Is the MP4/8B McLaren’s greatest what-might-have-been?

It was, Mika Hakkinen is reputed to have recounted, the biggest engine blow-up he ever experienced. Debris punched its way through the floor and, remembers Neil Oatley, “there were a lot of bits spread over the Hangar Straight”.

And so McLaren’s short test programme with the Lamborghini V12 early in the autumn of 1993 ended. The unique car, the MP4/8B, has remained silent until now. What could be described as a siding in the team’s history has been restored and ran up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July as a reminder of what might have been.  

McLaren was on the look-out for a new engine in the summer of 1993. It may have been punching above its weight in 1993 with customer Ford Cosworth HB engines – witness Ayrton Senna’s trio of early-season victories with the original version of Oatley’s active suspension MP4/8 – but it knew it needed to forge a link with another manufacturer after the shock end of its ultra-successful relationship with Honda the previous year. Enter Lamborghini, or rather Chrysler.  

The failing Italian sportscar marque had been taken over by the US car giant in April 1987. It pitched the idea of an F1 entry, as an engine supplier only, to its new paymasters in Detroit and met with a favourable response. That autumn the establishment of a new entity known as Lamborghini Engineering was announced under the technical leadership of former Ferrari design legend Mauro Forghieri.

A V12 from his hand would be ready when 3.5-litre normally aspirated engines became mandatory in F1 in 1989. Larrousse, Lotus, Ligier, Minardi and its own inhouse Modena Team all used the 80-degree LE3512 engine to no great effect over successive seasons. A third at Suzuka 1990 for a Larrousse driven by Aguri Suzuki was its best result. 

Chrysler was trying to offload Lamborghini in 1993, though it envisaged keeping its racing subsidiary. Which goes a long way to explaining McLaren’s interest. It wasn’t trying to forge a link with Lamborghini; it wanted a partnership with a big player. Chrysler, as one of the big three US automakers, fitted the bill. The Lambo V12s that ran in the MP4/8B didn’t carry the words ‘Chrysler’ and ‘Lamborghini’ on their cam covers like those used by Larrousse, Lotus et al; rather they bore only the word ‘Chrysler’ writ large and the marque’s Pentastar badge.  

Watch: Senna's Lost McLaren

“We’d been the works Honda team for so long and we needed something comparable to that – we needed the full attention of a manufacturer,” recalls Oatley, who as McLaren chief designer had overseen development of the three cars powered by Honda’s normally aspirated V10 and V12 powerplants from 1989.

“We were in a bit of a situation. The Ford thing was inevitably a stopgap because Benetton was the works team and we were unlikely to get equal attention from Cosworth. As a long-term thing it wasn’t right for us to be buying engines.”  

Who approached whom isn’t known for sure. That’s a secret held by then McLaren boss Ron Dennis, though a key player in the Lamborghini project reckons the first transatlantic call was made from Woking to Detroit. Alain Marguet was race operations manager from the beginning of Lamborghini’s F1 adventure.

“We’d been the works Honda team for so long and we needed something comparable to that – we needed the full attention of a manufacturer” Neil Oatley

“Ron called Chrysler,” he says simply. Dennis found an obvious ally in the late Francois Castaing. A key player in the initial years of Renault’s F1 programme, he’d climbed the corporate greasy pole and ended up as a vice-president of Chrysler.  

McLaren’s tie-up with Chrysler was billed as very much a test programme by Castaing. “Our ultimate goal would be to win the F1 world championship, and the best way to start working is with a test programme – to see if our strengths and talents can be combined into a team which is capable of taking on and beating the best in the world,” he said.  

The first meeting between McLaren and Chrysler came on 1 July. A McLaren contingent, including Oatley and race engineers Giorgio Ascanelli and Steve Hallam, met with Lamborghini Engineering boss Daniele Audetto, expat Brit Mike Royce, who had replaced Forghieri as the technical director on the V12 project, and Marguet. Less than a dozen weeks later, the B-spec MP4/8 was up and running.  

Conversion from Ford to Lamborghini power was relatively smooth

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Fitting the bigger engine wasn’t a major issue. “There were only fairly trivial differences with the Cosworth car,” explains Oatley. It helped that when he’d set out on the design of the MP4/8 the previous summer he hadn’t known what engine it would have in the wake of Honda’s bombshell.

“The MP4/8 was a fairly compact car anyway,” he continues. “The engine mounts were different and we had to cast a new gearbox casing.” The transmission was shortened, which Oatley describes as a “token effort to keep the wheelbase from being too long”. That meant new lower rear wishbones.  

