My hunt for the El Chapo McLaren F1

does somebody owe you a million dollars for a mclaren f1 that's in mexico tied to el chapo now i've often said that my personal dream car is a manual transmission lamborghini murcielago lp640 i own one and i can't imagine ever being without it but the end-all be-all money no object dream car for me like many car enthusiasts is a mclaren f1 now of course i don't have a personal life trajectory that's going to mean that i spend 10 15 20 million dollars on one of the 106 cars that exist some of them the lms are probably worth 30 million or more today so i don't really think borrowing any drastic life changes that i'm ever going to have one and i'm very happy with my lamborghini but i do harbor the fantasy that one day one of the cars that's not accounted for one that has some bad history too many miles is in really bad shape or hidden in a barn somewhere that i might find it and it might be the way that i end up owning one of these cars about nine months ago i got contacted by a vin wiki viewer saying that he thought he knew where the missing mclaren f1 in mexico was and he had some information that was unique to the car not the kind of stuff that you could just go out and google and he said that he had some ties to the people who had control of the car now the car in question is chassis 39 now keep in mind there is not like a consummate registry of all of the mclaren f1 vins we have probably the most complete list in the vennwiki app of the mclaren f1 bins but again it's very much a working list not complete by any means because not even the factory has disclosed all that most of the chassis numbers are pretty public and people know about them but the full vans and where they are and things like that is still shrouded in a lot of mystery for a lot of them especially this car now the car in question is brazilian brown metallic with a red interior and now gold wheels it was built late in 1995 we think and it could be with a build date that was in 1996 or in 1995. now the car was being built for the ceo of mclaren ron dennis and when it was completed his wife thought it was so hideous due to the specification that she refused to let him own it and he ended up buying chassis 50 a magnesium silver car and so the car was supposedly sold to a local buyer in the uk who drove it a little bit but it was still being marketed for sale by the factory and in 1997 it is generally thought that the car was sold into mexico now there are rumors that it was sold through a dealer in texas into mexico and also that it went illegally through brazil regardless there are pictures of the car in 1997 so the car somehow makes it to mexico now this chassis chassis 39 is frequently confused with chassis 29 the other brown mclaren f1 that one is called creighton brown and it was built for creighton brown who was one of the shareholders that helped ron dennis take over mclaren in the 80s and run it into the 90s and was also very much attached to the racing program and things like that now the most interesting thing about the car in these 1997 photos was actually the registration plate p440 cpj a uk plate now obviously the car made it into mexico but it was still wearing the uk license plate and that was a little bit confusing but it's gotten a lot more confusing lately because that license plate is now seen regularly on mclaren f1 gtr chassis 0 6r a car that's owned and driven regularly by david clarke now he worked with the factory in sales when the f1 was new and he's the man largely credited with taking the f1 racing so successfully so this is the herod's livery car and it's driven in all these events all over the world and it usually has this license plate on it and so that was something i never really understood but we'll talk a little bit more about that later now there are a ton of rumors surrounding what happened at chassis 39 when it went into mexico and a lot of them contradict but they are all consistent in that the car was owned by someone very close to joaquin el chapo guzman el chapo obviously known to be the leader of the sinaloa cartel for some time now he was in prison from 1993 until his first escape in 2001 when this car would have gone into mexico now many of the rumors say that the owner's name was ricardo beltran and that he went by the nickname el roba shivas which means the goat thief and there's no other real mention of someone named ricardo beltran attached to el chapo in that period of time there was a beltran family cartel that sort of spun off of the sinaloa cartel at one point there are some people named ricardo beltran that are a little bit younger and now connected to trafficking money and laundering money into the u.s hard to say there was another person though that did go by the nickname of the goat thief el robo shivas but his name was umberto ojeda and he was very close to el chapo very high up and known to be one of the most prolific drug runners that el chapo had he was known to make 300 million dollars moving 220 tons of cocaine for the cartel and he was killed by another member of the cartel in 1997. now that is consistent with the rumor about the car because the owner of the car was known to have been killed sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s that's really where the story gets almost the most ridiculous when this guy gets killed whoever the owner is he had not told anyone where the keys were to his mclaren f1 and so the family and the cartel anybody connected to him wanted to hide the car because of course at the time the government was trying to seize anything they could that was related to the cartel or el chapo and so they hide the car supposedly under a tarp in a field in rural sinaloa but regardless it went away so nobody from that point on knew where the car was now the rumor was that whoever had control of the car inquired to the factory around 2004 asking to buy a key for it now presumably because the guy who owned it was dead it was in mexico it may not even have come in there legally in the first place they probably did not have any ownership documentation and i would assume like most key orders you had to prove that they owned it so regardless mclaren said no the first time but according to the rumors they persisted and on their second request mclaren quoted them either two hundred thousand dollars or two hundred thousand pounds