McLaren F1

If you are looking for an extremely impressive sports car, McLaren F1 can be the one. It has been a dominant player in the Sports Car segment for more than a decade now. F1 has already set the record for the fastest production car in the world with a speed of 240 mph (391 km/h) with an acceleration of 28 seconds to reach the top speed. Till now, the F1 have been surpassed by only three other production cars in sheer top speed.

The car features numerous proprietary designs and technologies. It is streamlined and extremely light compared to most of its modern competitors despite having one seat more than most similar sports cars. The McLaren F1 was the first production road car to use a complete carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) monococque chassis structure. Aluminium and magnesium was used for attachment points for the suspension system, inserted directly into the CFRP. The car features a central driving position. This means that the driver’s seat is located in the middle, ahead of the fuel tank and ahead of the engine, with a passenger seat slightly behind and on either side. The doors when opened moves up.

Recently its engine has been redesigned by BMW. At 627 hp (468 kW; 636 PS) and 266 kg (586 lb) the BMW engine is 14% more powerful and 16 kg (35 lb) heavier than Gordon Murray’s original specifications, with the same block length. It has an aluminium alloy block and head, with 86 mm (3.4 in) x 87 mm (3.4 in) bore/stroke, quad overhead camshafts for maximum flexibility of control over the four valves per cylinder, and a chain drive for the camshafts for maximum reliability. Also the engine produces high temperatures under full application and thus causes a high temperature variation in the engine bay from no operation to normal and full operation. CFRP becomes mechanically stressed over time from high heat transfer effects and thus the engine bay was decided to not be constructed from CFRP.

The suspension of McLaren F1 is a double wishbone system with a longitudinal wheel that is included without loss of wheel control, which allows the wheel to travel backwards when it hits a bump and hence increasing the comfort of the ride. During breaking the Castor wind-off at the front is handled by McLaren’s proprietary Ground Plane Shear Centre with the wishbones on either side in the subframe, fixed in rigid plane bearings and connected to the body by four independent bushes which are 25 times stiffer radially than axially. When developing the suspension system the facility of electro-hydraulic kinematics and compliance at Anthony Best Dynamics was employed to measure the performance of the suspension on a Jaguar XL16, a Porsche 928S and a Honda NSX to use as references. Steering knuckles and the top wishbone/bell crank are also specially manufactured in an aluminium alloy. The wishbones are machined from a solid aluminium alloy with CNC machines. Also the standard McLaren F1 has a transverse 6-speed manual gearbox with an AP carbon triple-plate clutch contained in aluminium housing.

McLaren F1 has a full cabin air conditioning with a SeKurit electric defrost/demist windscreen and side glass, electric window lifts, remote central locking, Kenwood 10-disc CD stereo system, cabin access release for opening panels, cabin storage department, four lamp high performance headlight system, rear fog and reversing lights, courtesy lights in all compartments, map reading lights and a gold-plated Facom titanium tool kit and first aid kit (both stored in the car). In addition it has tailored storage compartments for golf bags etc. During its pre-production stage, McLaren commissioned Kenwood to create a lightweight car audio system for the car. During 1992 and 1998 Kenwood used the F1 to promote its products in print advertisements, calendars and brochure covers. Each car audio system was especially designed to tailor to an individual’s listening taste, however radio was omitted because Murray never listened to the radio. Also every standard F1 has a modem which allows customer care to remotely fetch information from the ECU of the car in order to help aid in the event of a failure of the vehicle.