McLaren F1: full test of world's greatest supercar

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"What you are about to read is not simply the fastest road test in history. It is, in all likelihood, the fastest road test there will ever be.

"Until we strapped our equipment to the McLaren F1 no one knew how fast it would go. Now we know it all, because we have driven it beyond 210mph, timed it to the last hundredth of a second. And here it stops.

Find a strip of Tarmac long enough and it will power you to 230mph – and beyond
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

"McLaren will never release another of its amazing £540,000 supercars for road testing to anyone, anywhere in the world."

Those were the words that introduced Autocar's review of the McLaren F1 in 1994. To this day, it remains the definitive road test of the most iconic British supercar of all time. 

It was such a hammer blow that it took McLaren 21 years to produce a supercar capable of coming close to the F1.

In May 1994 we took the fifth McLaren prototype, codenamed XP5, to two proving grounds – Millbrook and Bruntingthorpe – to attempt to generate a full set of performance figures. That same car was driven, four years later, by Andy Wallace at Ehra-Lessien in Germany to record a world record-breaking 243mph.

Here, we republish that original Autocar road test from May 1994. It must be noted that the F1 was superceded by the limited-run hybrid P1 and lost its performance title to firstly the Bugatti Veyron, then Bugatti Chiron and recently the Lotus Evija. 

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DESIGN & STYLING

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McLaren F1 dihedral doors

The McLaren F1 was powered by a 6.1-litre, four-cam, 48-valve 60deg V12 engine, designed and built by BMW Motorsport. It produced 627bhp at 7400rpm and more than 479lb ft of torque all the way from 4000 to 7000rpm. This combined with the F1’s 1138kg kerb weight that gave a power-to-weight ratio of 550bhp per tonne.

Unlike any other production road car (save Gordon Murray’s other baby, the Light Car Company’s Rocket), the F1 had a central driving position. You sat far forward in the car with a passenger seat on either side and some distance behind. Luggage was carried in two carpeted compartments, one on either side of the car, behind the passenger seats.

McLaren will paint an F1 in any shade a customer desires. Standard colours include Magnesium (silver), International (grey), Silverstone (green), Grand Prix (red), Black 235 and carbon
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

The dihedral doors flipped upwards rather than outwards and as you took your position behind the wheel you could see that you are sitting in a carbonfibre channel to remind you that the car’s composite construction was unique among road cars. 

As you would see from the performance statistics, it had no real rival.

A £238,000 Bugatti EB110 GT was a fine car and less than half the price of the McLaren, but it would not even allow you a glimpse at the world of the F1. Spending £403,000 on a Jaguar XJ220 bought performance that was monstrous.

But you could drive one for a year and never know what it was like to visit the places the £540,000 McLaren would take you on the slightest piece of straight open road. 

Each F1 took three and a half months to build; large luxury saloons could be mass-produced in little more than a day.

Thanks to its carbonfibre construction, it possessed a sense of indomitable strength and McLaren had also paid much attention to the all-important details such as the way the doors closed, the stitching of the leather and the exorcism of all rough edges. 

The exterior paintwork was as good as it ought to be given the car’s price. The quality of the carpeting and leather trim set similarly high standards.

The F1’s safety came from its almost unparalleled ability to get out of trouble before it took its toll, surrounding you at the same time with a Formula 1-style carbonfibre safety shell and a four-point harness.

Fashionable modern safety features such as airbags were unavailable.

INTERIOR

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McLaren F1 dashboard

There was the stuff of genius in this cabin, no question about it. The McLaren F1 had a driving position, for instance, that was without rival. For a start, those over 6ft would find driving a Bugatti or XJ220 largely a matter of contortion, whereas the F1 would come as revelation. 

All heights up to 6ft 4in could fit perfectly, with ample head and legroom. Because the driving position was central, there was no pedal offset, no wheelarch to negotiate. And the positioning of the pedals, the rake of the steering wheel and its location relative to the gear lever were as close to perfection you would find. 

Luggage is stowed in side compartments in front of rear wheels. Space is generous by supercar standards, and custom-made leather suitcases make the most of it
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

The pedals and wheel position could be adjusted, but only by the factory who would tailor the car to its driver before delivery. Thereafter, apart from fore/aft seat travel, the driving position was fixed.

But for one reservation, the F1’s cabin ergonomics worked well. The instruments, beautiful, clear and individual, were a delight; a change-up light in the rev counter that flickered on at 7500rpm was especially pleasing. That instrument sat in front of you with the smaller, 240mph speedometer displaced to your right. 

In the left-hand cluster were dials for fuel level, water and oil temperature but, oddly, not oil pressure. This was regarded as information that was only required if there was a problem and was dealt with, like all other fault-finding functions, via a warning light and an LCD readout. 

