Ultimate McLaren F1 GTR

MARK COLE, Porter Press International, £450, ISBN 978 1 913089 15 3

If ever a car model could be considered to have had a charmed life, it is surely the McLaren F1 GTR . First, because neither chief engineer Gordon Murray nor company boss Ron Dennis initially wanted the F1 to be used for racing in any form; and second, because the realisation that superseded GTR race cars could be made very usable on the road with comparatively little effort transformed their values. By the end of the 1990s, the F1 GTR was no longer a front-runner in International competition and prices had dipped accordingly but, when Nick Mason bought chassis 10R and had it converted for road use, the floodgates were opened and a GTR is now worth more than a standard road car as a result.

The definitive account of the F1 road cars is still Doug Nye’s 1999 volume Driving Ambition, the Official Inside Story of the McLaren F1 – available for £250 from our sponsor Hortons Books – and now we have a superb two-volume slipcased history of the GTRs, written by former Eurosport TV presenter and journalist Mark Cole. He has watched the GTR’s fortunes wax and wane, then wax again, from the initial press launch in 1995, through its stunning one-three-four-five placings at Le Mans the same year, to its swansong appearance in domestic Japanese series in the early 2000s and its current resurgence as a valued collector’s item. And the depth of his research is faultless.

Volume One details the cars’ race appearances; Two is devoted to individual chassis histories and the people involved, including McLaren employees, car owners and today’s specialists. Given that any F1 owner is by definition a multi-millionaire, it’s perhaps not surprising that they furnish some of the more intriguing asides in this book – for example, we learn that GT racer ‘James Munroe’ (real name James Cox) was jailed for five years after being found guilty of embezzling £2.8m to fund his racing.

If this makes GTR owners sound a little unsavoury, rest assured that the genuine passion exhibited by most of them comes through strongly, and it’s to the author’s huge credit that he managed to speak with so many, including F1 racer and owner Ray Bellm – pictured, above, in Gulf-appropriate orange T-shirt and blue jeans during a 1997 magazine road trip to Le Mans in his own car, chassis 12R .

If we have any reservations, it’s that this history is ‘reassuringly expensive’ and the hundreds of colour images look garish en-masse; important for historical reasons but aesthetically less suited to works at this price point. Nevertheless, this is very much The

Definitive History promised on the book covers, and a sure-fire instant collector’s item.