McLaren built just three road-going F1 GT Longtails in 1997, mostly to win a rules fight with Porsche and Mercedes. The first one, the green XP GT prototype, has just changed hands.
Most car fans know the McLaren F1. Ask them about the McLaren F1 GT, and you'll usually get a blank look. That's because McLaren only built three of them, and for most of their lives you couldn't see any of them. One sat in the factory, one went to a royal family in Brunei and one went to a museum in Japan (Hagerty, Supercar Nostalgia).
The F1 GT is the road-going "Longtail": an F1 stretched by about two feet, with a longer nose, a long swept-up tail and wider rear fenders, built in 1997 so McLaren could go racing with the same shape (McLaren, Wikipedia). The very first one, a dark green prototype called XP GT, has just changed hands again, which makes this a good moment to tell its story.
Gordon Murray, who designed the F1, never meant it to race. Owners talked him into it, and the racing F1 GTR won the 1995 Le Mans 24 Hours on its first try (Octane, Galerie Automobile). Then Porsche showed up in 1996 with the 911 GT1, a purpose-built racing car with just enough road versions to make it legal. It beat the McLarens on its debut at Brands Hatch that September (Hagerty).
Murray thought that bent the rules, but he played along. Back in May 1996 he'd already sketched a red "McLaren F1 Evolution" with a longer nose and tail for more grip. To race it, he needed a road car with the same body first. In his words, quoted by Hagerty from the book Driving Ambition, McLaren had to "build a new road car, sell one a month before the first race, have dealers, brochures and parts back-up for it." He called it "a major crash program" (Hagerty).
That road car became the F1 GT. Its job was to make the 1997 F1 GTR Longtail race car legal. McLaren built ten of those racers, with a slightly smaller 6.0-liter V12 and a sequential gearbox. They won five rounds of the 1997 FIA GT Championship and finished second and third overall at Le Mans that year (McLaren). Mercedes still took the championship, and 1997 turned out to be the F1's last season as a factory racer (Hagerty).
Park an F1 GT next to a regular F1, and you can spot it right away. Here's what changed:
McLaren itself calls the F1 GT "the ultimate iteration of the F1 concept" (Galerie Automobile, Octane).
McLaren didn't need to advertise a three-car run. Murray made a brochure anyway, and the reason is great. According to McLaren's Mark Roberts, Murray wanted to walk into a rules meeting with Porsche and Mercedes, slap down a real brochure and price list, and ask where their road cars were. "That's Gordon's sense of humor," Roberts told Hagerty. "Just to wind them up" (Hagerty).
So about a week after the XP GT was finished in early 1997, Roberts, photographer Colin Curwood and a small crew drove it north. They stopped at RAF Leeming in Yorkshire to shoot it next to a BAE Hawk jet, then spent three days chasing light in the snowy Scottish Highlands, including the Skye Bridge. They'd planned to haul it on a trailer but gave up and just drove it, and Roberts says it was "really reliable" (Hagerty, Supercar Nostalgia).
Two fun details from those photos: the car still had a red interior, which Roberts swapped for cream right after the trip because red "never really suited a GT car." That cream cabin became the template for the other two. It was also wearing OZ split-rim wheels, which it still had at Silverstone that May before getting the five-spoke wheels it wears today (Hagerty, Supercar Nostalgia).
It's mostly about who had them. A factory heritage collection, a royal garage and a private museum are about as hidden as a car can get. The famous Longtails are the race cars, the Gulf-liveried GTRs from Le Mans, and they get the attention (McLaren). Even McLaren's modern "LT" badge, which started with the 675LT in 2015, traces back to those racers rather than the road car that made them legal (McLaren).
So the F1 GT is a strange case: arguably the most complete version of the F1, and a car almost nobody has seen in person.
Which brings us to the news. In 2017 McLaren sold the XP GT to a collector through Geneva dealer Kidston, and it was shown at Rétromobile in Paris in 2022 (Octane, Autonews.fr). This October, Kidston said it had sold the car again in a private deal for its European owner. Nearly 30 years after it was built, it shows just 175 miles (Galerie Automobile, Octane).
Neither the buyer nor the price was made public, though Octane says it understands the figure is up there with the most valuable cars ever sold. Simon Kidston called it "a true unicorn" and "a true one-off" (Octane).
Watch the reel on Instagram
Of the three F1 GTs, this is the one with the best story. It's the first one built, the car in the brochure, the only green F1 and a car that has barely moved in almost 30 years. Whoever owns it now, we hope it gets out to a few more shows, because it deserves to be better known.
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