Thank Frankel It's Friday – The time I drove a McLaren F1 GTR

What interests me more is its name. Internally it’s called P15 which means in the mind of McLaren, it’s an all new car. For the geeks among you, P11 was the first of the new McLarens and included all cars in that series from the original MP4-12C to the only just defunct 650S. P12 was the P1 and P1 GTR, P13 is the so called ‘Sports Series’ including the 540C, 570S and 570GT and P14 is the 720S replacement for the P11. So P15 is no circuit-tuned version of something else: I expect it will be as close to a track car as McLaren can persuade to wear a number-plate.

Not that this has never been done before. Last year Lanzante Motorsport commissioned McLaren Special Operations to build five new P1 GTRs that were then turned into road cars called the P1 LM. But the car I want to focus on is another GTR, but a somewhat older one.

Probably the most out of depth I have ever felt doing this job was just over 22 years ago, when I was invited to Pembrey to drive an F1 GTR that was testing prior to trying to win Le Mans a few weeks later. At the time I was the road test editor of Autocar so the GTC Racing team and the car’s owner, Ray Bellm, were understandably under the impression I knew what I was doing, and I was not about to disabuse them of that notion.

The truth was I didn’t have the first clue. Problems included the fact that at the time I didn’t even know the way to Pembrey, let alone my way around it, I had, in my entire life to date, done a grand total of one race in a 1.4-litre Caterham, the 6.1-litre McLaren had over 600bhp and it was on slicks, a type of tyre I’d never experienced before. Did I mention it was also raining.

The car was being run by former Williams Grand Prix team manager Michael Cane and, quite clearly, he did not want me to drive. And what was wrong with putting a complete rookie in a million pound racer that was leading the BPR championship and was Britain’s best chance of winning Le Mans, and sending him out onto a damp unfamiliar track on slicks? For the avoidance of doubt, had I been in Cane’s position I’d have just said no, it was too big a risk so soon before Le Mans.

But he didn’t. Instead he got Mark Blundell to try to calm me down and Mark, being one of the good guys, did his best. He told me the car was very tractable, I didn’t need to use all the revs and just to be careful not to light it up too much at the exit of the corners. Ok then.

What neither Mark, Michael nor anyone else knew at the time was that the car was not at the slightest risk because I duly turned in what, in all probability, were the slowest laps ever completed of a race track by an F1 GTR. Yes, I gave it a bit of a squirt down the straights but crawled through the corners, just fast enough to keep some heat in the tyres but in truth barely any quicker than you might have gone in its road going equivalent. The truth was I was overwhelmed, a boy on a man’s mission, and they knew it.

My fear 22 years later was that I’d then written a story about how I’d traded times with Mark and blushingly declined the team’s pleas for me to join the driver line at Le Mans. So I dug out the magazine in which it was published and saw to my great relief I sounded just as scared on the page as I felt in the car.  I wrote: "I don’t know what happens on the limit. I couldn’t bring myself to push that hard and potentially let down the team that had brought me this drive." So at least I was honest.

Years later I drove another F1 GTR, this time Nick Mason’s car that, like the Lanzante P1 GTRs, had been made road legal. But by then I’d done a hundred or more races in all sorts of cars on all sorts of tyres and tracks and in all sorts of weather. The experience could not have been more different. What had once been terrifying beyond my powers of expression was now merely utterly exhilarating, as good an experience as the original had been bad. The car was essentially the same, but my perspective had changed. But if I ever get to sit in the driver’s seat of the P15, I’ll think back to that lonely day at a wet and foreboding Pembrey and remember that whatever you’re in, wherever you are and whatever your level, bring the bloody thing back in one piece. I didn’t do much right that day 22 years ago, but I at least managed that. Ultimately and for a hack in someone else’s race car, it’s the only thing that matters.