1993 McLaren F1

The definition of a legendary supercar, McLaren’s F1 broke records and won minds as it waltzed into the history books. During the late 1980’s McLaren were dominating Formula 1 and chief designer Gordon Murray was as the top of his game. The decision was made to revive the original idea of a McLaren road car that founder Bruce McLaren had back in the 1960’s. To this end, Gordon Murray was pretty much given carte blanche to design the world’s best and fastest driver’s car and take on the likes of Ferrari and Porsche.

With the aim of being as light as possible, the F1 utilised plenty of carbon fibre and other lightweight composite materials and kept the size of the car to a minimum. In order to provide some level of functionality, three seats were installed with the driver’s seat positioned in a central location, and the other two on either side and set back into the cabin. The engine was a bespoke V12 unit supplied by BMW that developed over 600 hp and was mated to a McLaren-developed six speed manual gearbox. Freed from the constraints of the Formula 1 rule book, Gordon Murray fitted two electric fans to suck the car to the ground for a ground effect aero setup and utilised a small moveable wing on the rear of the car to high-speed stability.

The F1’s party piece was its top speed, breaking the record for a production vehicle at the time with a speed run of 221 mph (356 kph), a record which stood until the Bugatti Veyron came along in 2005. The F1 did improve on that top speed mark with a modified version with a speed of 240 mph, but the modifications were never made available from the factory.