A lot of people here are familiar with my passion and knowledge surrounding the McLaren F1. I know a lot of people love the car, but not many take it to the extreme that I have over the past few years. Some of you are used to my posts in the threads mentioning McLarens that are chocked full of information that only a stalker would know.
This passion for the F1 gets me noticed from time to time. I have a lot of people email me to ask questions about the F1, and I do the same when I find someone that appears to have had an F1 encounter or knows a piece of the story that I don't.
Back in May I was contacted by a gentleman named Scott who had questions about a few different F1s. He claimed that he was trying to help a friend track down an F1 to buy. While that was a rare twist to the usual story I hear, I am always happy to share what I know with those who are interested. I gave him the info I had, and we probably exchanged a total of 6 or 7 emails - then I didn't hear from him again until the second week of this month.
He wrote again to ask if I was planning to be in Monterey for the Pebble Beach weekend. I explained that while I've always wanted to go, I never make plans early enough to attend. I figured that he was just hoping to meet up with me and talk more about the cars.
His response honestly floored me. He told me that he and his friend would be there in a silver McLaren F1 - chassis #068 - and that if I made it up there he would take me for a ride in the car.
I changed my tune on the reply that followed - I wasn't planning to miss the opportunity to see an F1, much less possibly get a ride in one. Of course I was still reeling from the shock of that offer. I told him I would be honored just to sit in the car, but that a ride would be awesome!
I knew who the current owner was of #068 - Frank Selldorff for those who are familiar - and Scott confirmed that Frank had recently sold the car to his friend Richard. The car had been in storage at the BMW Port in New Jersey for the past two years, and was being readied for transport across the country to Monterey for that weekend.
In talking with Mr Selldorff in the past, I knew that #068 still sat with just it's delivery miles on it of somewhere under 200 after being built way back in 1997. He had purchased the car in 2002 only to find there was no easy way of importing a McLaren F1 built after 1995 to the USA because the car would be required to meet OBD-II standards enacted by the EPA in 1996. Still wanting to own an F1 he could drive, Frank bought another one that was built in 1994 - chassis #007, but had held onto #068 all this time. While he had it, he contracted a company to begin the process of converting #068 to meet those new EPAs standards, something no one else had ever done. Although that process was eventually completed in mid 2003, he never took the car out of storage, and never drove it.
Richard ended up finding out about #068 through McLaren Cars, who knew the car was being stored in New Jersey. The BMW Port in Mount Laurel houses the East coast's Official McLaren F1 Service Facility with a trained staff of mechanics to work on the cars. The other unique attribute of this particular F1 is that none of it's three previous owners had ever registered the car, so technically this is almost a new car 7 years after being built. Richard bought the car, had it serviced by the team in NJ and then planned to put it on a transporter headed for Pebble Beach. What a wonderful place to take the wraps off your F1 really.
Scott sent me a photo of the car in an email that followed - probably to prove that he wasn't pulling my leg and we kept in regular contact over the next week to be sure that the car was going to make it, and plan to meet up in Monterey based on their schedule. At this point I think I was giddy with anticipation.
Initially the plan was to meet up with Scott, Richard and the F1 at Laguna Seca in the early morning on Saturday, so I got there at about 8AM. They were running late, and ultimately ended up heading to the Pebble Beach Concours instead, leaving me to take in all the sights of the Historics. I don't know all the old cars, but I know enough to get by and there was plenty to look at. I took over 250 photos in and around the paddock and at various displays. I found Jay Leno in the pit area and chatted with him for a bit. I also found an F1 GTR t-shirt in the vendor area that I have never seen before and bought that.
It was about 11AM at this point and I was taking shots of a dark grey Ferrari Enzo in one of the paddock spots when I heard a young kid about 10 feet away say "Well the McLaren was blue." I headed over to him and said "Did you say that you saw a blue McLaren?" knowing that he was most certainly referring to XP4 (one of the 5 McLaren F1 prototypes), and he said yeah. I asked him where it was thinking that he had probably seen it the day before at the Concorso Italiano or something. Instead he tells me that it is here at Laguna Seca in a BMW parking section across the track. He said it was really far away, and I assured him that I would walk pretty darn far to see a McLaren F1, so it was no problem.
I had actually missed seeing this very same F1 the previous weekend down in Laguna Beach at a weekly car show called Crystal Cove, so it was really spectacular to find it there in Monterey. This F1's owner, Larry Blair, is local to the Bay Area and I knew that the probability is high that he would be at an event like that, but I was surprised to hear he would leave it in a BMW parking area. It turned out to be inside of a special section that was fenced off and only open to BMW and Porsche Car Club Members. It took a minute of convincing at the gate since I am not a member of either club, but I got in and was able to get up close to XP4 and take some great photos. I also spent about 45 mins answering various people's questions on the car - eventually the guy who had let me in the gate came over and said "Well I guess I let the right guy in, didn't I?"
It was at this point that I bumped into Lorin - aka: OmniFocus - who I shared this very same incredible story with. I still wasn't sure how it was going to play out at this point, but it was cool to have someone to talk to that knows first hand how nuts I am about these cars.
Around 1pm Scott called to tell me they were headed from their hotel to the track and would be there soon. He was apologizing for the change of schedule, but honestly I had a wonderful morning. I got to see an unexpected F1 (one of my favorites), I met Jay Leno and chatted with him about his F1, I found a very cool F1 GTR shirt, and to top it all off, and I saw a ton of amazing cars in the paddock and parking area. I was so glad to be there regardless of the delay with #068. It's not like I could ever complain when they were being so generous.
