How McLaren conquered Le Mans with a car that wasn't intended to race

It was a car that wasn’t designed to race. And when it did get turned into a racer, it was under the express intention that it wasn’t to be taken to the Le Mans 24 Hours. That decision was reversed, too, but no one expected that the thing could win overall at the French enduro. Yet that’s just what it did, and at the first time of asking. This is the story of arguably the most unlikely Le Mans winner of all time – the McLaren F1 GTR.

The F1 was billed by its maker as the ultimate road car, the fastest production machine in the world. Of racing there was no thought, insisted its creator, Gordon Murray. And besides, when it was being conceived at the dawn of the 1990s, there wasn’t anywhere to race it. That changed pretty quickly in the years that followed the BMW-powered machine’s launch at the 1992 Monaco Grand Prix.

Group C had withered and died, and European sportscar racing was in the throes of a relaunch, not with prototypes but GT cars. Suddenly customers with their names in the F1 order book wanted to race the thing in the new series of races launched in 1994 by the BPR Organisation.

It would be simplistic to say, however, that the GTR race version of the car resulted from pressure exerted by those customers, led by former two-time Group C2 world champion Ray Bellm. The story that McLaren boss Ron Dennis told his friend that he’d turn his F1 into a racer for a million quid is true. So too that, when a driver racing a Porsche 911 Carrera RSR in the BPR’s non-championship series of International GT Endurance races baulked at the price, he was told to go and find some like-minded individuals who could share the development costs.

That is only part of the story. Just as important is the post-Gulf War economic downturn that was already biting at the time of the F1’s glitzy Monaco revealing. F1s weren’t going out the door, and the company known as McLaren Cars was committed to buying 350 BMW V12 engines. Producing a race car was an expedient way of increasing sales.

“Sales had completely stalled,” remembers Jeff Hazell, an ex-Williams Formula 1 team manager who had joined McLaren Cars to oversee the production of the F1’s carbon components. “The wider McLaren Group was propping up McLaren Cars to the tune of something like £1million a month.

Nielsen gave the F1 GTR its first test after the racing programme was given the green light

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“There was a meeting of what we called the executive committee early in 1994 at which we talked about what we could do to increase sales. There weren’t a lot of ideas, but I piped up and said we could race it. It was kind of needs must. Gordon and I went to a BPR race at Dijon [in May]. We saw that the level wasn’t particularly high and that it wouldn’t take a lot to make the road car competitive for BPR.”

McLaren boss Dennis bought into the idea.

“He told us we could have a car off the production line and a small development budget, which I think was in the region of £700,000,” recalls Hazell, who would go on to head up the F1 GTR programme throughout its life. “There was definite interest in the car and once we announced we were going to build the GTR, it snowballed.”

The development programme also included a single 24-hour test, though not at the type of track that replicated the unique demands of the Circuit de la Sarthe. “Completely the wrong place, but the only track we could get,” is Hazell’s description of Magny-Cours

BPR races were of four hours’ duration. McLaren made it clear from the outset that it wasn’t developing a car for 24 hours. “I was very strong with Ron on that,” explains Hazell. “With the amount of money we had, there was no way we could produce a car that we were confident could do 24 hours. We built a four-hour car and could do the testing to prove it over that duration.”

Just as it was inevitable that there would be teams and individuals wanting to race the McLaren, so it quickly became clear that those teams that had got their hands on cars would want to take them to Le Mans, then a stand-alone race in the wake of the demise of world championship sportscar racing.

More so because it quickly became clear that the F1 GTR was the car to have in the burgeoning GT1 category. Bellm and team-mate Maurizio Sandra Sala won the opening BPR round at Jerez in February 1995 aboard their Gulf-liveried GTC Competition entry. The new contender would be beaten only once in the run-up to Le Mans, and then only at Montlhery, where only one was present with Le Mans just a month away.

“As clear as we’d been that it was only a four-hour car, the teams, of course, wanted to do Le Mans,” recalls Hazell. “We always maintained a good relationship, so we told them we would see what we could do.”

McLaren came up with an upgrade package for the car. That included carbon brakes and work on the H-pattern FF Developments gearbox from the road car, which had already been proving troublesome in a racing environment.

The potential of the F1 GTR was made clear as it won its competition debut in the BPR Series at Jerez in 1995

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“I remember a few late nights with the gearbox during the development phase,” remembers Hazell. “There were so many tubes stuck into it that it looked like it was on a life-support machine.”

The development programme also included a single 24-hour test, though not at the type of track that replicated the unique demands of the Circuit de la Sarthe. “Completely the wrong place, but the only track we could get,” is Hazell’s description of Magny-Cours. The test car came through approaching 24 hours largely without problem. McLaren started with a conservative approach at a test attended by a total of nine drivers supplied by its customers, but gradually increased the pace.

“I remember John Nielsen [McLaren’s test driver who was also racing the West Competition car run by David Price Racing] coming in after a stint or two and saying that we had to start going faster,” recalls Hazell. “When I asked him why, he told me that he couldn’t concentrate. He said, ‘I’m thinking about all the jobs I’ve got to do in my garden’.

“We upped the pace and as we went further into the test we started pushing harder and harder. For the final six hours they were driving the nuts off it, trying to break the thing.”

Successful test or not, the five teams with seven cars between them weren’t in any way favourites for Le Mans. A GT1 car may have beaten the prototypes to claim overall honours at the French enduro 12 months before, but that was the Dauer 962 Le Mans Porsche, racer-turned-road car-turned-racer again. The McLaren was a souped-up road car, with a suspect gearbox at that.

