MCLAREN F1 GTR RESTORATION
Living history in the (re)making, Octane has been following the story of this factoryrestored Le Mans racer for over two years
the noise is almost indescribable. As the pale blue missile hurtles around the top of the test track banking, its snub nose seemingly aimed straight for the small group of spectators clustered behind the curving Armco, it’s emitting a loud, menacing drone eerily reminiscent of a big-engined World War Two fighter. Then it flashes past, and the sound instantly morphs to an ear-splitting howl as quad exhausts batter us with the storm und drang of a Le Mans-spec 6.0-litre V12, before its rapidly fading fury is overlaid by the whine of straightcut gears in a sequential manual ’box.
Temporarily half-deafened, we can only grin stupidly at each other. For the men from McLaren Special Operations, this final shakedown run is the culmination of two years’ hard work, restoring an F1 GTR Long Tail to the exact specification in which it competed in the 1997 Le Mans 24 Hours. Chassis #25R is the first F1 to have been completely restored inhouse and it’s the first F1 to be authenticated by McLaren’s new Certification Programme – of which there’s more in our news pages. This is a special moment, and a special car.
OF COURSE,
any F1 is special – it’s just that some are more special than others. Here’s how its creator Gordon Murray remembered the F1 for Octane back in 2007, when we gathered three GTR racing versions for a cover feature.
‘Beating the prototypes to win Le Mans in 1995 with a road car, synchromesh gearbox and all, remains one of my best memories. Winning that race, first time out, is in my opinion more difficult than winning back-to-back Formula 1 championships.’
Gordon was talking about the fairy-tale win for McLaren with a car that he had famously never intended to be used for racing. He deliberately designed the F1 only as a road car so that it would not be compromised and end up being neither fish nor fowl. However, as Gordon continued in our feature: ‘What I didn’t realise is that, because of my racing background, I subconsciously built all the good racing stuff into the design… so when we were bullied into turning our road car into a racing car by two very determined customers, we actually had very little to do.’
The result was that a minimally modified F1 took overall honours on McLaren’s first attempt at Le Mans – the only manufacturer ever to have
won, first time out. And now, 11 years later, we have another GTR on the front cover. This one, however, chassis #25R, is a ‘Long Tail’ F1. A full 25 inches longer than a regular GTR, the Long Tails were built for the 1997 racing season to remain competitive with the dastardly efforts of rival teams, who were taking what were, in effect, full-house racing cars and productionising them just enough to qualify as roadgoing cars for that year’s inaugural FIA GT series.
Chassis #25R raced at Le Mans that year, along with five other GTRs, but was forced to retire due to a fractured oil-cooler pipe, which led to an engine fire. The pipe failed, it was discovered afterwards, because it had been stressed by vibration due to solid mountings. Scarily, the oil-cooler pipe of the F1 GTR that finished second overall in 1997 – chassis #20R, which is displayed at McLaren’s Technology Centre – was also found to have incipient stress cracks and could have failed at any time…
Just to compete at Le Mans is an honour in itself and, what’s more, #25R did so in the iconic Gulf Oil colours of orange and blue, as one of three cars fielded that year by British team GTC Competition (it’s rumoured that the previous year’s dark-blue livery was discontinued because its metallic particles added too much weight). During its subsequent race career #25R wore various other liveries, but when the time came to restore the car there was never likely to be any argument about how it should be finished. Nor, indeed, about who should do the work.
IN 2016, McLaren started to look seriously at the heritage side of its business, under the umbrella of its Special Operations division. It had already rebuilt a couple of accident-damaged
F1 road cars – former Octane contributor Rowan Atkinson’s being the most famous example – but GTR #25R would become the first F1 to receive a total in-house restoration. Emanuele Collo, managing director of Kidston SA, explains how that came about.
‘Our company has sold a dozen F1s over the last decade, and Simon Kidston himself owns chassis #007, so we’re very familiar with the model, and we had recently appraised #25R on behalf of a client in the Far East, where the car had ended up after its racing career. It had not been used for several years, and the new owner
was unsure how far he should go in having it recommissioned.
