F1 UPGRADES
MCLAREN F1 GTR THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY
Author Mark Cole
Price £450
The McLaren F1 was never conceived as a race car – as noted in this month’s Now That Was A Car (p72) it was essentially a vanity project, greenlit to keep innovative engineer Gordon Murray in the McLaren fold. But a handful of early customers, including pharmaceutical entrepreneur and amateur racer Ray Bellm, saw its potential for racing in the new GT series which grew up in the early 1990s in the wake of the world sportscar championship’s demise. Still McLaren and Murray held off, only to acquiesce when Bellm threatened to take his road car to an independent specialist for conversion.
This large and lavishly illustrated work, presented in two volumes in a slip case, is an exhaustive history of the McLaren F1 and its racing derivatives, with a preface from Murray and opening chapters setting the context with histories of McLaren as well as the sportscar scene at the time. Murray expected to sell at best two or three F1 GTRs but ended up building 28 examples
