The McLaren F1 LM story really begins with what we decided not to do at McLaren cars. Mansour Ojeh, Ron Dennis, Creighton Brown and I were the four directors of McLaren Cars, with Creighton and me leaving Formula 1 to become active partners in the new company. Our decision about the first product was to start at the top and attempt to design the best driver’s car the world had seen.
Deliberating the car’s specification, I realized that it would have to be a pure road car if it was going to be comfortable and usable in everyday driving. I insisted that we should never be tempted to race the car, as I was sure that diverse targets and mixed messages would dilute the design and compromise the result.
How wrong I was! My thinking was that being primarily a racing-car designer (I had designed only three road cars by then), I would subconsciously be thinking about the design requirements for a racing car, and that is exactly what I did—with low weight, high horizontal stiffness, low polar moment of inertia and center of gravity, underbody ground-effect aerodynamics and pretty much uncompromised classic double-wishbone suspension geometry. With the central driving position thrown in for good measure, all this added up to the F1 being a pretty useful racing car right out of the box. Another plus for racing was that the tens of thousands of test miles put on our XP prototype cars meant that the racing car was pretty bulletproof.
The road car went into production in 1994, just about the time when the BPR Global GT series [the forerunner of FIA GT] was becoming a serious sports-car championship. During that first year of production, we were approached by two of our road-car customers to build a racing version of the F1. At first we refused but when the owners threatened to do the conversion themselves, we capitulated. Jeff Hazel and I worked out the budget to design a prototype and test the car, and we were given the blessing by Ron Dennis to go ahead — if the required funding could be obtained from the profit on the sales of the first five racing cars. The figures worked out and so the 1995 F1 GTR was born.
We needed to do surprisingly little work — an FIA rollcage, an extinguisher, race-car electrics and instruments, racing brakes, stiffer suspension components, air jacks and racing systems for fuel and oil. The engine was remapped for more power but ultimately, the air restrictions imposed upon us reduced the horsepower to about 600. We built a racing exhaust system and mounted the engine solidly.
Bodywork modification included larger radiator intakes in the nose, more driver cooling and new brake cooling ducts. A front splitter, front wheel arch exhausts, revised underbody diffuser and a rear wing quadrupled the road car’s downforce. A new duct in the right-hand luggage door fed air to a larger transmission cooler. The drag coefficient increased from 0.32 to around 0.39.
The 1995 and 1996 sports-car racing seasons were very successful for us with the GTR winning the championship in both years, and the customer cars winning 19 out of 23 races. But the biggest challenge was still to come — no less than six GTR customers wanted to race in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Once more we gave in to the owners’ wishes, and early in 1995 produced a special parts kit for Le Mans, which included carbon brakes, updated lights and various other small modifications for endurance racing. The cars finished 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 13th overall, thus becoming the first car to win at the first attempt since the inaugural race, and the first true road car to win for decades.
The F1 LM was born out of this victory. We had at the start of the F1 program promised customers that we would not make any nonsensical variants of the car, such as a convertible, for example, but I was a bit put out that the only other car anywhere near the 1140-kg weight of the F1 was the Ferrari F40, which was, at the time, consistently held up by the press as a competitor for the F1. Unfair, I thought, when the F1 had room for three, a 6.0-liter engine, large luggage compartments, a CD stacker, air conditioning, carpets, even a toolkit! I harbored a secret desire to build our own F40 — a performance version stripped of all the luxury and practical stuff — even lighter and more powerful than the standard F1. The win at Le Mans in 1995 provided me with a very good reason to build this car — we should celebrate the victory with a limited-edition version of the F1.
Not only did we have the reason but we already had the basis for the car. Because the GTR was essentially a road car on the track, it would prove to be relatively simple to make a road car from the race car. I was determined that the LM should be as close to the 1995 GTR that won Le Mans as was practical and possible from a regulation point of view.
We already had the bodywork, aero package and, of course, the tooling from the GTR. The body of the GTR had been influenced by wind-tunnel data, and the "styling" was the result of a few sketches I produced after the tunnel work was complete. Although the shape was engineering-driven, most of us at McLaren Cars agreed that it looked pretty purposeful from a road-car point of view, so work began on what was to be a truly satisfying project.
When setting out the original specification for the LM, I kept the car as close to the ’95 GTR as I could, and the design team added only those pieces that were required for legal road use. The chassis of the car was exactly the same as the road car’s monocoque in construction except that we paid much closer attention to the fiber lay-up in the cockpit tunnel area and the general visual quality of the other exposed carbon parts. When I specified the interior of the original F1, I was trying for a functional, engineering-driven look without the overt statement of exposed carbon and other structural elements. So now we had an opportunity to really show what the F1 was made of.
The guys at Shalford (our composites facility) did a great job of laying up these areas, which were finished with several coats of lacquer. For the body panels we retained the lightweight GTR components with the exception of the additional "squinting" driving lamps on the hood on the Ueno Clinic car. The front body panel and aero splitter were pure GTR, with the enlarged radiator inlet ducts, large central brake-cooling duct and the GTR driver-cooling duct in the center of the nose. The flared wheel arches were also retained to cover the larger wheel and tire sizes, which could be carried over from the GTR. The remaining two ducts in the nose are the two small vertical slots on either side of the brake duct. On the GTR these ducts were designed to carry air down the full length of the two main structural beams in the cockpit to remove hot air from the feed and return water pipes, which ran through these sections. This airflow prevented heat buildup in the cockpit and helped engine-bay cooling as they exited into the lower engine-bay bulkhead area.
