Crown

Just found this very nice vido here. What an amazing car the F1 is (still today) 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Azl-drqMk

Nice, I like the 5th gear version Tiff did also.

A lot of body roll. Did top gear ever let the stig do a lap with it? 

racerx:

Nice, I like the 5th gear version Tiff did also.

A lot of body roll. Did top gear ever let the stig do a lap with it? 

The interior sound of this car seems to be amazing 

P.S.: The body roll indicates that quite some time has passed since the F1 was developed. No active suspension etc. 

***** The Car's The Star: McLaren F1 ***** (1)

***** The Car's The Star: McLaren F1 ***** (2)

***** The Car's The Star: McLaren F1 ***** (3)

***** The Car's The Star: McLaren F1 ***** (4)

Great videos 

McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo driven by Tiff Needell...

McLaren F1 vs Bugatti Veyron... 

McLaren F1 GTR driven by Autocar... 

truly a masterpiece. From idea to execution to achievements to customer service and marketing!! 

indeed shifting is ancient technology - so is a fuel burning engine..  I happen to like both :) 
_____________________________________________________________________
1984 BMW 323i 5spd 2.3L 141 hp (105 kW) More door. Black on black (parting out) 
1986 BMW 325e 5spd 2.7L 121 hp (172 lb·ft) Le Mans Blau on Tan leather.
1986 BMW 325is 5spd 2.5L 168 hp (164 lb-ft) White on Tan leather (parted out) 
2005 Ford Focus S, 5spd 2.0L 136 hp (120lb-ft) CD silver on grey (sold)
1986 Porsche 944, 5spd 2.5L 150 hp (168lb-ft) champagne gold on grown leather. (sold)

autocar does some great work. GTR is amazing. 

Almost 20 years later - this car is still kicking ass and taking name.

I wonder if Gordon Murray has any more genius strokes left. Every great design gets at least 3 or 4 in their life.

...the only thing stopping you in all likelihood, is you!

this got to be the best car of the last millenium. 

Eunice:

this got to be the best car of the last millenium. 

 Agree. 

On the other hand, all the cars produced in the first 900 years were pretty crappy. 

fritz

fritz:

Eunice:

this got to be the best car of the last millenium. 

 Agree. 

On the other hand, all the cars produced in the first 900 years were pretty crappy. 

 As we say over here, "small sins..." 

1997 McLaren F1 vs 2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4

"The Evolution of the $1 Million Sports Car"

Article by Rowan Atkinson

(1 February 2010)

What is special about the 2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 and 1997 McLaren F1 is that they combine warp-speed capability with usability, practicality and reliability. They have been designed to be usable every day, and, given that fact, I feel that my primary aim here should be to try to describe what it would be like to share your life with these cars.

When you wake up in the morning with the Bugatti Veyron and McLaren F1 outside your house, which would you be inclined to take on a 300-mile journey in the pouring rain? Which would you choose for an 8-mile dash up a mountain road? Which, if you were honest, would you be happy to drive to the shops?

These activities might seem mundane, but to me they are important, because a rarely spoken pleasure of supercar ownership is that of doing ordinary things with an extraordinary tool.

Supercar Generations

Our two cars are assembled in the milky sunlight, the 1997 McLaren F1 looking like a very delicate little flower next to the bulbous muscularity of the 2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4.

First produced in 1992, the McLaren F1 summed up everything that the McLaren Formula 1 racing team knew about building automobiles. It had a BMW-built 6.1-liter V12 that produced 627 horsepower and 480 pound-feet of torque, figures considered titanic until the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 appeared in 2005. And just as you'd expect from a manufacturer of racing cars, the McLaren F1 has no electronic driving aids whatsoever — no traction control, no stability control, and not only no ABS but also not even simple hydraulic power assist for the brakes.