The car ended up three and 7/8 inches longer than the Cosworth car. “We still worked in inches in those days,” says Oatley. “That’s 98mm if you want to convert it.” The floor and bodywork were then suitably lengthened without recourse to the wind tunnel. There were also changes to the engine: the car, which always tested in fully-active form, ran McLaren’s own TAG electronics rather than a Bosch system.  

The MP4/8B was given a shakedown on the Silverstone Stowe (or school) circuit on 20 September. The test was meant to be a secret, but Autosport got wind of it and ran what appeared to be a photograph of the car running in plain white, as it did in each of its four tests, in that week’s magazine.

That it was a fake – it had been mocked up – was clear to McLaren. Senna was at the wheel in the image, when in fact only Hakkinen, McLaren’s test driver who was days away from making his race debut with the team after Michael Andretti’s departure, drove in what Oatley remembers as “atrocious conditions”. 

Testing moved to Pembrey the following day. “We were ready to run at something like 11:30,” says Oatley. “Mika did the initial running and then Ayrton took over for two days.” 

Senna lapped quicker with Lambo power than he had during the Portuguese GP

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The Pembrey test was a lead-in to an appearance for the McLaren-Lamborghini in an official test at Estoril the week after the Portuguese Grand Prix. Senna gave the V12-engined MP4/8B rave reviews after lapping faster than either he or Hakkinen had done during the previous weekend’s race.

Over the course of the three days in Portugal, Hakkinen set the best McLaren lap of 1m13.214s in the Cosworth car, while Senna was right behind him on a 1m13.218s with the Lambo-powered machine.  

“The engine certainly lit the drivers up,” remembers Hallam, Andretti’s and then Hakkinen’s race engineer in 1993. “Ayrton really loved it; he was really enthusiastic about it. The engine was powerful, there’s no doubt about that, but it was fragile even if it had come a long way since I’d run one in the back of a Lotus in 1990.” 

“Ayrton really loved it; he was really enthusiastic about it. The engine was powerful, there’s no doubt about that, but it was fragile” Steve Hallam

Marguet explains that over time the engine had been lowered and lightened. “We paid particular attention to the weight,” he says. “We modified a lot of parts of the block.” 

Oatley remembers the Lamborghini engine having quite different power characteristics to the Ford. “It had a lot of torque, then a dip in the power curve and then it really came on strong,” he explains. “Because it had that kick it might have felt that it had more grunt than it actually did. It certainly had more horsepower than the Ford engine. I didn’t see the power curves for all the engines we used, but the one that I did would suggest it had 30bhp more, something of that order.”

Interestingly, Marguet believes that the hasty adaptation of the engine to the TAG system cost it a few horsepower right at the top of the rev band.  

Both Senna and Hakkinen enjoyed the Lambo-powered car

Photo by: Patrick Behar / Corbis via Getty Images

Two different specifications of LE3512 were used at Estoril, one with revised camshafts that, says Oatley, “filled in that flat spot while sacrificing a bit of top end”. The idea that this development came at the urging of Senna after his first run in the MP4/8B at Pembrey is a myth. “It was a project they had been working on since the summer,” recalls Oatley. “It first tested at the end of August on the dyno. It just coincided with where we were with the programme.” 

Senna made comments in the Italian press suggesting that he wanted to race the McLaren-Lamborghini at the forthcoming Japanese Grand Prix. Hallam reckons it wasn’t just talk. “I know for a fact that Ayrton was badgering Ron to race that engine in Japan,” he says. Long-time McLaren mechanic Indy Lall, until recently part of the McLaren Racing Heritage team that has restored the MP4/8B, reckons a plan was being put in place for Hakkinen to race the car at Suzuka, even if it was unlikely to finish.  

Oatley, however, suggests racing the car was a non-starter. “Not realistic” is how he describes the proposition. “We could never have raced it, because the fuel tank was too small,” he explains. A V12 was significantly thirstier than a V8, and the only concession to increasing fuel capacity had been removing what he calls “a divot” in the monocoque behind the driver’s back for the bottle that stored the compressed air to activate the Cosworth’s pneumatic valves. (McLaren had started using the latest-spec engine with this system mid-season.)

“It probably gave us four or five kilos of fuel,” he says. “Not a huge amount, so it would have been fairly marginal getting through a race with what we had. It was also evident that there were some reliability issues.” Oatley points out that sticking with the Cosworth didn’t turn out too badly: Senna won in Japan and then Australia. 

