There is an excellent episode of the Simpsons where Homer discovers that he has a long lost Brother (voiced by Danny DeVito) who turns out to be the head of a major Car Manufacturer. Homer ends up being asked to design a car for the common man by his brother, but ends designing a ridiculous car that only he would want and is far to expensive to put on sale.
With Mclaren celebrating 20 years since the launch of the F1 it is a good time to consider where the F1 sits in the pantheon of motoring greats.
When it was new I did not care for the F1, it seemed far to expensive at over £600K, the top of the range Ferrari 512TR cost £140K at the time. The styling while certainly functional was not exactly flamboyant, considering it arrived just after the excess of the 80's, and the three seater driving position although providing a panoramic view seemed like it would compromise the driver when it came to overtaking.
My view of the F1 changed somewhat when I was given a copy of Driving Ambition the official inside story of the Mclaren F1, By Doug Nye, Ron Dennis and Gordon Murray. After reading this I came to appreciate the effort and attention to detail that went into the F1 and yes it joined the many cars in my fantasy garage.
Driving Ambition also identified what I think was the cars Achilles heel. Mclaren and Gordon Murray in particular set out to build their vision of the best Sports car in the world. In that they succeeded, the trouble is I'm not 100% sure that their vision was shared by terribly many customers. Even in the early 1990's I doubt too many customers would have expected a £600K car to come with brakes that lacked servo assistance and ABS, both omitted at Murray's request. The high cost also meant that many of the owners were probably not in their first flush of youth and ageing hips are perhaps not the best when trying to squeeze into the central driving position.
The recession of the early nineties is citied as the main reason that the F1 only managed to shift 107 units (including 27 race versions), but in the same general period Ferrari managed to shift all 349 F50's that it planned to make, admittedly it cost a lot less than the F1 but at £320K it was hardly cheap. The F50 probably gave the customers more of what they wanted, it looked spectacular if not exactly pretty, had a direct link to F1 with a Formula one derived V12 and if the road tests of the time are to be believed was relatively easy to drive. The F1 on the other hand developed a reputation for being a little tricky to drive especially in the wet.
Probably the worst commercial mistake that Mclaren made was not homologating the F1 for sale in the United States. Although a couple were converted for sale from new sporting weird lights and overriders (quickly removed after delivery by their owners). it is telling that according to this months Evo magazine the Show and Display regulations now mean there are more F1's in the US than anywhere else. I do accept that complying with US regs may have been costly but that should have not been a problem when you consider the F1 has a gold lined engine bay for optimum heat reflectivity. I suspect that the requirements of the US regulators probably did not match the requirements that Gordon Murray had for the car?
The price while probably necessary to meet the production costs was also probably not sustainable for a car with a brand name only really known to followers of F1.
My Homer Simpson analogy at the start of this blog is perhaps a little cruel (Gordon Murray is a genius while Home Simpson is an animated buffoon) but I do think it applies to the F1. One man's vision of the perfect car does not necessarily translate into the perfect car for everyone else and the customers.
So Mclaren probably missed the mark commercially with the F1, but the lack of commercial success and resulting tiny production numbers have probably contributed to the iconic status that the the car has today. Okay the fact it spent nearly two decades with the title as the worlds fastest production car, and being a road derived car that won the 24 hours of Le Mans also have a massive contribution to it's success but the lack of sales when new and the fact the road versions especially seldom come up for sale on the open market mean that the F1 has joined the likes of the Ferrari 250GTO and Bugatti Type 57 as ultimate icons of motoring.
As an engineering achievement it certainly deserves it's place in history but as with many icons it is also an example of folly.
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