Geek Out! Let there be lights

The most persistent urban myths are the ones that won’t be squashed by facts. You know the sort of thing. Bob Holness played the saxophone part on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street. Margaret Thatcher invented soft serve ice cream. A swan could break your arm with its wings. The rear lights on the McLaren F1 are taken from a coach.

These rogue bits of info have been floating around for years. Probably still are. Yet by his own admission Holness couldn’t play a note of sax, soft serve ice cream had existed for years before future prime minister Margaret Roberts took a job in a food research lab, and the website Outdoor Swimmer estimates that a swan’s wing can generate 80 Newtons of force, a long way shy of the 2000 Newtons it takes to break a healthy arm bone.

And the McLaren F1 lights? Well, that’s not strictly true either. In early form the F1 wore different rear lamps which, as far as I can work out, were off-the-shelf Hella units with a distinctive indicator strip across the middle. On the first prototype there were four of them, but this seemed a needless duplication so at least one subsequent pre-production car had a single lamp of the same design each side, but this didn’t meet various homologation regs.