There were doubts that the transmission would last, but as Hazell says “the rain saved us”. Le Mans 1995 was one of the wettest on record. The reduced stresses placed on the gearbox played a crucial role in McLaren’s success – it notched up a remarkable 1-3-4-5 result.

Rain, of course, is also the great leveller. It helped get the McLaren on terms with the much faster prototypes. The best of the F1 GTRs qualified 11 seconds off the pole mark set in the dry by a WR-Peugeot LMP2, and more than 8s behind the much more credible victory contender that took third on the grid: the Courage-Porsche C34 shared by Mario Andretti, Bob Wollek and Eric Helary.

The F1 GTR was a popular choice for customer squads at Le Mans in 1995 despite McLaren's insistence that it was a "four-hour car"

Photo by: William Murenbeeld / Motorsport Images

One of the F1 GTRs didn’t even head the GT1 order: that honour fell to a Ferrari F40 GT-Evoluzione. Yet within an hour, a McLaren was leading. Four of the seven cars present would sit at the top of the hourly classification over the course of the race, and from hour three, it was McLaren all the way.

When the track was at its wettest, the F1 GTR was the fastest thing in the place. It is true that there were times when JJ Lehto aboard the winning Kokusai Kaihatsu UK entry he shared with Yannick Dalmas and Masanori Sekiya was approaching 30s per lap faster than anyone else, but the speed of Andy Wallace and Derek Bell – on Goodyears rather than the winning car’s Michelins – shouldn’t be underplayed. They led much of the second half of the race, until a clutch problem with two hours to go scuppered the chances of the Harrods-liveried car in which Justin Bell joined his father and Wallace.

Just as important in McLaren’s victory was the modest entry of prototypes running in the LM-WSC class, and that those present made major mistakes

“The extra weight of the GT cars and the narrower tyres played a part in what happened that year,” says Wallace. “There were definitely times when we could get the all-important heat into the tyres quicker than the prototypes when it was really wet.”

Just as important in McLaren’s victory was the modest entry of prototypes running in the LM-WSC class, and that those present made major mistakes. Andretti famously lost his chance of completing his CV with a Le Mans victory by just over a lap. That was just a fraction of the time lost to repairs when he misjudged the speed of another prototype in the Porsche Curves and put it in the wall.

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The best of the Kremer-Porsche K8 Spyders, which was supported by the German manufacturer with the loan of Thierry Boutsen and Hans Stuck, was never in the hunt after qualifying fifth. Such were the team’s struggles in the wet that it opted to change springs and dampers early in the race, admittedly to little effect.

McLaren shouldn’t really have been at Le Mans in 1995, and definitely shouldn’t have been a contender for anything more than class honours in GT1. But the stars aligned to give a car that its creator insisted was never going to go racing an against-the-odds victory.

Sekiya, Lehto and Dalmas delivered a memorable victory for McLaren on the F1 GTR's maiden outing at Le Mans

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Was it a works car or not?

McLaren has made much of its triple crown of victories at the Monaco Grand Prix, Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans 24 Hours in this, its 60th anniversary year. Its 2023 Formula 1 contender is called the MCL60, and there was a special livery for the Monaco and Spanish GPs. It counts the newly restored M16C Indycar in which Johnny Rutherford took victory with the works team at Indy in 1974 as its first winner at the Brickyard, not Mark Donohue’s with Penske two years before. Is that an admission that the 1995 Le Mans-winning F1 GTR was run by the factory?

It was a controversial point at the time. Ray Bellm hit out at McLaren, suggesting that it had violated a promise not to run a works car and having to make an apology in the pages of Autosport. Derek Bell made comments on the subject and was given a balling out by Ron Dennis a few weeks later at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

McLaren was firm in its insistence that the winning F1 GTR wasn’t a factory car, and also pointed out that Bellm was wrong in claiming that it was contractually forbidden from running one. But it is fact that the Kokusai Kaihatsu operation was put together by McLaren.

When none of the customer teams wanted the sponsorship brought by Masanori Sekiya from the Ueno Clinic, a plastic surgery clinic specialising in a taboo part of the body, Dennis decided to run the test car in its colours. He did the deal to bring Yannick Dalmas in as a driver on Jeff Hazell’s suggestion and got JJ Lehto as part of the deal – both were managed by Keke Rosberg. Graham Humphrys, who’d worked with Hazell at Group C constructor Spice, came in as race engineer, while there were at least four mechanics from McLaren on a car run on the ground by Lanzante Motorsport.

“When Ron told me we were going to put the car with Lanzante, my blood ran cold,” recalls Hazell. “I didn’t have anything against them, it was just that they didn’t have Le Mans experience. That’s why I wanted Yannick as the ‘car captain’ and Graham to knit it all together as the engineer.”

The relationship between Lanzante and McLaren’s men on the ground wasn’t always cordial. Hazell and F1 GTR engineering chief James Robinson were thrown out of the pit at one point by team boss Paul Lanzante. Hazell confirms that Lanzante’s long-made claim is in fact true. It followed a slip-up in the pits when the car was dropped off its jacks without any wheels and tyres. It appears to have resulted from a call by a McLaren Cars employee, though not Hazell or Robinson.

So works or not? Hazell has a response to that question: “A journalist asked me that one in the pitlane during the race. I told him that when we came with a factory team you’d be able to see it as far away as Paris.”

That journalist was your writer here.

McLaren personnel were among the pitcrew of the famous Le Mans-winning machine of 1995

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