There was one more test for the McLaren-Lamborghini on the Silverstone Grand Prix track at the start of October. Only Hakkinen was present to drive both versions of the 1993 McLaren. It ended with the blow-up when a piston overheated on the run down to Stowe. The blown engine – one of four used over 842km racked up by the MP4/8B – was returned to Lamborghini, but McLaren was allowed to keep another unit. The car has periodically been part of the walk of fame Boulevard at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, but has remained silent until now.  

“Whenever I’ve shown people around myself, the car seems to generate more interest than anything else,” says Oatley. “It’s very distinctive with its plain white bodywork. It was always on the list to restore and finally it came to the top.” 

McLaren Racing Heritage driver Garofall gets the V12 wound up at Blackbushe

Photo by: Rhys Lucas/JEP

McLaren’s Lamborghini engine was brought back to life by Langford Performance Engineering and now runs on MoTeC electronics rather than the original TAG system. McLaren has only two of the original electronic systems left in working order, and they are being retained to allow its Cosworth-engined MP4/8 to run in as near-to-1993 spec as possible.   

Work on the project started last year, with renowned historic specialist Paul Lanzante partnering McLaren in the restoration. The unique McLaren-Lamborghini MP4/8B was given a couple of brief shakedowns at the Blackbushe airfield in Surrey at the end of June and the beginning of July with McLaren Racing Heritage driver Rob Garofall. Then it was the turn of Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok to take the car up the hill at Goodwood.  

It was the first time the McLaren-Lamborghini had run in public, but it could have been different. The idea that Chrysler was some kind of plan B for McLaren is almost certainly wrong. McLaren entered into its arrangement with Chrysler with the idea of racing its V12 engine, potentially as early as 1993.

“My brief was, whatever you do, don’t go quick. I didn’t know the details of the contract, but I think there was a performance target, and if it was hit, the contract clicked into place” Dave Ryan

The document it presented to the US manufacturer at the first Woking meeting was entitled Investigation into the feasibility of installing the Chrysler-Lamborghini V12 engine into MP4/8 with the aim of racing it at the earliest opportunity in 1993. A strongly worded statement issued by Chrysler when it was announced that McLaren would be running Peugeot engines in 1994 indicated that it wanted to move forward with the team.   

More to the point, when contact was initiated, the Peugeot V10 engines that McLaren would run for just a single year weren’t yet available. A plan for the French manufacturer to graduate to F1 lock, stock and barrel with the same inhouse team that had claimed a second Le Mans 24 Hours victory in 1993 was in the works.

It was rejected by the company board in May, at which point team boss Jean Todt decided to jump ship and join Ferrari. It wasn’t until 15 September that the same men in suits at Peugeot gave the go-ahead for an F1 entry as an engine supplier.  

Only ‘Chrysler’ adorns the engine, indicating the possibility of bigger deal

Photo by: Autosport

Almost immediately Todt’s successor, ex-Formula 1 driver Jean-Pierre Jabouille, was in the UK to court potential partners. He met with both McLaren and Benetton at the end of the week of the Estoril test. Two weeks later, the McLaren-Peugeot deal was done.  

Peugeot, reasoned McLaren, looked the better option because it had the greater resources behind it. “The main reason it didn’t happen was Ron felt Chrysler didn’t have the strength in terms of the number of people working on the engine and supporting it,” says longtime McLaren design engineer Matthew Jeffreys. Hallam points out that many of the staff at Peugeot Sport had formerly worked at Renault, chief designer Jean-Pierre Boudy included.  

The Chrysler deal probably came closer than was realised. The pace of the MP4/8B in Hakkinen’s hands at Silverstone was the reason. Contemporary stories suggest that Hakkinen was 1.4s quicker aboard the Lambo car than with the Cosworth. Oatley can’t verify that because the run sheets, hand written on pink card (races were recorded on green card), are missing from McLaren’s archives.

But Marguet insists they are correct. His records show Hakkinen setting a 1m22.40s best in the V8 car and then getting down to a 1m21.08s with V12 power. That’s also quicker than Senna had qualified for that July’s British GP.  

The speed of the car in that test might offer an insight into Chrysler’s ire on the Peugeot announcement. Former McLaren chief mechanic and subsequently sporting director Dave Ryan was running the test and remembers receiving some pretty firm instructions from above.

“My brief was, whatever you do, don’t go quick,” he says. “I didn’t know the details of the contract, but I think there was a performance target, and if it was hit, the contract clicked into place. Just to be safe, I tanked it [fully fuelled the car] and told Mika that he had to stick to a certain lap time. But out he goes, and he’s so quick. I was bricking it.  

“And then the thing lunched itself on the next run.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the Summer 2026 issue and subscribe today.

July’s Goodwood Festival of Speed was the first time the Lambo-powered car ran in public

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