About 40 minutes later I met up with Scott and Richard in the paddock. I figured that they wouldn't let a car like the F1 out of their sight, but Scott informed me they had parked it up on the hill and he got the keys from Richard so that he and I could go and have a look at it. The car had a small swarm of people around it when we got there, one of which was a police officer so he and I hung back a bit to see what might be happening. The officer was there like everyone else it seemed - just wanting to look at the car. We moved in and shocked the whole group when the doors were opened. Scott told them he had found the keys somewhere...
I looked the car over for a while and it really is beautiful, inside and out. The one strange thing you will notice from the photos is that it has an odd wheel nut on it at all four corners. They have a loop that sticks out from them which is used to fasten the car down for transport. Unfortunately the car's full rolling tool kit wasn't sent to Monterey with the car, so they weren't able to remove these and put the normal ones on yet. They tried using the wheel nut wrench included with the car under the left side luggage compartment, but they are simply on too tight and the tool doesn't give enough leverage.
Scott offered for me to sit in the car which is where that photo at the start of the thread came from. The driver's seat fits like a glove - there is no other word. You really can't get a feel for just how compact the F1 is until you get in the car. It's by no means cramped, but there is just enough space and you feel like the car and all the controls are just an extension of you. The pedal box is a little tight - I had on a pair of Skechers tennis shoes and they were just a bit too wide for getting around the clutch and onto the dead pedal. The other pedals were fine. I didn't have to worry either way though, as I wasn't going to be driving...
It was at this point that Scott said he would be willing to take my car back to their hotel so that I could ride in the F1 from the track to the hotel before they headed off to the auction in the late afternoon. I felt bad because my Focus has about a 3rd the amount of power that Scott is used to, but he actually said later that he enjoyed my car. You'll see it in some of the last few pictures with the F1.
I walked Scott up to my car and then headed across the paddock again to meet Richard where I thought he would be. We had told him about XP4 being there and he was supposedly going to look at it when we left him. By the time I called him to see where he was at I was almost to XP4, but he was still in the paddock watching one of the races with friends so I told him I would meet up with him when he was done. I decided that I would go stand gaurd at #068 and answer any questions that people had about the car like I had done earlier with XP4.
About 10 minutes after I got there some Raceway staff showed up on a golf cart and were asking if anyone knew the owner of the car. They were saying it was parked illegally in a handicap zone.
I called Richard again and he came running (almost) to move the car. It was at this point that I got my first ride in the right passenger seat on our way into the paddock. There were three check points along the way from where it was parked to where we needed to go. Normal cars would have been stopped at each one to be sure they had proper access, but in a McLaren they just waive you on through.
When we got to the paddock Richard invited me up onto the observation deck of a friends semi-truck transporter to watch the finish of the Historic race that was running. They had a perfect spot against the fence in turn four I believe and the birds eye view was wonderful. Down below another swarm was engulfing the McLaren F1. In a crowd like that, the car gets no shortage of attention as I am sure you can all imagine. We were up there for about 10 more minutes and then needed to leave so they would make it to the auctions on time.
This is where the story gets kind of comical. Richard was planning to give me and a friend a ride back to their hotel in the F1, but one of the ladies they were with had a bad ankle and wasn't going to be able to walk back to the rest of their cars in the parking lot. To solve this problem, Richard's friend got into the right passenger seat and she somehow managed to sit on his lap - they even got the door to close. Richard climbed into the driver's seat and I took the left side passenger seat, possibly making for the first 4-passenger McLaren F1 ride ever. We were only going a few hundred yards, but it was still very funny.
After we dropped her off we left the track and headed into Monterey. The drive was probably less than 10 miles, and there was a noticeable amount of traffic, but it doesn't take a very large section of road for the F1 to be able to stretch it's legs a bit before being hauled back in by the Brembos. I took some videos of the rides with my digital camera, and except for my voice chatting with Richard and his friend along the way, they turned out really well. I say "ummm" way to much, but I think that my brain was having trouble comprehending the whole experience at the time.
The ride was as Tiff Needel said - "sensational!" - the car is exactly what I was expecting. It is very docile when you aren't trying to extract all-out perofrmance from it just like the stories tell. The engine does indeed pull in 6th gear from very low RPMs. It also spins the tires profusely in 1st gear. The three seats are comfortable and hold you in place quite well - the side seats kind of coddle you. The view from the passenger seats is slightly less amazing than what the driver has, but you still have a great view of everything on the horizon. The view out the back as a passenger is fairly impossible. Incidentally, as you will see from one of my photos, the car had just over 400 miles on it when I got my ride to the hotel - barely broken in yet!
When we got to the hotel I spent some time outside going over the car again. He was showing his friend the owners manual and service manual among other things. He opened the front comparment and showed me the on-board tool kit. Those spanners are incredibly lightweight - you wouldn't believe it - they feel like they would snap in two if you tried to use them. Richard and Scott went inside and I stood with the car a bit longer in the parking lot. A family from Washington had come by and the father knew a bit about the car. I gave another 20 minute question and answer session before heading off. If you have any questions already after absorbing all of my story, let me know.
= = = = = =
I'd also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank both Scott and Richard for extending an extreme amount of generosity to me Saturday and ensuring that I had an amazing experience with the F1 at their expense effectively. Scott was only at the Historics for about an hour or so and spent most of that time walking around and talking with me. I'm sure in a place like that with his automotive interests he could have found other things to do. Instead, he made me the priority and that was certainly beyond what I would have ever expected. Richard was a wonderful person too and it was a pleasure to meet both of them - not just because they had an F1 either. They were both genuinely good people who conspired to give me the experience of a lifetime - one I will never forget. Thank you gentlemen - I was truly honored!
Thanks for reading all of that if you did. If you care to see the rest of my images, you can follow these links to my Flickr albums:
McLaren F1 #068
McLaren F1 'XP4'
>8^)
ER