With the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, of course, the engine is bogglingly complex, an 8.0-liter W16 with four turbochargers that develops 1,001 hp and 922 lb-ft of torque. It has the first dual-clutch automated manual transmission (a seven-speed piece designed by Ricardo), which proved to be the first proper alternative to the traditional manual gearbox. Developed by Volkswagen, this is an all-wheel-drive car with all the latest electronics. It is named after Pierre Veyron, who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1939 in the Bugatti T57 C.

A Misty Day at Rockingham

Unfortunately, if our plan was to test these cars to the limit, this is not the day to do it. We're at Rockingham, only this is the eight-year-old English oval with an infield road course, not the circle track in North Carolina. In an in-between state of autumnal damp like today, it's like an ice rink.

The infield at Rockingham is a perfectly nice little circuit, but unsurprisingly it feels like a go-kart track in cars with the performance potential of these two. The McLaren F1 is a real handful. At the most modest speeds, it is skittering about and drifting through the corners. The understeer in slow corners is dreadful, a tendency I've noticed on the road, where it tends to go straight while coming out of slippery roundabouts. I managed to spin it a couple of times even though I was tiptoeing around the track. Not a comfortable experience at all.

By comparison, the Bugatti is a breeze. This is the first time I've driven a car that has a full regime of electronic nannies on a racetrack and the reassurance imparted by Bugatti's four-wheel drive, assorted differentials and stability system is just astonishing. If you go into a corner too fast or accelerate far too hard, you hear the dugga dugga dugga as the ABS and stability control begin braking this wheel and sending power to that wheel, and then suddenly you are pointing in the direction you want to go.

In the McLaren, you're the lone sailor in the little dinghy, in sole and direct charge of what happens and when. In the Bugatti, you're the captain of a destroyer, with hundreds of ratings and midshipmen scuttling about in order to realize your declared wish to set a course for Egypt. In fact the Veyron feels a bit like a computer game; if you crash, all will be put right by the press of a reset button.

The Modern Way of Speed

Accompanying the Veyron 16.4 on this day is Bugatti's official pilote, Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a charming French racing driver who ironically competed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times in the mid-1990s with the McLaren F1 GTR. The GTR was the racing version of the F1 and it had been developed when it became clear that there was no chance of selling the 300 cars that had been part of McLaren's original business plan (there was a recession at the time, remember). Instead the money earned from the manufacture and servicing of the 28 racing GTRs propelled the project into something resembling profitability. A total of 106 McLaren F1s were ultimately built.

Anyway, according to Raphanel, you can push the Veyron into corners up to 30 percent faster than you should and the electronics will always sort you out. That is a huge margin of error. In a car like this, I would never find it easy to accelerate down a wet road with the pedal to the metal. In the Macca, it would be madness, but in the Bug you can do it with impunity.

In our cool, damp British autumn, the Bugatti's brakes are exemplary. They should be, with eight-pot calipers in the front and six-pot calipers in the back plus carbon-ceramic rotors. Although the Veyron weighs around 4,410 pounds and the McLaren is just 2,756 pounds, the Bugatti stops in a much shorter distance. Indeed the car's whole chassis feels far more sophisticated, as the steering is lighter and more precise, and the car turns into corners wonderfully.

But in a few critical areas, it falls down. You sit low and slumped in the Bugatti, peering out of a letterbox-shape windshield over instrument dials of questionable legibility. I also couldn't see the first 10 yards of the road surface in front of the car — ridiculous. The only way I could feel in control was by leaning forward and hugging the steering wheel like Granny. (This might be partly the result of the test car being fitted with a strange sports seat with no height adjustment.)

The McLaren Way of Speed

It is a shame for the McLaren that the track is wet. On a dry track, the front end has sufficient grip so you can get the power down properly. It still understeers thanks to what I assume is a deliberately safe setup, and the steering effort gets heavier to an irritating degree in tight corners, but otherwise it is predictable, involving and a hoot. The gearbox definitely requires masculine effort, yet it has a shift action that is wonderfully tactile if not quick. When accelerating at full chat, I often change gear without the clutch, because the engine's racing-style lack of flywheel effect lets the revs drop almost instantaneously when you release the throttle, facilitating a very quick snatch of the next gear if you time it properly.

