THE ACCIDENTAL HERO

There was a fundamental but unscientific parameter amid and behind the cutting-edge technology of the McLaren F1 GT: would you want to drive it to the South of France? Right from his first sketch in 1988 to a ten-hour ‘happy clappy’ blue-sky session with the original engineering team, via three pages of handwritten notes to himself, at no stage had designer Gordon Murray envisioned making a 24-hour detour around Le Mans.

The creation of the world’s fastest road car – one that was also comfortable and, in supercar terms at least, practical – was his chance to get away from racing after 20 years spent as an innovative and successful force in Formula 1. ‘I had to forget about motorsport,’ says Murray. ‘But you can’t unlearn what you know. That’s not to say I designed a racing car. I didn’t. If I had, I would have given it much longer overhangs, a wider track and a better option of venturi shape.’ Well, of course.

‘So I wasn’t that interested when first approached about racing it,’ he continues. ‘Ron Dennis definitely wasn’t. It was the cars’ owners who made the decision for us. They planned to race it with or without our help and I was worried that they might make it unsafe, slow and unreliable.’

Which left Murray with a conundrum. ‘We had to fit a rollcage because the governing body wouldn’t accept the carbonfibre structure. That pissed me off: it was plenty strong enough. We fitted fire extinguishers, spent day in a wind tunnel and did