which would have been about three hundred thousand dollars at the time now keep in mind in 2004 when this would have been happening that's the same year that i was offered the collection of wyclef john's cars the mclaren f1 he had with about 30 40 000 miles his pagani zonda s and his ferrari 360 spyder all for 900 000 bucks of the package we thought 600 or so was the f1 so this may have been half of what this car was worth and keep in mind it was brown over red with gold wheels now there's barely any photographs of this car but it's generally thought to be one of the uglier f1s in fact it was so ugly that the person it was built for the person mostly responsible for its actual existence in the world couldn't even own it now at this point i think that's what makes it awesome not only this amazing story that goes with it but the fact that it's a very unique very strange off-the-wall color combination what could be better brown cars are awesome so obviously the family says no to this ridiculous quote and the car just sits so presumably at the point that this guy's contacting me telling me that he knows where it is with pretty specific ideas in terms of proximity to different places so he has pretty high confidence that he knows who has control of the car and where it's located and his real ask of me is ed could you help me find a buyer so we can make a commission on this now of course my immediate thought after putting all the pieces together is this may be my only chance to buy a mclaren f1 because you think about it all right let's say the car would be worth 8 10 12 million bucks if it's perfect which it is not it's been sitting for 16 years it was inevitably bought with profits made from the trafficking of drugs so it may always be subject to being seized by the mexican government it probably has no ownership documentation so you're going to be buying this thing on a handshake and a bill of sale if you can even go down there because i had been told that i could never go to this part of mexico safely doesn't matter how many bodyguards you have like it's just not the place you go now not to disparage mexico it's just obviously it's cartel territory and you're trying to do business with the cartel and i don't think they're the people that i want to surely negotiate with but regardless it's got all these devaluing factors not the least of which is it doesn't have a key it's going to take a multi-million dollar restoration if you go through the factory probably half a million dollars if you were to do it in the u.s there's a lot of things between this car where it is and wiring the money to a cartel and probably getting audited every year for the rest of your life and having a mclaren f1 that you can own drive and use so i'm thinking this car may only be worth two to three million bucks now that's a ton of money it's more than my net worth but hey it's not 10 it's an awesome f1 i know a lot of banks and i could probably make this happen now knowing a lot of banks also came up in my research of this car because i talked to someone who knows about most of the f1s in the u.s and he knew about this car in fact he knew a lot about this car because about five years ago in his research of it he heard a rumor that a u.s leasing company a bank had a lien against this car for a million dollars when it was sold into mexico now very few leasing companies were gonna even write a lien for that much back then and they certainly weren't gonna let the car go out of country but anything could happen so i call mitch at premier financial services one of the supporters of the vinwicki channel not only to say hey i may need the biggest loan you've ever thought i would ever ask for but also does somebody owe you a million dollars for a mclaren f1 that's in mexico tied to el chapo and he said maybe to the first thing no to the second thing i called the other banks that it might have been they all said no but this guy's idea bright idea had been to buy out the loan travel with a tow truck to sinaloa and repossess the car from the cartel now fortunately he had some very intelligent friends who knew a lot more about western mexico and they told him that was a really really bad idea and that he would not make it out alive and so not worth the risks there so he had kind of dropped it at that point but again i had to do some more research to make sure that i wouldn't even be buying a car that had this crazy lien attached to it at this point we're into june july and his travel plans keep getting pushed back the coveted shutdown of the borders that was keeping us from being able to drive to alaska via canada to shoot the avalon king as 55 off the cliff was also stopping my mclaren f1 treasure hunt into mexico and so he keeps telling me he can't go he can't go even though he has dual citizenship mexico and the u.s he just couldn't get across the border not even to go to grandma's house most of the time unfortunately and so his plans keep getting pushed back and pushed back and eventually it looks like he's going to be able to go but then he introduces this unexpected wrinkle his side hustle like many even wiki viewers and fans is buying and selling cars and he said he had this car that he really needed to sell in order to finance his trip for him and the couple of friends that were going to go with him down to mexico to hunt for this mclaren f1 and it was a jaguar xjr i think an 07 that he wanted like 15 grand for which was probably 50 to 80 over true wholesale for this car and of course i'm like dude i just want you to find this car we had talked about what a reasonable finders fee was considering that i wanted to buy the car rather than us trying to market it somewhere else and get a commission that we might split and i was like look if we can get this deal done i'm going to pay you 25 50 000 whatever is fair for you finding me what's hopefully like a one and a half two million dollar car maybe and so you know i said look i'm gonna take care of you if i need to do that preemptively by buying this jaguar i'm gonna do it and in that moment it occurred to me that this might be the greatest scam i ever conceived against me because there was no way i wasn't going to offer to buy that jaguar at almost whatever price he wanted who cares if it's twice wholesale money i want him to go and worst case i'm just the world's most reluctant jaguar