The McLaren brakes are not good, however. These Brembos with iron rotors were quite sophisticated things in their day, but they seem poor by modern standards. The feel is OK, but when properly taxed, they get very hot, very quickly, and then fade and start groaning like beasts from the underworld. Even on some mountainous roads I've tackled in the south of France, the McLaren's brakes proved hopeless and gave me some nasty frights before I decided to slow down.

Sitting in the McLaren driver seat is the closest experience that most of us will have to that of sitting on a throne. The central location for the seat, the perfect positioning of all controls, the exemplary clarity of the instruments, the fabulous view out of the deep, deep windscreen; you could not feel in a better place to control a motor car.

Motoring on the Motorway

The McLaren is much the quieter car. The F1 engine is the smaller, of course, but it is also so much more delicate and refined with a flatter, more predictable power curve. The animalistic howl it emits at higher revs is thrilling but not overwhelming. By contrast, the Veyron's turbocharged W16 unit is physically huge and sounds even huge-er. When it gets truly wound up above 4,000 rpm, the sound it makes is absolutely terrifying, a thunderous, basso cacophony that shakes you to your very core. It sounds more like a diesel locomotive than something automotive.

And the Bugatti's acceleration, well, the sensation is indescribable. The 60-mph mark comes up in 2.4 seconds and 186 mph (300 km/h) arrives in just 16.7 seconds. This is amazing in a car that weighs over 2 tons, not to mention it's quicker than the McLaren.

Even at a steady cruising speed, the Bugatti is noisy. It's all road roar, most likely the sound of those gigantic run-flat tires on coarse British tarmac. With its restricted view, its wider girth and that incessant road noise, I found the Veyron to be a far more tiring car on a journey than the McLaren. Also it suffers from a serious lack of luggage space, as anything larger than the tiniest of squashy bags has to live on the passenger seat. Two people cannot go away for the weekend in the Veyron unless they post their luggage on ahead. In the McLaren, by contrast, there are two large luggage compartments with custom-fitted cases. And you can take an extra passenger as well. As someone once said to me, "There's room for the wife and the mistress."

Finish Line

Which is best? Ha! I suspect that most readers would better appreciate the McLaren, because it is the ultimate representation of the computer-less sports car. But, I have to tell you, the Bugatti is adorable. It is blissful, extravagant nonsense. Mad, bad, and yet surprisingly safe to know. It is a truly great car — blisteringly fast, its modernity showing up clearly the period deficiencies of the F1.

However, although the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is the better tool, the McLaren F1 might be the more special car. It is the more practical (surprisingly), the more rare and the more involving. In the McLaren, you're definitely the driver. In the Bugatti, although you have the steering wheel in front of you, often you feel more like a well-informed passenger. Of course, you're not really driving the Veyron at all; the car is driving itself. You're just issuing commands about where you'd like it to go and then it computes the optimal way to make it happen.

I know that one mustn't be too cynical about the Veyron's electronics, because the truth is that the car would be unmarketable without them. Try to sell a 1,001-hp road car without electronic stability control and half your customers would be dead within a month. In such circumstances, customer relations can suffer.

If you're torn and cannot decide which to choose, remember one thing. The McLaren F1 will continue to go up in value; the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 will almost certainly go down. However, it would be a shame if a mere financial rationale excluded the Bugatti, so in my view it would be most sensible to buy both, so that the depreciation of one can be offset against the appreciation of the other.

So there you are. Not tactical neutrality but instead sensible compromise...

McLaren-F1_vs_Bugatti-Veyron_Rowan-Atkinson

McLaren F1 vs Bugatti Veyron...

...by Rowan Atkinson (for Octane Magazine / Edmunds Inside Line)

Boxster Coupe GTS:

McLaren F1 vs Bugatti Veyron...

Thank you for that article, a very interesting read. I can sense what he´s got his eyes focussed on...

