It’s not every day a McLaren F1 comes up for sale. Rarer still is when one of the GTR racers is looking for a new home. So imagine how much of an occasion it must be for one of the 10 GTR Longtails built for the 1997 racing season to come up for sale, and for it to be one converted for road use by none other than Lanzante.
Via Girardo & Co., someone is selling an insane piece of road-going wonder. This 1997 McLaren F1 GTR Longtail race car was restored and converted for road use. And when we say race car, we mean race car. This particular McLaren F1 GTR Longtail has a history of racing, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a total of six rounds of the 1997 FIA GT Championship, and won the season-opening Silverstone round of the 1997 British GT Championship. Over $300,000 later, Lanzante restored the one-of-ten model and made it road legal.
The Irony Of The Lanzante Prepped McLaren F1 GTR Longtail
Back in the 1990s, racing car design genius and master of the gentleman’s mustache Gordon Murray set about designing an uncompromising driver’s car for the road, and came up with the McLaren F1. As legend has it, because it was an uncompromising road car, he told the then McLaren CEO Ron Dennis not to come back later demanding it be turned into a race car.
So, what started off as a road car for speed-loving drivers became a race car, and Lanzante turned it back again. The irony only gets heavier here because, as well as being a specialist restoration and development, the Lanzante Motorsport offshoot won the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans with a McLaren F1 GTR for McLaren Automotive. According to history, Lanzante used the name Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing or Kokusai Kaihatsu McLaren, depending on the source. The team was sponsored by Kokusai Kaihatsu’s UK division, a company that made a phenomenal amount of money with coin-operated amusement devices.
McLaren sold the car to a rabbit hole of a man who called himself James Munroe. The short version is that he was a car obsessive fanatic who managed to make his way up the ladder into the British GT Championship as a wealthy gentleman racer and the owner of AM Racing, before being found out as an accountant called James Cox. James Cox was an accountant with a family making fifty thousand pounds a year. The car, chassis 27R, was then acquired by Paul Osborn of CARS International before being sent to Lazante in 2011.
Undoing All That Work
To complete the job, requiring a lot of engineering beyond lowering the McLaren F1 GTR and fitting a factory exhaust, Gordon Murray was brought back in. Murray, at this point, had his own firm in Gordon Murray Design and presumably charged a pretty penny for its help reversing the reversal. Among other things, the aerodynamic package needed to be changed for practicality, and smaller wheels and tires were fitted along with a passenger seat.
According to the listing, “particular focus was paid to the steering, which needed to navigate England’s myriad mini-roundabouts, and the damping, which needed to handle England’s notoriously poor road surfaces.” We suspect there’s a little too much egg in the pudding there, but we absolutely believe that fitting the handbrake from the original McLaren F1 wasn’t easy because that’s the sort of easy-sounding project that never ends up being straightforward. However, the engine is the same BMW S70 V12 that was brought down to 6.0 liters from 6.1 for longevity in endurance racing. Still, 595 hp in a Gordon Murray race car for the road is plenty to play with.
Sources: Girardo & Co