Our reservation concerned the minor controls, laid out in banks either side of your legs. They dealt predominately with the modest air conditioning and incredible Kenwood CD player. These switches were too far from your line of sight for comfort. 

Rearward visibility was also a problem. Two interior mirrors provided some but ultimately insufficient detail of what was directly behind the car, while the usefulness of the exterior mirrors was compromised by the A-pillar, which cut off much of the view they would otherwise have given.

Worse, if you had tall passengers on board, the interior mirrors were close to useless. Reversing the F1 without external guidance could be a heart-in-mouth affair. 

The McLaren would sit three in comfort while swallowing enough luggage that made the eyes of a driver of the physically larger F40, XJ220 or Bugatti pop out. Because you rarely travelled three-up anyway, the spare seat became useful auxiliary stowage space.

In packaging terms, it was an utter triumph. That said, there were some problems. The driver could not close the doors without undoing the four-point safety harness and those of a fuller frame would find getting in and out neither easy nor dignified.

Heat soak from the engine warmed your luggage and, to a lesser extent, your passengers as they sat alongside you in their surprisingly comfortable seats.

The driver, sitting forward in one of the most supportive and just plain comfortable seats we had come across, remained cool. 

The McLaren was not an especially quiet car at motorway speeds. Surprisingly, perhaps, the engine was the least dominant sound source in the cabin, with wind and tyres vying for that title.

What’s more, the driver heard a lot less than the passengers, for whom the noise on a long motorway haul would eventually become a little tiresome. 

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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McLaren F1 getting air

To drive the McLaren F1 safely on British roads, with consideration to other road users, required considerable mental discipline.

You had to accept that, save on empty autobahns, there was no way you could sample the F1’s performance potential safely and legally on a public highway. The truth was that, even for drivers of exceptional experience and skill, driving the McLaren fast in public was an exercise in restraint. 

Engine produces 627bhp and 479lb ft of torque with the roar of a Le Mans racer, yet it is docile enough to perform sweetly for the most inexperienced of drivers.
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

For this was a car that could exit a curve at 60mph onto a straight and, just 11.4sec later, be travelling at 160mph. This was a car that could accelerate from 100 to 200mph considerably faster than most quick cars could reach 100mph from a standstill. This was a car which, unless driven with a cool head, could land you in greater trouble than you could imagine. 

Happily, though, it was both simple and enjoyable to drive slowly. The engine, despite having a specific output of 103bhp per litre, the highest of any normally aspirated production engine, used its capacity and variable valve timing to summon huge chunks of torque from idle onwards.

The clutch was a little lighter that you’d expect given the power it had to transmit. The engine had no flywheel so the revs didn't so much fall as vanish when you lifted your right foot, but so swift was the six-speed gearbox that changing gear smoothly was simple.

Threading your way through town, the F1 seemed almost sedate. Behind you the V12 whirred softly to itself, you adapted to the central driving position without thinking about it and, thanks to the F1 being no wider than a Toyota Supra, gaps were easy to negotiate.

Once you reached the city limits, you'd slot the lever into sixth and you spend hours wandering around the lanes at 60mph and 2000rpm. But this was not what the F1 was for. 

We used two proving grounds for this test: first there was our usual visit to Millbrook in Bedfordshire to exploit the superb grippy surface that all our test cars enjoyed, then we left for the Bruntingthorpe test track in Leicestershire with its two-mile runway to record the performance figures that, of all production cars in the history of the motor car, only the F1 could have produced. 

Starting a world record breaking acceleration run in an F1 was easier than you’d think. There were cars with considerably less than half the F1’s power that would prove trickier.

Because the engine had no turbos, just good old fashioned cubic capacity with an icing of high-tech variable valve timing, instant and reliable torque was available everywhere. You just called up about 2500rpm on the large, central rev counter and gently fed in the clutch.

If you got it right, your brain would be too preoccupied with keeping the rear tyres on the edge of wheelspin and the bark coming through the rear bulkhead to appreciate just how fast you were travelling. You needed to be quick with the six-speed gearbox to hook second before the engine slammed into its 7500rpm limiter.

But even before your left foot touched the clutch, you’d be doing more than 60mph, just 3.2sec from rest.

And only now would you start to appreciate how fast this car was because, until now, you’d only been using part throttle. How fast? So fast that it was actually uncomfortable on first acquaintance. As the car shot forward, the acceleration penetrated right through to your deepest internal organs. In second gear, the F1 added 10mph per each half second.

You’d pass 100mph in third, having been mobile for 6.3sec. The second-fastest car we had tested, Jaguar’s XJ220, asked for 7.9sec for the same measure. And still the McLaren was not in its stride. 

It did 0-120mph in 9.2sec, a decent enough 0-60mph time for a hot hatch. It could reach 150mph from rest quicker than a then new Porsche 911 could reach 100mph. But the statistic to end them all was this: in sixth gear, it could cover 180-200mph in 7.6sec. A Ferrari 512 TR needed longer to do 50-70mph in fifth. 

