{"id":181815,"date":"2025-10-01T05:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T05:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/181815\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T05:36:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T05:36:08","slug":"meet-edward-a-recreation-of-the-secret-mclaren-f1-test-car-made-from-an-ultima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/181815\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Edward: a recreation of the secret McLaren F1 test car made from an Ultima"},"content":{"rendered":"

Big Reads<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1990, McLaren was developing the F1 road car. Two Ultima kit cars were used, then destroyed. Now, it’s back<\/p>\n

\"\"Published: 01 Oct 2025<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a butt coming. Soon it will be going, and I can\u2019t decide if that\u2019s better or worse. The front is an ode to 1970s fibreglass, the back is… well, significantly prolapsed. The square, rheumy headlights lift as it accelerates, then fall like a sigh under braking, the bodywork leans into the corner like it\u2019s about to flop off the chassis beneath, and it exits in a complicated flurry of wheelspin, lock and lurch, displaying a back end of prodigious ugliness. Makes a divine noise, though.<\/p>\n

Meet Edward. He\u2019s not the best looking chap, bless him. But he does have a story to tell. Because buried behind the mesh rump is a 6.1-litre naturally aspirated, BMW created V12. That\u2019s right, this tale digs deep into the history of the legendary McLaren F1.<\/p>\n

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Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Here\u2019s how it goes. The year is 1990 and the F1\u2019s carbon chassis is still two years away from being finalised. But the car’s engineers and designers really need a platform to test the driving position, brakes, clutch, gearbox and cooling. It needed to be light, mid-engined and able to take a big engine. A Ferrari Testarossa is briefly considered, but dismissed as too extravagant by the head of F1 road car programme, Gordon Murray.<\/p>\n

Photography: Jonny Fleetwood<\/p>\n

Instead McLaren ends up buying an Ultima kit car, which is then fitted with a 7.5-litre Chevy LS6 V8. It’s a botch job with a cut down swamp and butchered chassis, but it meant McLaren had a running prototype to test its components, including the transaxle gearbox, carbon brakes (quickly abandoned), central driving position (the seat, pedals and wheel shifted to allow it to be right hand drive on the road, centre seat on test track) and a cockpit window that got sucked out at 160mph. The first ever F1 mule is born. It’s named Albert after the road outside the workshop the car is being built in.<\/p>\n

Edward came two years later when, on 4 March 1992 BMW delivered the very first iconic 627bhp V12 to Woking, where it was then put into a second Ultima chassis. The modifications this time were more complete and included the construction of an entire new rear frame to cradle the engine.<\/p>\n

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At this point you might be thinking \u201cwow, that looks tidy and fresh for a battered prototype from 33 years ago”. And that\u2019s because this Edward wasn\u2019t built 33 years ago. More like 33 days. Albert and Edward were more pit ponies than show ponies, they worked every day of their lives and when their job was done and the finalised McLaren F1 went into production, they were taken out the back and shot. Well, the automotive equivalent. McLaren stripped them of parts, took them down to Bill Bridge\u2019s breakers yard at the end of the M23, and crushed them.<\/p>\n

This phoenix from the ashes is pure show pony, as exact a recreation as it\u2019s possible to put together when all you\u2019ve got to work with are black and white photographs. No blueprints for Albert and Edward, they were just jostled and bundled into life. This one, much to its constructor\u2019s chagrin, is exactly the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could have made it nice,\u201d mutters Paul Lanzante as we pore over it at Dunsfold. \u201cCould have got rid of that revolting back end. But no, he insisted, it had to be the same as the original.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2018He\u2019 is the man who commissioned Edward\u2019s resurrection, an American collector who prefers not to be named, but has worked through Mouse Motors to bring this to life. Why? He has every other size and shape of F1 going, so this was just the logical next step to complete the F1 set. And Paul Lanzante did the work \u2013 just the man for the job given his long association with the F1, which includes the Lanzante Motorsport run Ueno Clinic car winning Le Mans back in 1995.<\/p>\n

So how did this project come about? \u201cWell, I had a brand new engine. I\u2019d pestered the hell out of BMW \u2013 I knew they had a couple of engines left, so I just kept on and on and on at them, and in the end they cracked and sold me one. I thought it would be a good investment and it was because [the owner] found out I had it and made me an offer I couldn\u2019t refuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought he was the right buyer for the engine as he owns so many F1s… so we shipped it over to America and it was in his showroom,\u201d Lanzante continues. \u201cThen he calls me up and says \u2018I want to use that engine to put in an Ultima\u2019, and I said \u2018you\u2019re crazy, the engine\u2019s worth 10 times what the car is worth\u2019. But he insisted. He ordered the rolling chassis from Ultima and we did all the alterations to accommodate the engine.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t all go according to plan. The Ultima chassis was delivered using the pick up points from a regular BMW V12 rather than the S70\/2 \u2013 that was the most difficult to sort \u2013 figuring out the cooling was tricky, it needed an entire new bell housing and, \u201cy\u2019know, you come to do that last little bit, and it doesn\u2019t fit and you have to undo so many things. It\u2019s a jigsaw puzzle”.<\/p>\n

That massive exhaust back box? It\u2019s actually from Gordon Murray\u2019s own XP road car. There\u2019s a weld line across the back where Gordon had opened it up and removed the baffles to make it noisier. But it\u2019s still a hefty 80kg component slung out behind Edward\u2019s rear axle \u2013 and that does have an effect on handling.<\/p>\n

14 minutes 57 seconds<\/p>\n

Because of this unique car\u2019s value, I\u2019m not able to drive it, but Paul has drafted in racing driver Harrison Newey (yes, Adrian\u2019s son), to take me round Dunsfold. The cockpit is tiny, basic, awkward to climb into and ferociously hot. If my foot slips to the left I\u2019m playing footsie with Harrison for control of the throttle.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s raw and noisy and dated, but massively fast in a very modern way \u2013 627bhp working on 950kg will have that effect. It rips through the revs, sounds like a buzzsaw and prickles every sense. And yeah, it\u2019s soft and not fully set up, and the weight at the back means a bit of turn in oversteer but that\u2019s the whole point. The original was a battered mule, and so is this recreation. It would be wrong if it was perfect.<\/p>\n

Instead it rolls and slides and at one point we have to remove the lower section of the exhaust cover because it catches the wind under the car, starts to pull loose and flap noisily. Proper. It\u2019s exactly those sort of \u2018on the fly\u2019 corrections that the engineers would have had to make 33 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an engineering exercise it\u2019s been quite interesting,\u201d Lanzante says. \u201cYou think you\u2019re just going to bolt the engine in? No, it\u2019s not that simple. It\u2019s been challenging. All told I think it\u2019s been in the workshop for over two years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Going to be sorry to see it go off to its new home? \u201cI stuck that sticker on the front because we\u2019ve nicknamed it \u2018the plastic pig\u2019,\u201d chuckles Lanzante. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to see the back of it.\u201d Unsentimental. Which is apt. Because so was McLaren with the original.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Big Reads In 1990, McLaren was developing the F1 road car. Two Ultima kit cars were used, then…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-181815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}