Hand-built McLaren F1 Replica - The 23 year journey to build a dream (and we drive it!)

[Music] right climbing into the car for the very first time i haven't practiced this but donnie has given me some pointers so back first into the passenger seat sort of and then feet into the footwell and slide in okay i can imagine arriving outside a nightclub and extracting yourself from this car is very glamorous becomes stuck out i'm glad i'm short that is not easy wow bad central driving position so it's all worth it all right you want to show me how to turn it on yeah there we go okay that up there there we are all right a little bit on the accelerator a little bit of gas and hold this in pressure so she cranks hahaha [Music] [Applause] holy crap this is definitely a race car not a road car so [Music] a hand built mclaren f1 lm only five of these were ever made in real life and one prototype if you want one you're looking at north of 300 million rand 300 million and so if you don't have 300 million rand to spend well then you could just build yourself one i suppose like donnie's done what an incredible achievement this is and the thing is you know mclaren didn't exactly publish a blueprint for the car it's not you know you can't exactly go out and buy a kit donnie hand sculpted all everything you see here based on pictures and scale models that's it that's all he had to go on but you know as far as homemade cars go this is pretty impressive throttle feels good the clutch position is good brake feel is good the shifting action is nice and positive nice and notchy so for all intents and purposes it's kind of a normal car there's three pedals by my feet there's a steering wheel in my hand the gear shifter to my right however i'm sitting in the middle dead center of the car and if this isn't the best view in motoring i don't know what is [Music] this is a 23-year dream in the making the owner knew he had to own one of these one day but he knew that that was going to be a challenge and so being quite good with his hands by crafty a skilled mechanic he set about building one from scratch this is not a fiberglass body built onto some sort of chassis he built the chassis himself some of the body panels are aluminium some are carbon fiber some are fiberglass everything front of the driver everything front of the doors is carbon fiber the chassis is a combination of aluminium and carbon fiber and so while the original weighed 1140 kilograms this car comes in at 1180 that's how close he got to matching the original weight of the car that's less than a mazda mx-5 and of course the original car was famous for having one of the best engines ever created supplied by bmw when honda refused to do it a 6.1 liter naturally aspirated b12 with 461 kilowatts 650 horsepower it is widely regarded as one of the best engines ever made and so to be as close to the original as possible donnie source the v12 from a bmw 850 so there is a bmw v12 in the back but of course he didn't have the might of the bmw m division behind him and so to chase those power figures he really wanted the same power figures he went for a twin turbo setup and so i'm in a car right now that weighs less than 1200 kilograms that has 650 horsepower on the wheels on the wheels and those wheels are absolutely massive they come off a west bank modified car a racing car they're really not great on the road the car tram lines quite dramatically [Music] when the original car had three one fives this car has three nine fives three nine fives whoa oh that was scary nearly got thrown into the bushes there this is like going to one of those bars and there's a mechanical bull except this one's trying to kill me i do like a challenge but wow i'm having to concentrate everything you see on this car i did myself everything in my yeah just about there's there's nothing i didn't make the engine that's it i even did i fabricated fabricated a flywheel and also the ball housing adapter between the audi gearbox and the bmw motor because there's nothing that exists that i know of that i could use so there's a six-speed manual six-speed cable yeah i did used to have a originally we had a g50 porsche 5-speed gearbox in it and i just decided i want to have the 6-speed gearbox so i found an audi gearbox that closely resembled the same gearwriters than the original chords i think it's every petrolhead's dream to drive a mclaren f1 it is one of the best cars if not the best car ever made of course designed and conceived entirely by durbin-born caught in murray an absolute genius of a human being and i wonder what he thinks of this a hand built homage to his genius it bears your mind to try and figure out how to to make something that doesn't exist yet but it was years and years worth of research many many years looking at pictures trying to get dimensions buying little model cars scaling them up that's unbelievable and the windscreen windscreen is polycarbonate everything else every all the glass is out of polycarbonate it's the same stuff that they use on race cars and motorcycle