Even at 200mph the F1, as sure and stable as it was at 100mph, accelerated hard. Had we enough Tarmac, we had no doubt that it would finally stop accelerating at its rev limiter in top which, taking tyre growth into account, would be somewhere the far side of 230mph.

A prototype with only about 580bhp achieved 231mph – and that was on a banked circuit in 40deg C heat, both of which would serve to blunt its potential. 

Its in-gear performance was similarly stupefying. How about 60-80mph in second in 1.2sec, or 90-110mph in third in just 1.7sec? Or the fact that every single 20mph increment between 30mph and 130mph in fourth was dispatched within a tenth of 2.2sec? It didn't slow much in fifth either, every increment between 30mph and 160mph taking 3.0sec flat or less.

But it was sixth, geared to allow the car to reach beyond 230mph, that stretched belief beyond breaking point.

Our standard measure for top gear flexibility, aimed at cars with maximum speeds of about half the McLaren’s, was 50-70mph. The F1 covered the ground in 3.7sec, blitzing the next fastest production car we had tested (the TVR Griffith 500) by 1.7sec. 

For its flexibility, throttle response and power alone, this V12 would probably wrest the title of world’s best engine from the Ferrari 512 TR. But the sound it made put that issue beyond doubt. Smooth, subtle and, above all, quiet when you want it to be, the F1 gave everything you had ever wanted from an engine note when the throttle is opened wide. 

Full throttle at 60mph in sixth produced a noise closer to that of the Mustang in Bullitt, only louder. It was a growling crackle that bored into your brain at just the glorious side of painful.

Drop four gears and repeat the exercise and only those who had seen the film Le Mans or were present at endurance races in the early 70s would have any inkling of the complexity and savagery of its utterly pure V12 howl. It was the finest noise any of us had ever heard from a production road car. 

If there was room to carp in this section, the F1’s ultra-quick gearbox attracted mild criticism from some who drove it. No one argued about the ratios which, apart from the necessarily long sixth, were stacked as close as you could wish, but many felt that a touch more weight and a shade less travel in the admittedly short-throw lever would have been more in keeping with the F1’s character. 

One tester also observed that, for the money, a sequential box could be expected; others preferred the convenience of skipping gears that a conventional gate and the monster torque allowed. 

At a more mundane level, reverse proved unusually tricky and frequently impossible to engage without several attempts, although slotting briefly into second gear before attempting reverse did improve the situation.

We had no issues with the McLaren’s ultimate stopping power though even its huge ventilated discs and four-pot monobloc callipers had their work cut out reining in its power.

But despite McLaren’s best efforts, we would have liked more feel through the pedal, which only bit hard if you treaded hard. And you need to because, with no servo, even mild deceleration required twice the pedal effort of a conventional car. 

And while we admired the aims behind omitting power assistance and anti-lock brakes from the specification – weight reduction and feel retention – we think for a road car of this potential, the F1 would have gained more from their presence than their deletion.

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RIDE & HANDLING

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McLaren F1 hard cornering

The McLaren F1 delivered headlines as you would have expected from any top-line supercar. Double wishbones at each corner, anti-roll bars at each end and fat tyres on each wheel – unidirectional, custom-made Goodyear 235/45 section rubber at the front and 315/45s behind, in this case.

Each of the front suspension units had its own subframe mounted to the body via compliant bushes that were 25 times stiffer radially than axially, allowing considerable longitudinal wheel compliance to aid ride quality with no loss of stability to adversly affect handling. 

Central driving position inspires complete confidence
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

At the rear, the lower wishbones were mounted to the gearbox, itself mounted compliantly to the body, and all suspension forces were fed through the engine/gearbox assembly to the central core of the car. There was no traction control, nor was there any assistance for the rack and pinion steering which nevertheless retained a swift 2.8 turns across its acceptably tight lock. 

Another crucial facet of the F1’s handling was its central driving position. As we discovered, this forced compromises in other areas but, from a purely dynamic point of view, it made all symmetric cars appear flawed.

The knowledge that, regardless of which way the corner turned, the apex would always be the same relative distance from you, the driver, was hugely reassuring. You found yourself placing the F1 to within inches of the apex without the slightest fear of accidentally banging a wheel rim. 

The car’s ultra-compact dimensions (small enough to make an XJ220 seem elephantine) and the splendid forward visibility afforded by the central driving position were the final raw ingredients. 

If we told you that the F1 handled as well as it goes, you would have a good idea of the esteem in which we held this car’s chassis. The first words from the lips of all who drove it spoke of accessibility, how mere mortals could climb into this machine for the very first time and drive it hard despite its power, despite its price. 