‘So we asked McLaren themselves to check the car over and give us their verdict. We chose the factory for two reasons – partly out of romance, the appeal of taking it back to where it was made, but also because we know the team there and respect their abilities. Then, quite early on in this process, the car was sold to another client of ours in Europe, who shared our vision of exactly restoring it to a particular moment in time – to Le Mans in 1997, with all the correct little details such as the marker lights, and of course that distinctive Gulf livery.’
As delivered to McLaren in early 2016 for assessment, #25R was finished in plain white – just as it had been outshopped by the factory back in 1998, having been mechanically overhauled after the Le Mans fire with a rebuilt engine and refreshed transmission. It was sold in 1999 to Japanese race team Hitotsuyama, which regularly contested the Japan Grand Touring Championship with it until 2003, and briefly again in 2005, latterly in the yellow-and-orange livery of motorcycle clothing company Yellow Corn. It’s believed that #25R’s final race at Mount Fuji in 2005 was also the last time an F1 appeared in international motorsport.
Stripped down for inspection, #25R proved to be a typical old race car: a working tool that had been well-used, had earned a few battlescars, and had been patched up over the years as required. The underside of the central tub had numerous scrapes and gouges, a replacement ‘luggage locker’ door on the offside flank suggested a side impact at some point, and the wheelarches had been heavily peppered with circuit debris to the extent that in places there were patches over patches. But the tub was structurally sound, and the key question was to what lengths the restoration should be taken.
‘the front and rear clamshells had suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous racing’
IN NOVEMBER 2016, Octane paid a visit to GTR Composites down on the South Coast, to whom McLaren had entrusted the tub for repair. GTR has been a world-leader in composite construction since the 1990s and its technician Steve Larder is better qualified than anyone to work on an F1 – because Steve joined McLaren in 1991 to make F1 tubs, which he did through to the end of production in 1998. ‘These longtail cars were the hardest to make,’ recalled Steve,
‘because there was so much extra work to do at the back. In 1997 we were working 12-14-hour days, seven days a week for three months, to get those cars built.’
Chassis #25R’s floorpan had suffered a lot of knocks and scrapes underneath, but evidence of its replacement with a new panel would have been visible from inside the car. So, instead, Steve and his team bonded a thin sheet of carbonfibre over the underside for cosmetic purposes, using a pink polyester glue (3M’s product 9323, to be exact) as a kind of contact adhesive. ‘The tubs were assembled with DP490, which is also a 3M product, but it’s too heavy for this application, although it’s a form of the same glue, coloured pink rather than black,’ said Steve. ‘It takes about four hours to cure at room temperature, and then we put some heat lamps on it to post-cure it for a couple of hours, with weights applied to keep it flat.’
The front and rear clamshells, which comprise the majority of an F1 Long Tail’s exterior bodywork, had also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous racing. So the decision was taken to retain the original clamshells for potential road use, but prepare a second set of new/old-stock clams for the car to be displayed in racing trim. Race- and road-spec clamshells are different: when a GTR is converted for road use, the suspension pick-up points are altered to give a taller ride height; however, because this creates an ugly gap between the wheels and the wheelarches, the road-spec clamshells’ wheelarches are given ‘downward flares’ to compensate.
Externally, the original, now road-spec clams have been brought up to scratch cosmetically, but they’re not to the 100% concours level of the new/old-stock racing equivalents. Project leader for #25R’s restoration, Russell Hancox, explains that many of the body panels had been internally strengthened during repairs by ‘wet lay-up’ of additional carbonfibre: ‘We compared the original rear bumper with a new part from our stores, and it was almost twice the weight of the new one!’
Where body panels were replaced during the restoration, more than 80% were from McLaren’s stock of original parts, rather than being remanufactured. Finding those parts was often something of a challenge, however: McLaren Automotive’s rapid expansion in the 2000s, and a change in software many years ago for the parts inventory, meant that there was only a sketchy record of what was in the stores. ‘I’d often go to the warehouse, open a cardboard box and be amazed at what I’d find inside,’ admits Russell.
That upside of this situation was that Russell made some fantastic discoveries, not least the parts to totally rebuild #25R’s six-speed sequential gearbox with brand-new internals. ‘I’m not sure we could do it again, because there was only one example of certain parts, but we could always remanufacture them from the original drawings, which we still hold,’ he adds.