owner and the jaguar comes with this story attached to it and so i'm like i'm probably getting scammed but i'll do it but then i knew it wasn't a scam because he didn't let me because the next week el chapo's kids started a street war over the territory i think his nephew got killed it was a massive mess and he's like look no one can go to sinaloa right now nobody's going to go to culiacon and look for anything much less asked around for a mclaren so we're sidelined again back to the drawing board over the next few weeks nothing happens nothing happens finally in november he's able to make it down and unfortunately he learns pretty quickly that the person who he had been told was in control of the car and was interested in selling it had passed away a couple of years prior so the friend of a friend who thought they knew and all these things and he did have a lot of confidence that that was the gatekeeper to the car but unfortunately that's kind of where the trail dried up and he's still asking around we're still trying to figure out if the car is there now another rumor had around that time been presented to me unsolicited so somebody else from instagram contacts me and says i heard that the missing mclaren f1 in mexico went to mexico city about a year ago at a very very cheap price and was repainted black and that the owner was never going to let it see the light of day again okay perhaps that could happen you know it's staying in mexico was always going to be a really likely thing because getting it across a border was never going to be easy now fortunately it was in the possession of people very good at getting things across the border but that did kind of make sense there were a lot of very wealthy people all around mexico certainly in mexico city that might have wanted a trophy mclaren f1 to just put away and show people they really really trust there's also legitimately another black mclaren f1 that has been in mexico city so it's possible that the person contacting me had just seen that and assumed there was only one mclaren f1 ever in mexico which is not true and kind of put the stories together but regardless i chased that through several people that would know and nobody even knew if the black car was still there and certainly they didn't know or believe that it was the brown car that had been painted black so nobody knows where this car is my guy comes back to the u.s kind of sorry sad whatever i'm like dude this has been a a wild adventure and something that i very much enjoyed digging into but i really wasn't done digging i wanted to find out what else could be known now in the vinwicki app most people make posts based on license plates but we get the vins from the government agencies for the plates and we post by then so we reference the license plates but all the posts are categorized by then so that when a car gets a different license plate on it in the us which happens all the time usually for every registration we're able to keep tracking the cars and that only works in the app for the us now it works for other countries we're still developing out an international version but it does work in the uk so i ran p440 cpj through the vinwicki apps uk backend and the vin that it comes back to is for chassis 39 not the race car then there are services like carfax and autocheck where you can get broader vehicle history reporting in the uk it's not quite as comprehensive but it's useful and so i ran it through one of those and usually you enter it by the registration plate rather than the then there because it actually only shows you the last of the vin but it is the last of chassis 39's bin that goes to that plate in the uk consistently registered for full mot since 2005. there are several theories about why that might be one is that he legitimately bought the tag you can do that there's a huge market for buying license plates it's how shmee gets all of his and they can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars now this one's not a clever word or something pertaining to an f1 it doesn't really make sense that it would be that desirable probably not desirable enough that you'd want to be known to send money to a cartel in mexico in order to buy it but that's one possibility the other is that he knew that at one point this was a registration to a mclaren f1 in the uk and he just wanted to remake the tags which i believe is very illegal put them on his car knowing that if anybody ever runs it they're going to see a mclaren f1 he probably has one with no visible vents and he says i'll be able to drive it without having to pay lonzante to street convert my gtr and make it less race car-ish maybe he wanted to keep it as pure as it could be and still be able to drive it around the road that's a possibility the other possibility because that registration began in 2005 is that in 2004 when the family or whomever in the cartel contacted mclaren trying to buy a key they said no then eventually they said half the car's value essentially designed to say well what do we do with this car maybe the factory said hey here's a guy who we know quite well and he'll buy your car and he'll secretly get it out of mexico not want to make it public because he doesn't want the mexican government to come find his car and seize it but he just moves the license plate onto his other mclaren f1 which he drives around regularly takes to goodwood does all the things with and pretends that it's that car there's no way to know but if i were to guess i bet he's got that car tucked away in a dark basement with some whiskey on the walls it's a beautiful car posters and he only goes down there to uh be with his mclaren or his other mclaren and show people that he really really trusts but if i was that rich and i was presented with that opportunity i think that's exactly what i would do but who knows no one knows where chassis 39 is but over the last nine months or so i have truly enjoyed the treasure hunt to try to find it now if you click on the link in the description below and head on over to auto tempest search for mclaren f1 even with their ability to search all the major listing sites at the same time unfortunately you will not find one there aren't any for sale right now but if a car is for sale auto tempest is the best way to find it all the cars one search and thank them for their continued support of ben wiki

