F1 overload?

The next time I remember that feeling of utter satiation came a few years later, when now a callow teenager, I was taken to Mulhouse in France and introduced to the Schlumpf Collection. Hans and Fritz Schlumpf, how they built their collection and how it was removed from them by a workers’ uprising are a story in their own right which I’ll tell another time, but by the time I visited, the brothers were living back in their native Switzerland and the collection unloved and uncared for.

But what a collection it was. Between them they had amassed, wait for it, over 120 Bugattis and many hundreds of other cars from almost every desirable name you’ve heard of and quite a few you have not. After a bit I was just staggering around, blankly gazing at the impossibility before me. To see one Grand Prix Bugatti is a rare and special moment, to see row after row becomes simply too much. One blends into another, all become meaningless to your overloaded brain. It’s just too many sweets to take in.

Why all this now? Because earlier this week, I feared I was going to feel it all over again. This time I was at the astonishing brand new Kiklo Spaces car storage facility near Petersfield in Hampshire. There its founder Chris Vassilopoulos decided to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of the McLaren F1 at The Sporting Club in Monaco. And he and his team had managed to gather no fewer than 12 F1s in one place, plus an astonishing assortment of F1 memorabilia from components – such as an entire F1 engine and the Facom tool rack that went with every car, to all the books and magazines about the car, plus letters from senior McLaren management to race teams, private customers and so on. When you consider those dozen cars represent over 10 per cent of total F1 production – race cars included – some idea of what I saw before me becomes apparent.

And as the person reputed to be the first journalist to ride in and to drive the F1 – I’m never going to say I absolutely was because there was a lot of backstage cloak and dagger business happening at the time with other media – I’d been asked to join a small panel of guests to be interviewed about the car in front of an audience of owners, journalists and others connected to the F1 story. My fellow panellists were Peter Stevens who’d been responsible for the way the car looked, David Clark whose job it was to sell them, Paul Lanzante who ran the team whose F1 won Le Mans in 1995 and Derek Bell who needs no further introduction from me.

But first I wanted to look at the cars. And because they were all laid out with space to spare around them and each beautifully lit, that sensation of being completely overwhelmed, as I’d been at Schlumpf and in my dorm, stayed away. I could look at each car as an individual, walk around it and then move onto the next one.

And what struck me was how different they were, and not just because some were road cars, some were racing cars, some were road cars that had been racing cars and some road cars that just looked like racing cars. Because there never was any such thing as a ‘standard’ McLaren F1 and you can see in their detailing all the little touches their first owners added to make them their own. Each was a little biography in its own right.

Then came the chat and with it, the stories. I repeated my old tale about making my very first acquaintance with an F1 on a damp Nordschleife driven by Jonathan Palmer, Peter Stevens reminded us that the very earliest idea for the car was that it should be a single-seater. David Clark reckoned that before the F1 went to Le Mans he’d sold approximately six units so bad had the recession been, and that the victory in France transformed the car’s prospects on both road and track. He also confirmed that 350 engines had been ordered from BMW, despite the fact that only 106 cars were sold. So someone somewhere is sitting on quite a pile of very precious metal.

We heard how Ron Dennis crashed one with Gerhard Berger in the passenger seat and that Gerhard knew they were going off fully three corners before the car finally left the track; and it was generally agreed that the most special of all the customer F1s was that ordered by George Harrison, who had his painted in Dark Purple and had images of Lord Ganesh hidden about the chassis during its build where they could never be found.

And then Derek started talking about Le Mans in 1995. How he’d considered himself retired from racing and returned only because his son, Justin, was driving. He told how his only stipulation was that he didn’t have to drive at night because he was by then 53 and had already done plenty of that, yet ended up doing much of the night anyway because the weather was so bad and an experienced hand was vital.

He recalled the guilt and fear when handing over to Justin in the middle of that night too: ‘Usually you’d come in and tell the next driver that there was flooding at Arnage or whatever and what else to watch out for around the lap. But it was so bad out there everywhere I just slammed the door shut and let him find out for himself.’ Instead of resting or sleeping when Justin was in the car, invariably Derek could be found glued to the television monitor. ‘It was far worse than being in the car,’ he told me. They would have won and become the only father and son team to have done so, had a clutch problem late on not knocked them back to third.

Then, when we were done, I went back and looked at the F1s again and tried to work out why this was such an important car. And to me it’s not just that it moved the bounds of road car capability further than any car created before or since, but that it did so within compact dimensions, yet with seating and luggage space for three. It was comfortable and, on part throttle, pretty quiet too. It wasn’t just the fastest car I’d ever driven up until that time, it was the cleverest as well.

And I think that’s another reason I was able to stay clear-headed in their presence. A Grand Prix Bugatti is only good at winning Grands Prix; a sweet is only good at tasting sweet. A McLaren F1 wasn’t just good, but beyond brilliant at pretty much everything you could ever imagine doing in one. And that is why it remains to this day the most remarkable road car I have driven.

Photography by Classic Driver