Rebuilding the engine was particularly challenging. As delivered from Japan, #25R was fitted with a replacement V12 that came as part of the deal. The original unit, the one that powered the car at Le Mans in 1997, was crated-up with a package of other spares, but its mechanical condition was unknown. Fortunately, BMW Motorsport came up trumps in helping to source scarce parts – scarce, because these engines were continually being developed for each season’s racing, and the result was a minefield of component variations.
This is true of GTR parts generally, and Russell recalls having to back-pedal through dozens of technical updates to ensure that something was the correct spec for June 1997, when Le Mans was held, rather than, say, July or August. He went to inordinate lengths to make
sure that every detail was correct. The roof-top identification lights used at Le Mans, for example, were not McLaren parts. They looked like aircraft wing-tip lights – and so they proved to be. Russell found the housings, made by a company called Whelan, at an aircraft surplus store in the USA. The correct blue lenses came from another American warehouse, while the Kamei golf-ball gearknob was found on that great resource of car restorers everywhere, eBay.
The online auction site was also responsible for an amazing reunion between some of the original GTC race team and the restored #25R. ‘Russ [Hancox] was searching for a copy of the 1997 book published by the ACO on that year’s Le Mans, which we knew would contain team photos of #25R,’ explains Thomas Reinhold, manager of McLaren Heritage. ‘He found one on eBay – and the person selling it was Michael Cane, GTC’s team leader in 1997! We invited him and two of the team’s race mechanics to visit the Technology Centre to see #25R under restoration – and so that we could pick their brains about some of the details. It was an emotional moment, especially when they heard the car fire up.’
ON A BLESSEDLY DRY
November day at Millbrook proving ground, where #25R is making its second appearance for testing and fine-tuning since the restoration was finished, emotions are running high, too. Russell Hancox was up until midnight the day before, wrapping the exquisitely finished bodywork (painted inhouse by Special Ops’ Mike Fuller) in protective blue tape to guard against stonechips during
‘The roof-Top idenTificaTion lighTs were found aT aircrafT surplus sTores in The usa’
today’s session. At the wheel will be Pani Tsouris, a senior F1 technician with more than 14 years’ experience of the model.
Word to the wise: if you’re anywhere near a McLaren F1 GTR when it fires up, stick your fingers in your ears first. The noise is shockingly loud: a race-car chainsaw rasp, not in the slightest bit musical but hugely impressive in its raw intent. As Pani eases the car away for some action photography, we can hear the skirr-skirrskirr of the gearbox competing with, and then dominating, the exhaust note; Pani is having to keep the revs low while he tracks alongside the camera car, conscious that this no-compromise racer relies on constant airflow to keep its engine cool. Fans add complexity and weight, y’see.
Later, Pani confesses that #25R isn’t easy to drive at low speeds with its Le Mans-spec engine mapping. ‘Because this car has been restored to
exact 1997 Le Mans specification, everything has been set-up precisely as it was for the race – the gearing, the fuelling, the steering lock, the ride height… And the ’97 cars were hugely different from the 1995/96 versions, which were basically road cars with a few tweaks. Normally we’d re-map a GTR to make it more driveable on the road, but this one is just as it was on the grid in June 1997.’
And how do you map those 1990s electrical systems? Why, with a 1990s Compaq LTE 5400 laptop, of course. All 32MB RAM of it, complete with floppy disk drive. McLaren has half-a-dozen of them and it’s fortunate in being able to call upon the services of the ex-TAG-McLaren computer engineer who wrote the original programs. The continued serviceability of these venerable computers is something that will have to be addressed before too long, but a solution will most definitely be found, for it is a problem that affects every 1990s race car manufacturer, not just McLaren.
Meanwhile, F1 Long Tail #25R is in perfect working order, and ready to be handed over by Kidston SA to its patient owner. It is, quite simply, an automotive jewel. ‘The fit and finish really are above-and-beyond,’ sums up Tom Reinhold. ‘But we are McLaren, and we are Special Operations. It’s what we do.’