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Originally Posted by mr bridger
to peleton, i"m curious to know how you knew i had owned 007?, i was the 2nd owner, having bought the car at auction in france in 98 (with just 300mls on it), the first owner being a member of arabian royal family (name witheld for obvious reasons!), sold to frank selldorf in mid 2001 as i recall...
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I have lots of great resources for info which is how your name came to me in reference to #007. You say that you bought the car at auction in France. I have a Christie's Auction catalog from Geneva for Monday 18 May 1998 showing #007 as Lot #53. Is that the auction you purchased the car from or was it later in 1998 at a different auction in France? Just trying to nail down some details on the car's history.
Thanks for the previous ownership details. It seems they must have bought the car just to look at it if it only had 300 miles on it at the time you purchased it. I'm fairly certain the cars were delivered with somewhere between 100-200 miles on them already so that doesn't make for very much use in 4 years.
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carbuilder, i was introduced to this particular car thru a friend of mine who knew it could be for sale (the owner deciding it was TOO "hard" for him), not a problem for me as i have always preffered the F40 type of car as opposed to the regular models!...
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So you didn't purchase #16R direct from Maranello Motorsport in Melbourne, Australia?
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also the car was an ex BMW factory car, with good drivers & no huge accident damage ever, there was also speculation that the 2 factory cars (known as " the purple cam cover cars") had "slightly better engines", although i"m sure that would not have happened, BMW supplying the engines & all...would it??...also,to my way of thinking, a car with race provenance & history will always be worth more in the long run than a "standard" model due to its rarity & interesting past (think 250GT0), similar no"s & achievements, especially when it becomes eligible for the "classic le mans" series...thanks, mr bridger.
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I agree - I would have loved to have purchased #16R during the year and a half or so that it was for sale through different sources in the UK. A lightly used race car owned by someone like Ray Bellm is sure to be in good shape overall. Personally, though the finished product looks highly impressive, I would have kept it in it's former FINA paint scheme to tie in with its racing history instead of giving it the papaya respray. Do you have a preference between the two?
I'm curious how you like the interior treatment in the car? I had helped the owner of Maranello Motorsport with reference photos of the LM interior when he was having the car refitted in May 2005. He wanted to get it as close to the look of the LM as McLaren would allow. It seems they weren't willing to entertain that request to the letter, but the final product still looks good.
In what state of tune is the engine at in #16R? Obviously the registraion plate claims 700 BHP
and autofocus/Tim has mentioned you stated it has approximately 680hp, yet in this photo and others it would appear that the air restrictors are still fitted to the air intake.
The car would have had closer to 600hp in racing form, so is there record of someone having the work done to bring the car up to LM power levels since it finished racing? As I speculated a few pages back - that would require at least changing the camshafts as well as an ECU remap to account for and take advantage of the extra air coming into the engine.
A final question about the badging on the car. Currently it wears badges like a road car would with the "F1/McLaren" badge in the lower right corner of the rear grillework. That badging was originally placed in the upper right corner on '95/'96 F1 GTRs as you can see from the FINA-paint photo above. The car is completely lacking of a "GTR" badge right now which should be found on the upper left corner of the rear grille. Do you have any plans to add a "GTR" badge to the back of the car or is it fine the way it sits for you? Given the exterior color, do you often find yourself having to explain to folks that it's not really an LM?
Thanks again for your time and trouble here and also thanks for allowing Tiff/5th Gear to put together the segment that sparked this thread too.
>8^)
ER