Although it was firmly sprung, there was body roll through corners but, as you sat in line with the roll-centre, you scarcely felt any of it. The steering, which loaded up dramatically and undesirably with lock at urban crawl speeds, came alive on proper roads. 

Grip through slow corners was not limitless, allowing you to spot a safe, open road ahead, turn towards the apex with just a whiff of understeer detectable through the steering and power slide this half-million pound car away from the apex with the abandon you might feel safe to exhibit in a small sports car that was perhaps 30 times cheaper. 

Four factors combined to create this extraordinary state of affairs. First there was the steering: quick, lucid and as successful an example of kick-back elimination while retaining feel as we’d experienced. Next was the on-limit behaviour.

If you wanted you could exploit the F1’s traction or you could tread a little harder, feel the tail start to move, replicate that movement with the steering for as long as your right foot dictated and watch while it straightend and streaked up the road ahead. 

In the dry, there was no trace of malice in this chassis. In the wet, the tail, predictably, moved more swiftly, but so long as you were prepared to match that speed, the F1 would remain faithful. 

The third and fourth factors were what really split the F1 from the likes of the Ferrari F40, Bugatti EB110 and, particularly, the XJ220. It was compact, allowing you to exploit its performance on many more roads than the others. But, crucially, it was powered by a large capacity, naturally aspirated engine, not a small, turbo unit. 

Hence throttle response was not only immediate, but also reliable. You got what you asked for when you squeezed the accelerator, something which, with the best will in the world, you could not say about the aforementioned supercars. 

In faster bends, the F1 did the only thing a sane person could hope for on the public road. It gripped. It went beyond merely rounding curves accurately at high speed; whatever you threw at it, from an off-camber corner on a crest to a sequence of left-right sweeps creating ever-increasing g-force transference, it simply did what its told, displaying a level of adhesion we had never come close to broaching anywhere but on track. 

In our experience, only the XJ220 approacheed such levels of gilt-edged grip and security in its body control over the most challenging roads this country had to offer. 

The F1 was firmly sprung but, thanks in the main to the way it allowed longitudinal wheel movements to absorb the shock of country road lumps, its ride quality in such conditions was wonderous. 

It felt less composed on the motorway, however. It had a slightly jittery attitude to coarse and especially concrete surfaces which, while never much more than an increase in feel through the steering, contrived to be wearing after a couple of hundred miles. 

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MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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McLaren F1 1992-1998

The McLaren F1 had a fuel tank which took 90 litres of 98 octane super-unleaded and, depending on whether you thrashed the car hard across moorland roads or gently trundled down the motorway in sixth, it would return anywhere between 9mpg and 23mpg. 

We did quite a lot of both, resulting in an overall test consumption of 15.2mpg, which we geared as an excellent result for a car of the McLaren’s performance. It was achieved through the efficiency of the engine, the lightness of the car and a drag coefficient of just 0.32.

BMW dealers equipped to service M-cars will be able to perform routine servicing of the F1
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

Using our touring route return of 23.4mpg as a guide, it could put more than 450 miles between tanks. 

What car can cost £540,000 and still represent good value? One built to the highest technological standards from the strongest materials such as carbonfibre and titanium? One that burned one and a half man years in labour alone in the course of construction?

Or one where a vast number of parts, not simply the chassis, engine, and gearbox, but even such items as the CD player and air conditioning components, were specifically built for this car, setting new standards in lightness and compactness on the way? All these things the F1 had. 

Certainly its value did not stem from its equipment level which, while including all the usuals like leather and air conditioning, electric windows and mirrors, also provided a titanium Facom tool kit on board, a fully equipped garage tool kit, a set of fitted luggage (with golf bag, which fits into a passenger seat), a car cover and magnesium alloy wheels.

All these together still accounted for a small slice of £540,000. No: if this car was good value, it stemmed from its ability to provide the ultimate in dynamic performance. 

VERDICT

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5 star McLaren F1

The McLaren F1 was the finest driving machine built for the public road. It possessed more performance than most of the cars racing at Le Mans in 1994, but that was almost a side issue compared with its real achievement: that of containing such performance within a car that was without guile. A car that always inspired, and never intimidated the driver. 

Yes, it had too much performance for most public road situations but, paradoxically, it was this excess that actually provided the F1 with justification. 

In the event of an emergency and failure of the on-board modem to link to the Woking factory, McLaren will immediately dispatch a mechanic, by plane if necessary
Andrew Frankel
Senior contributing writer

The F1 was a car which, no matter how often you drove it, no matter how skilled you were, would always be capable of showing you something undiscovered, something you didn’t believe a road car could manage.

We were also convinced that the F1 would be remembered as one of the great events in the history of the car, one to rival the launch of the Mini and Jaguar E-type.

What we were looking at here was very possibly the fastest production road car the world had ever seen, a walking, talking piece of history. But £540,000? If we had the money, we’d have formed a queue.