How Crazy Expensive Is It to Maintain a McLaren F1?

proposal to drive boring [Music] [Applause] [Music] another car I bought during that time was a McLaren F1 one of the 63 roadworthy cars known to exist and I negotiated with it with a gentleman's lawyer for about a day and a half we couldn't come to terms and after about a day and a half they wanted a million three offered him 1.2 million we parted ways a year later to that weekend I got a phone call from the lawyer saying do you still want that car and I completely forgot about it and I said sure and he said okay it's yours for a million too as we discussed and as you wanted to pay and I said okay I wired the money and the next day I set my colleague Transportation a flatbed to get it well what I didn't know anything about the car other than I did know the Providence of it I'd spoken to a gentleman that personally inspected that car a month before I bought it and uh and that car had some some serious work done to it after Factory and so I knew the car was was a really good mechanical car the car was born silver and he repainted his orange which I loved so he sent it back to the factory which I got a gel coat they stripped it right down the fiberglass everything off of it to do this I got pictures I had pictures of the process they charged them 250 000 pounds to repaint the car I never heard of such a thing but when I saw the process of what they had to do it was six month process it was crazy so they have a program with McLarens when you own uh one of those McLarens back then it was Factory Direct to the consumer there weren't any middlemen there weren't any dealers there wasn't anywhere you could really take that car to get serviced and they would look after it so they dealt with you directly via satellite they have a hookup in those cars where you hook up your laptop with the a modem that comes with the car so they have direct link to your car and they can troubleshoot it they can examine the car mechanically for you while they're in the UK and you're sitting there in your garage in Atlanta Georgia and one of the things they offer when you buy a McLaren uses they give you the first service and first inspection free so they literally fly over their mechanic from London or from the UK and they come inspect the car for a couple days give you a checklist of what they think needs to be done with the car and then it's your choice whether you want it done and you have options you can fly back to the factory to have it done in a factory or you can send it to one of two service centers they have the US they have an east coast and the West Coast what I didn't realize when I bought the car and a lot of people always talk about oh my car's made for the track it's a road going but it's a race car this truly was built as a race car first and then they made it street legal where when you buy your Ferraris and Lamborghinis they're truly road cars that you can take to the racetrack so the theory behind the car and and the real uh you know makeup of the cars it was truly a race car and with race cars not only do things wear out after a race but they time out and in particular this car which of course I've learned all is after the fact was that there were items on the car that timed out like for instance the fuel cell they have a lifespan of five years whether you use it for a day an hour or don't use it at all in five years you're required to replace the fuel cell same with the fire extinguisher same goes with the tires same goes with the clutch the clutch is good for two to three thousand miles but they claim after three years you need a new clutch so it's a timed out type of car I sat down and figured out that this car if I never drove at a single mile would cost me fifty thousand dollars a year based upon all the things they told me from the factory that timed out so I thought to myself okay I paid 1.2 million I've probably got a good couple years before I'm gonna maybe start losing money on this proposition so uh I go and start driving the car and truthfully I only use it to pick up my son from school it's a carpool car there really isn't anywhere for me to take it other than a racetrack and I'm not the kind of person that takes my cars to racetracks I enjoy my cars and I don't really want to see them either damage direct and I don't have that much faith in myself to tear around in a car that you know I'm not that familiar with on a racetrack after about four months um of owning the car and having it Factory inspected of course I get a back I get a uh the list with all the the uh the values of what needs to be done to the car and it and it was 250 000 worth of work and it floored me because this car had just been serviced four months prior to me buying it and it just came back from the factory then and I'm thinking holy gosh how can this be 250 000 well one of the items was the tires needed to be replaced the tires I didn't realize that were three years old but they didn't they didn't have less tread on them from brand new because there was only about a hundred kilometers driven on this car since those tires were put on it so I said okay what can tires cost I'm used to paying a thousand dollars a tire maybe on my Ferraris and Lamborghinis well the tires were fifty thousand dollars but it wasn't fifty thousand for the tires it was fifty thousand dollars from the time you were going to remove the old tires and set up the new tires because this was a race car not a street car a street car when you mount tires you balance them on a race car you only can balance tires on the car when you take it around a track you can't balance tires because you're not just balancing the tires you're adjusting the suspension system to the tires you've put on and every tire is different so they were explaining this to me uh in a very lengthy situation on the telephone and I said well I've got to really think about this and figure this all out and then the proposition with that fifty thousand dollars was here's the list I can remember it was around seven thousand dollars for the tires it was a couple thousand dollars to rent a race track and North Carolina was near the BMW Factory it was a couple thousand dollars to send the car up there and bring it back and in a closed trailer it was a thousand dollars for the driver it was a thousand dollars for the ambulance that had to be at the racetrack it was five thousand dollars of liability insurance with my insurance company to even send it up there it was a couple thousand dollars of liability insurance to pay two BMW for using the racetrack and then it was um another couple thousand dollars to actually set the car up with mechanics that had to be on the scene at the racetrack so it was a long involved proposition just to change a set of tires and it started to be honest with you at the time turning me off about owning the car because I'm thinking to myself when the fuel cell needs to be replaced they quoted me 110 000 for the fuel cell but it wasn't just the fuel cell was it was either shipping this car to BMW's Factory in the Carolinas or sending it back over to London or to England they're not in London but to England and I'm thinking well they're only telling me 110 for the actual fuel cell but what does it really cost and they couldn't give me those numbers until I was ready to do it because things change and then the fire extinguisher that expired that was 800 for a fire extinguish I could literally go to Walmart and buy for 9.99 and they wanted to charge me 800 because their fire extinguisher was purpose-built to fit in this little hole on this little strap that you know would be basically attached back to the body and I'm going for a lousy little fire extinguisher you get for ten dollars they want 800 for it and and this kind of thing went on and on and on it just and and the car comes with a BMW engine so you would think how expensive is it to maintain a BMW engine this isn't a McLaren purpose-built engine for racing it's really off the shelf that's why the car was kind of bulletproof that's what I attracted me the car to begin with was this isn't really a prototype hand-built car even though the body is but the engine itself is bulletproof proven engine from BMW so uh I would say after about a year I figured well I don't know that I want to be upside down in this car because at the time the car wasn't appreciating like it has and it's probably one of my few regrettable cells I've ever had it over probably owning a thousand cars is selling that car as we all know today that car's a 15 million dollar plus car [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,979,243

Keywords: McLaren, F1, Exotic Cars, Car Collecting, Hypercars, Exotic Car Buying, Exotic Car Profits, eBay, British Cars, VINwiki, Buying Advice, McLaren F1, Orange, Atlanta, Georgia, Track Setup, Buying and Selling, Caffeine and Octane, Motorcars of Georgia, eBay Motors, MSO, Tires, Expensive Cars, Fuel Cell Replacement, Fuel Cell, Carbon Fiber

Id: EsKDGdcb6BQ

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2017