A long tAle in the mAking
The first McLaren Long Tail was the 1997 F1 GTR, but there have been several generations since. Mark Dixon charts the history of the models bearing this coveted moniker
dieting can be hard work but the effort can sometimes make a lot of financial sense. If you order the optional Clubsport Pack for the new McLaren 600LT – seen happily destroying a set of rear tyres in the photo opposite – it will cost you an additional £24,170 on top of the car’s list price of £185,000, and it will save you a princely 9.3kg in weight. That’s just under 1½ stone. A Weight Watchers programme, on the other hand, typically runs at about £20-30 per month; stick at it and you’ll make the same saving in, let’s say, three months. As our American friends say, you do the math.
Then again, no-one buys a supercar to be sensible, and it has to be said that the 600LT actually looks rather good value when you compare it with McLaren’s slightly earlier 2018 release, the Senna – £185,000 versus £750,000, although both figures zoom skywards by the time you’ve penned a few ticks on the options list. And, by McLaren logic, the 600LT actually has a closer link with the seminal F1 GTR Long Tail you’ve just been reading about. The clue is in the name: no prizes for guessing what ‘LT’ stands for. The 600LT is the fourth iteration of the Long Tail story, says McLaren, and there’ll shortly be a fifth – in appearance, if not name.
As recounted in the previous pages, the F1 GTR Long Tail was a 1997 creation, spawned as an urgent attempt to keep the F1 competitive in GT racing. The Long Tails were the final evolution of the F1 GTR and ten examples were built, chassis #19R through to #28R. Although never quite reprising the original F1 GTR’s stunning victory at Le Mans in 1995, the Long Tails were successful in their own right, chassis #20R and #26R finishing second and third respectively in the 1997 event, and other cars placing well in various GT series.
Towards the end of F1 production, the regular short-tail GTR wasn’t too appealing a purchase now that its racing heyday was over, and McLaren struggled to sell the last couple of examples. Nick Mason described in Octane 51 how he was persuaded to do a swap, handing over his ex-Denny Hulme McLaren M15 in return for short-tail #10R . But Nick then had the bright idea of asking McLaren to convert it for road use, and at a stroke he transformed the value of these former race cars for later owners.
‘A short-tail GTR is now worth $20-30 million, depending on its race provenance,’ says supercar specialist Tom Hartley Jr, ‘whereas a normal F1 road car is valued at $15-25 million. The GTR Long Tail, in contrast, is around $1517.5 million. That’s because it’s less user-friendly than a short-tail, which is basically a road car with a wing stuck on the back, whereas the Long Tail is a purpose-built, no-compromise race car.’ And Tom should know, because in recent years he’s sold two of the ten Long Tails made: chassis #19R , which was the original 1997 development car, and chassis #27R , pictured above.
After production of the F1 (road car) ended in 1998, nearly two decades would pass before McLaren revived the LT suffix, when it launched the 675LT in 2016, closely followed by the 675LT Spider. To describe them as Long Tails
was something of a stretch – no pun intended – since the cars were not notably extended at the rear in the way that the F1 GTR had been. Instead, they featured a 50% larger airbrake than the one found on the contemporary 650S – significant from an aerodynamic point of view but not visually arresting (see previous comment regarding puns), as you can judge for yourself from the picture at the top of this page.
McLaren revitalised the LT suffix to indicate a car that was more track-focused, with greater emphasis placed on aerodynamics and weight-saving, and the 675LT was a more hardcore evolution of the 650S, which itself was an upgraded development of the original MP4-12C that had brought McLaren to the masses, relatively speaking, on its launch in 2011. During the seven years since the MP4 12C appeared, McLaren has unleashed a barrage of new models with a bewildering array of nomenclatures as it seeks to fill every possible marketing niche. The master strategy centres on three core levels of product – Sports, Super and Ultimate Series – which may, where appropriate, be further subdivided with LT (Long Tail), S (Sport) or C (Club) suffixes. So, for example, a 540C is the entry-level model in the Sports Series, while the new 600LT is the most extreme.
Extreme is relative, of course. In McLaren’s pecking order, the 600LT at £185,000 is very much junior to the £750,000 Senna, which heads the Ultimate Series. Here’s the thing, though. Having driven both of them flat-out on track – the 600LT at the Hungaroring, the Senna at Estoril – and then ridden shotgun with professional instructors who were really going flat-out, we’d have to say the thrills don’t feel markedly different. Yes, the Senna has cleverer aerodynamic gizmos, it’s objectively faster and it will brake even harder than the 600LT, but the buyer of the latter is not missing out. It’s still a stupendously fast trackday car that can literally leave you breathless.
Astoundingly good though the 600LT is, it’s been rather overshadowed by the announcement of yet another new car from McLaren. And, while the 600LT may be a Long Tail more in name than proportions, the forthcoming Speedtail, pictured below, is very much a spiritual successor to the 1990s F1. That’s the F1 road car, however, rather than the GTR – despite its elongated looks. Slated for launch in 2020, the Speedtail will occupy the GT niche of McLaren’s proposed trio of Ultimate Series models, while the Senna represents the track-focused end, and an as-yet unseen P1 replacement will sit somewhere in the middle by 2025.
Like the F1, the Speedtail features a centrally mounted driving position and three seats, and, like the F1, it’s a clean-sheet design that owes nothing (twin-turbo V8 aside, although now electrically assisted to deliver 1036bhp) to what’s gone before. Note the aerodynamic covers on the front wheels, and how they don’t feature on the rears. Apparently, they wouldn’t offer much tangible benefit at the back and so the rear wheels are left naked, creating an intriguing visual mis-match. That is McLaren.
Like the F1, too, the Speedtail will carry a standard-setting hypercar price tag of £1.75m plus taxes – about double what the P1 cost new, five years ago. But remember, that’s small change compared with the values of F1s today.
Which brings us neatly back to the original GTR Long Tail, and its status in the marketplace. Tom Hartley Jr reckons that – if you can find one – it’s actually A Very Good Thing to buy right now. ‘McLaren built only ten of them, and they’re all very special cars; they’ve each done something more significant than driving to Sainsbury’s and back. Of the three F1 variants – road car, short-tail GTR and Long Tail – I think it’s the Long Tail that has the best potential.’
‘TO DESCRIBE THE 675LT AS A LONG TAIL WAS SOMETHING OF A STRETCH – NO PUN INTENDED’