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 2,538,866

Rating: 4.8728333 out of 5

Keywords: McLaren F1, El Chapo, Chassis 39, 039, McLaren, Ricardo Beltran, El Robachivas, Robachivas, Supercar, Hypercar, McLaren F1 GTR, David Clark, Ron Dennis, Gordon Murray, Mexico, Sinaloa, Culiacan, Cartel, Beltran, Humberto Ojeda, Umberto Ojeda, Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Stories, Dream Car, Lamborghini Murcielago, Brazilian Brown Metallic, Creighton Brown, Barn Find, Key, Number Plate, P440 CPJ, UK, Sales, Racing, Goodwood

Id: Yn742vmAbEA

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/newtonreddits]

I'd like to think it's been saved and tucked away in the underground garage of some McLaren collector, but part of me also thinks it was just destroyed at some point or withering away in the hills of Mexico.

[u/seeasea]

I'll give a million or two to the cartels, I just need an F1 - Ed

[u/BisonPuncher]

I wonder which one Ed likes more about this whole youtube thing

1. Youtube Revenue
2. Having a million+ audience of people to help with things like this.

I bet you he made this because he knows someone is going to see this or tell someone about it, and that person will have info. I think hes done this before. If you're someone like Ed, I would imagine having the power to use this channel to source practically any car you want is pretty awesome.

[u/hondaexige]

Pretty interesting, especially on the UK P440CPJ Harrods car.

Is it just me put off by his never look at the camera talking style. Who's he looking at? He's essentially interviewing himself.

[u/lowRMS]

Am I the only one who is not really interested on Vinwiki channel on YT?