The door and mirror systems on the GTR had been carried over from the road car — convenience and luxury on a racing car! The mirrors were large and retained their remote electrical adjustment and heating, while the doors were still self-opening via their gas struts at the push of a button! These two systems helped enormously during the heat of battle. The luggage compartment doors were fixed with quick-release, racing-type fasteners to allow outside access and save weight, and the right-hand luggage door was home to an inlet duct for increased transmission oil cooling — this we retained for the LM. The non-opening plastic side windows and rear quarter lights with their air-extraction holes from the GTR were also used on the LM.
The interior of the LM is where we had the most fun. Exposing and lacquering much of the carbon structure meant that the interior had quite a different feel from the standard F1. We retained the racing seat for the driver and in the passenger-seat wells (there was no passenger seat substrate molding in the LM). The dashboard was a simpler design — more similar to the GTR’s with round air vents for occupant cooling, and I drew a special carbon instrument cluster. There was a secondary instrument panel to the right of the driver and the two main secondary instrument aluminum casings in the tunnels were devoid of the a/c and hi-fi controls. I had great fun designing a finely engineered handbrake lever and gear change — no expense spared! The steering wheel was from the race car, and a final touch was to ditch the road-car carpets in favor of a lightweight, technical material with the carbon-like repeat pattern of the F1 logo.
When we built the first GTR, I retained the original suspension geometry and therefore had to put up with compromised camber-change geometry when running lower ride heights. The LM ran more conventional ride heights and therefore better geometry. I decided to leave the solid, rubber-free suspension and engine mountings from the GTR in place on the LM. My reasoning was that the car would be so noisy from the cockpit anyway that it would be worth putting up with a little more harshness for the increase in transient handling performance. The GTR had stiffer machined aluminum wishbones and we carried these items over to the LM. The larger 18-in. wheels and tires were also carried over, although the LM wheels were special magnesium units with the center-locking hubs.
We conducted a short development program to choose a setup for the LM. The GTR was running natural frequencies, which would have been much too stiff for the road, so we ended up with spring and damper settings that were about halfway between the relatively soft road car and the very stiff race car. The LM also carried over the stiffer front anti-roll bar from the GTR.
The F1 road-car engine is a mighty thing — in my opinion, it is the best road-car engine ever made. The response time for rpm pick-up is almost unbelievable for a 6.0-liter V-12. This is mainly due to lightweight reciprocating components but also because the engine has no flywheel and a 3-kg carbon-carbon clutch assembly. The GTR engine was further improved with careful remapping by BMW Motorsport and a free-flow sports exhaust system. By raising the rpm limit to 8500, the race engine was even more spectacular. We carried this engine over to the LM and without the regulation air restrictors, the horsepower climbed from the F1’s 627 to 680 at 7800 rpm. Torque also increased by 8 percent, and this produced at lower rpm. So the LM engine is truly the heart of the car, and the noise it makes on wide-open throttle is enough to make anybody’s hair stand on end.
The transmission was also a simple program for the GTR. We changed the helical gears to straight-cut gears, increased the oil cooling and regained the synchromesh change mechanism. I had designed the road car’s gear-lever throw to be very short and the cross-gate angle was only 9 degrees, which made the gear change precise and therefore acceptable for racing.
On the original F1 road car, I was adamant that the car should be understated in styling and graphics, but with the LM we all thought we really had something to be proud of, and I went to town on the graphics! The LM and GTR logos appear in several places, including the instruments, steering wheel, fuel-filler flap, rear wing plates, rear grille and even on the specially made orange engine cam covers. I chose McLaren orange for all the LMs for a couple of reasons: First, our Formula 1 team’s colors largely followed sponsors’ colors, and, second, McLaren’s historic color was, of course, orange — the result was startling, to say the least.
One last technical point about the LM, which has a slight twist to it, is that the race car and therefore the LM have some of the more sophisticated features missing. The automatic brake cooling to the front and rear brakes on the standard F1 was dropped because the race car needed much more air for the brakes’ cooling — particularly for the carbon-carbon brakes. The plasma-sprayed metal leaf for electric glass heating and the 58-volt generator went missing for weight reduction. The sophisticated and complex reflex ground-effect underbody diffuser had to be substituted for the simpler racing regulation version. The automatic rear air brake was disallowed under the movable aerodynamic rule, as was the fan-assisted ground-effect underbody. So the LM is a much more basic car than the original F1. On the other hand, that had been my original intention.
I hope the F1 will have a place in automotive history, but the LM is even more special for me as it commemorates that wonderful win in 1995 and because it is a pure performance car with no concession to comfort or practicality — absolutely the opposite of the original F1. It is not really a variant of the F1, it is a different car, born for a different purpose. The LM will always remain valuable for another reason — its production volume. Just five cars were made to celebrate the five cars that finished Le Mans.
The final car after its development cycles weighed 2342 lb. — some 84 lb. lighter than the GTR that won Le Mans, so the performance is quite astonishing. The F1 LM remains today the only car I have ever driven that feels quicker on the road than an F1!
Designer Gordon Murray began his career in F1 with Brabham, which won the 1983 world championship. At McLaren, he worked on cars for Alain Prost and Aryton Senna. In the private sector, Murray produced the fabled McLaren F1.