Fastest ever test - McLaren F1 

by Richard Meaden (Evo magazine)

The McLaren F1 shoots for the fastest time on the Bedford Autodrome West Circuit...

The owner's fine words as we fired up Gordan Murray's creation: "May I remind you that the chassis stinks, it has no downforce, and the brakes don't work. But it's got a good engine!"

Exactly the words we want to hear when we're about to throw a million quid's worth of iconic supercar around the West Circuit under the gaze of a pit-wall full of onlookers.

Look out for an astonishing 'catch' as Richard Meaden gets the F1 very sideways coming out of O'Rouge at a speed you'd much prefer all your wheels to be pointing in the general direction of travel.

McLaren-F1_Evo-magazine_Richard-Meaden

“The Driven Man” by Rowan Atkinson (1992)

...yes sir, Rowan Atkinson is one serious (and talented) motorhead!

Gordon Murray's T25 begins road trials...

(26 April 2010)

Gordon Murray’s revolutionary city car, the T25, has begun secret road trials near Murray’s design works in Guildford, Surrey.

The T25, a tiny three-seater, foreshadows a new era of tiny, great-to-drive economy cars as well as a highly original manufacturing process called iStream that slashes the investment, factory space and energy required for manufacturing.

The T25, which weighs less than 650kg, has a much smaller road footprint than today’s smallest production cars, the Smart Fortwo and Toyota iQ.

Murray said the T25 could be ready for production in two years’ time, and there are strong indications that the first iStream factory will be in the UK. Eventually they could appear across the globe, close to the biggest population centres. Murray said the car’s unusual design and progressive values have powerful appeal both to leading automotive and non-automotive brands.

Our exclusive photograph shows the car’s compact dimensions and reveals the revolutionary single door for the first time. It swings upwards and forwards to allow cabin access for all three occupants. The driver sits centrally with a passenger on either side and slightly to the rear.

Despite the T25’s compactness, there is still space for several large suitcases. The rear seats also fold.

Powered by a rear-mounted 1.0-litre, three-cylinder engine and six-speed clutchless transmission, the car has a “fairly close” relationship with the similar-sized, battery-powered T27.

That project was the result of a meeting between Gordon Murray and Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, during which Murray was commissioned to produce “the most efficient EV in the world”.

Gordon-Murray-T25-concept_Autocar-link

______

Gordon Murray Design & Zytek Automotive Announce Electric City Car Programme...

Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive announce an all-electric three-seater city car, made possible through a £4.5m investment from the government-backed Technology Strategy Board. With a total cost of £9m, the new research and development project will allow the consortium to develop four prototypes by February 2011.

Professor Gordon Murray, Chief Executive and Technical Director of Gordon Murray Design said of the announcement “As we head towards the new industrial revolution brought about by rising energy costs and concern over the effects of greenhouse gases, we at Gordon Murray Design feel proud to be working with the Technology Strategy Board in helping the UK play a leading role in tackling the issues we all face. More often than not the UK has been responsible for innovative concepts and technologies only to have the end benefits seen abroad. In this case, we’re all working together to keep the technology and the production in this country.”

The T.27 will be the world’s most efficient electric car due to its low weight and ‘clean sheet of paper design’. This ambitious target cannot be achieved by applying a conventional stamped steel construction design, nor with a drivetrain using existing gearboxes, motors or batteries. Instead, an entirely fresh approach is proposed; accepting no compromise in safety, performance, range, space, weight, rolling resistance and ride quality. By applying iStream® methodology, a new manufacturing process developed by Gordon Murray Design, to the T.27 and fully integrating it with a custom-designed lightweight, highly efficient drivetrain from Zytek, every aspect of the vehicle can be optimised. This holistic approach results in a car slightly smaller than a Smart, but with more interior space.

A similar approach was used by Gordon Murray Design for a three-seater petrol-driven car (T.25) which is receiving significant market interest. The T.25 programme provides confidence that the aims of the T.27 programme are 100% achievable.

