the car I'd be interested in hearing about that experience as well. :cool:

>8^)
ER

Havn't ridden in it yet it's still being fixed, they're fixing the tranny. I'm goign to ride in his murcielago and hopefully his new enzo over thanksgiving. When i get back i'll have more pics (hopefully enzo pics) and ride experiences.

William

Also the pics that i have seen of it (car show) were originally posted on www.anythingcars.com in the multimedia section under shows. If you want to check the origin of the pics.

William

I went to see McLaren F1 chassis #69 (you done laughing?) when it was for sale in Chicago. It was actually quite an experience, since my mom's fiance and I had to create quite a cover story to convince the dealer that we were really intent on buying the car (I mean, we wanted it, but the outrageous $1.6 million asking price was a bit out of reach). The car was being kept at the owner's home, and the owner was ofter out of town. We finally connected with him and his car in February of 2001. We saw the car, sat in it, heard it start, and gave it the once over, but for all intensive purposes, this 1998 McLaren was damaged goods. The price was easily half a million more than the cars actual worth, there was a growing crack in the windshield, and the purchase and importation of the car had been very shady.

It did lead to one incredible thing though...a car sourced relationship b/t Jay Leno and I founded through discussion about this very McLaren. My mom's fiance ran into Leno at a charity benefit about a month after we saw the McLaren, and got to talking about it. He wasn't able to asnwer all of Leno's questions, so I wrote to Leno, who called the factory for me about the car (I didn't even ask him to, he just did it to be kind). Turns out the car had been illegally imported (little surpirse it soon disappeared from Fox Valley Motorcars website) and that the windshield would easily cost upwards of $20,000 to fix. The best part, however, was that Leno, impressed with my letter, invited me to his garage. I went to it in August of 01, after the Pebble Beach Concours. There I saw Leno's McLaren F1. In August of this year, I saw the Lark McLaren F1 Longtail GTR at the Symbolic Motor Cars exhibition in the Double Tree.

Check out my gallery for pictures...

Hi there Duesey - your story is already quite familiar to me , but I'm glad to have you here! :cool:

>8^)
ER

Hi there Duesey - your story is already quite familiar to me , but I'm glad to have you here! :cool:

>8^)
ER
Yeah, well, I guess I finally joined. See that Duesenberg was one of the car categories is probably what pushed me over the edge!

duesey, do you know if jay leno knows or maybe even visits these boards? another famous owner here would certainly not be a bad thing ;)