risers and and the paint so mclaren called it papaya orange i'm guessing they didn't publish the paint yeah that was also part of my 20-year research to try and get a paint or the paint that mclaren used the papaya orange and i even emailed them and asked them if they would give it to me yeah obviously they said they wouldn't [Laughter] that's very stingy i i matched it up with colors from little model cars and the little model cars it's funny if you scale that color up it doesn't match even though it looks right on the model car on the real car didn't so eventually i did come across someone that was willing to give me a color code and he said that that was the original color code and i had it mixed and it came out in this color and it looks damn close to original it does it really does it's matched beautifully i'm very proud of this gun and and super proud of all the small little details that i put into this car i mean yeah all of these edge work and everything was done you know because of years and years worth of research and just checking out exactly how everything works even the blocks inside of the car i had that made to look exactly like the original car the gear lever i i made it and i had to learn how to anodise and everything just to get the gear lever to look exactly like the original cost caliber even the fuel pedal and um the steering wheel everything is like the original momo steering wheel of the quiet on them is that a reverse camera yeah it was actually an afterthought um because it's just so immensely intimidating driving this super white car and sitting in the middle and you are a little bit prohibited with your rear view so i put the camera in at the back and it really helps a lot is this wing adjustable yes it is yes so the original core didn't have an adjustable wing but i really wanted to add that and mclaren was one of the original people that used an adjustable wing so this one is adjustable from the inside it can either do it automatically if you press on the brake pedal it moves up and down or you can physically change the setting up and down sure for better downforce i don't know if it really works because i've never driven that fast with this car i love the attention to detail i mean there's plastic louvre here yeah how did you get that right yeah also pictures so i had to count how many there was and try and figure out how wide that form that's just insane luckily the original mclaren had the brake lights was off of a bus and uh really yeah so i could source that easily that was easy yeah that's easiest part of that all the motors also the motors is off of a volkswagen corado so yeah my uncle in germany bought them for me and sent it over it's the only thing that's original on the score i suppose what's what's nice about a mclaren f1 is uh left hand drives are illegal in this country but i don't think the government has banned censor drive we're actually busy with a little bit of a battle to try and get it registered is it for that reason because i say that the only thing that you can register as center drive as a tractor so this is probably going to become registered as a tracker i love that that is fantastic [Laughter] this is one of the greatest expressions of the love of motoring that i've ever encountered yes it's a little bit rough in places yes it's difficult to drive but this man hand built one of the greatest cars if not the greatest car ever made and now he's got one in his garage to look at every morning when he wakes up he's having a bad day go make a cup of coffee go stare at your mclaren f1 and i can promise you just being around it is something so special it is just an absolutely magnificent piece of engineering i absolutely salute you sir may you live long and prosper and hopefully one day i'll have enough money and maybe you can build me one of my own [Music] you know i've always worked with my hands and left fabricating and this is my my biggest achievement so far you know this is and i don't even know if i want to up it because i just enjoy the course so much yeah i don't think there's anything else that i could do or would want to do that's going to be better than this [Music] thanks very much for watching if you've just watched this video but you haven't yet subscribed to our channel you absolutely should do that immediately right now click the subscribe button it's a good idea for a bunch of reasons which i actually don't have really a lot of time to go into but it's good it's a good idea excellent thanks for watching i said that already [Music]

Channel: Cars.co.za

Views: 47,524

Keywords: mclaren f1 lm review, mclaren f1 lm gtr review, mclaren f1 gtr driven, mclaren f1 centre seat, mclaren f1 sound, mclaren f1 V12 engine, hand built mclaren f1, mclaren f1 replica, brough built mclaren, danie brough, mclaren f1 replica south africa, ciro de siena, cars.co.za, twin turbo BMW V12, mclaren f1 2022 car, mclaren f1 nfs heat, mclaren f1 vs bugatti veyron, mclaren f1 top gear

Id: cTPb0UOG2EQ

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022