Quote:
Originally Posted by Peloton25
The easy answer is that the number on the sign atop the car doesn't correspond to the chassis number. The difficult answer is: "what the heck did it correspond to?"
...oh wait, that's another question. 
That's believed very strongly to be GTR #09R Sami, the one built for the Brunei collection that looks identical to the LeMans winner.
I think it is pretty safe to ignore those numbers when you see them. Here's a pair of images of the easily identifiable chassis #071 in build, as documented in Driving Ambition, and you'll note the number on that car is 099.
What is interesting is that GTR #09R wasn't the 36th F1 built no matter how you count them and chassis #071 wasn't the 99th car either. What I suspect the number might relate to is perhaps an order number or customer record number that McLaren used to track things in the factory, but has no correlation to anything that we're typically familiar with. It could also relate to the order in which the actual chassis were built perhaps. 
>8^)
ER |
OK children, time for a maths lesson, "One and One does not make Two"
Well at least, not down at McLaren
Not all the F1,s were built at Genesis, up to that point in time when #09R was being built. So its all down to how they counted or how many fingers they had
.