MCLAREN Lovers

[Gast]

[Gast]

Daar lijkt hij echt voor gemaakt, precies of de straatversie hiervan is afgeleid en niet andersom.
Prachtig!

[Gast]

Jaaa!

F1 style.

[Gast]

Jaaa!

F1 style.

Huh?

[Gast]

Huh?

Van de McLaren F1 zijn er toch ook een hoop racewagens gemaakt? Die livery's staan er gewoon enorm vet op!

[Gast]

Oh, my bad. Ik dacht dat je Formule1 bedoelde.

Idd enorm vet.

[Gast]

[Gast]

Shiit, zelfde eigenaar?
Staat wel serieus dicht tegen de muur

[Porker]

[Gast]

McLaren F1

[Roughneck]

Ik zou veel geven om zo'n F1 eens écht de sporen te geven op circuit.

[ScoobySimon]

De Configurator is online :-)

http://www.mclarenautomotive.com

[Gast]

dat fireblack... .. wat een configurator trouwens

degene die ik samenstelde was bijna identiek als die van Frank Stephenson

[Gast]

wow

[Porker]

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...

+ YouTube Video

[Gast]

Mooi stukje dat in lijn met mijn verwachting ligt.

[Gast]

is gepubliceerd geweest in Octane

[Gast]

[Gast]

Wat een heeeeerlijke kar blijft dat toch..

[Gast]

Die blauwe ziet er schitterend uit...
Als je meer pics zou vinden..