T.27 will also set new standards in environmental sustainability. High level lifecycle analysis derived from T.25 data predicts life-cycle emissions 63% less than the average car and for the T.27 lifecycle emissions 27% less than the nearest EV rival which is partly due to the iStream® manufacturing approach. Rival compact city car EVs do not simultaneously address all of the factors noted above and so this combination of attributes presents a significant market opportunity.

Zytek has designed and integrated electric drive systems for a wide range of European and US vehicle manufacturers and is currently building high performance electric drivetrains up to 70kW and 300Nm for cars, buses and light commercial vehicles. The T.27 focuses on ‘efficient performance’ with all aspects of the drivetrain designed to maximise efficiency and minimise weight. The motor, power electronics and gearbox will form a single, highly integrated unit designed specifically for the performance requirements of the T.27, but offering scaleability to heavier vehicles as required.

“This is an exciting project on several levels,” says Zytek Automotive Sales and Marketing Director Steve Tremble. “As well as supporting the development of a new family of E-Drives, it will show what can be achieved when the vehicle design is optimised for zero emissions propulsion. It’s a terrific initiative and we are delighted that the Technology Strategy Board has agreed to back it.”

The 16 month project has several aims; to position the consortium positively to further explore the possibility of scaling up and building a manufacturing facility in the UK, with the ultimate goal of producing the T.27 in this country; keeping the new technology and IPR within the UK and making this affordable, fun and environmentally friendly car widely available on the open market. The project outcomes will help justify the required follow-on commercial investment to take the vehicle into manufacture by providing a body of evidence that the concept is a viable design for production.

Gordon-Murray-T27-Design_Link

Gordon-Murray-Design

McLaren F1 review by Jay Leno...

...designed by Gordon Murray...

Mr bean in a Bugatti. Really nice.

 CT, GT3, Cooper S

The F1 is so much nicer inside and out then the Veyron. But the One-77 out does both in looking the price. It will be nice if someone arranges a test of all the these top hyper cars when 1 is available.

And not just 0-100, 100-200, but looks, sound, real world driving, ...... along the lines of a Top Gear extended segment.

Gordon Murray T27: full tech details...

(28 May 2010)

British automotive entrepreneur Gordon Murray has released a stunning set of performance targets for his forthcoming T27 electric city car which, if achieved, will make it the world’s most efficient electric vehicle.

The car, an ultra-compact MPV with six different interior configurations, closely resembles Murray’s T25 petrol-powered city car.

The electric T27 version is being developed as a partnership between Murray’s Guildford-based design company and Northampton-based Zytek Automotive, who are designing an all-new electric engine and gearbox.

The project is financed to the tune of £4.5 million, around 50 per cent, by the government’s Technology Strategy Board.

Murray and Zytek’s Bill Gibson say T27’s low kerb weight of 680 kilograms, which includes the weight of its 25kW (33 bhp) engine, its single-speed gearbox and a 12kWh lithium-ion battery pack, should allow it a range of between 80 and 100 miles, a top speed around 66 mph, and a 0-62 mph acceleration time below 15 seconds.

Its CO2 footprint, which includes emissions from the power stations that provide its electric power at the outset, is just 48g/km on the combined cycle, and an astonishing 28 g/km on the city cycle alone (where emissions from petrol/diesel cars usually increase).

Murray claims the T27’s whole-of-life CO2 emissions will be 42 percent less than those of an average conventional car in the UK.

The T27 programme, which has been running for 16 months, is on target to produce a fully driving prototype on April 2011.

Murray and Zytek have already begun pushing to assemble partners and funding for full-scale manufacture in the UK, using the ultra-efficient iStream process which Murray has devised to eliminate the high tooling costs of conventional steel monocoque cars and greatly simplify the automotive manufacturing process.

Murray intends that iStream — which can produce cars of many sizes and designs — should become a worldwide phenomenon, but says he would prefer the first application to be in the UK, to keep the technology at home and to create an estimated 6000 jobs.

Gordon-Murray-T27-Project_Autocar-article

20-Years-of-the-McLaren-F1_Autocar-link