The Rarest McLaren F1 You Have Ever Seen

July 5, 2022

Andrew Bagnell might just be the luckiest man in the world. As the proud owner of one of the rarest and most extraordinary vehicles in the world, he is well aware of how remarkable his McLaren F1 High Downforce is. Bagnell admits he has owned, raced, and driven many nice cars in his lifetime, but he has passed most of them on after a few years. However, he admits he would truly feel a sense of loss if he ever let this fantastic vehicle go.

Although only one hundred and six McLaren F1s have ever been built, the car is anything but rare. But with all of its modifications, Bagnell's car is one for the books. Of the one hundred and nine F1s built, sixty-nine were standard road cars (five were prototypes); twenty-eight were race cars, of which some have been made road legal; three were turned into GTs (the street-legal version of the Longtail), and five were made into LMs (the orange-colored road race cars built in honour of the five F1 GTRs of the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans race).

The McLaren F1 Downforce, however, is the rarest of them all. It is the perfect blend of a road car and a GTR racer. It features an HD package that has been awarded to only two people with a V12 engine that puts out 680 horsepower. Bagnell first requested the downforce kit in 1994. Other notable features include larger wheels, a carbon rear wing, an extended front splitter, a different suspension, and a completely modified engine that revs up to one thousand revolutions per minute higher than other standard V12 engines.

Although Bagnell has the best McLaren on the block, standard models are not too shabby themselves. The McLaren is known for being the “finest driving machine yet built for the public road,” according to British car magazine Autocar. The magazine further stated that the car will likely go down in history as the fastest production road car the world will ever see. The car was in production from 1992 until 1998, and standard models featured a 6.1 litre V12 engine with a six-speed manual transmission. No car owner could ever complain about owning one of these.

Bagnell usually takes the car out on back roads every month to open it up a bit without putting too many miles on it. He says one of the best things about driving the car is the way the motor feels like a racecar on the road. The downforce kit combined with the engine modification turned it from a very comfortable, easygoing road car into a racing machine. Bagnell notes that the car changes gears with a snap, like no other car on the road. The car is sure to turn heads wherever he takes it because it has the presence of something great. Bagnell tries to get the car onto the track as much as he can.

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