It’s been a sad week for Australian car aficionados, as the country bids farewell to its only McLaren F1, chassis 009, which has flown overseas to the home of a secretive billionaire after the car failed to find a local buyer.
The 1 of 64 road-legal F1 was spotted being loaded onto an Emirates flight in August 2020, with many believing it was Dubai-bound, but the car kept going on its journey and landed at Stansted Airport in the UK, now in the hands of exotic car dealer Tom Hartley Junior.
Chassis 009 was originally offered for sale in Australia, with a crazy asking price of $37 million (USD $24 million), a hefty jump from their $800,000 retail price in the early ‘90s. Despite the effort no local buyer emerged, leading the car to be ultimately exported and ending its three-decade Aussie story.
Australia’s F1 was delivered new in 1994 to Dean Wills, who was the then-CEO of Coca-Cola Amatil. From here, it was far from a garage queen, with Wills famously commissioning a 22-corner, 5.1-kilometre private racetrack known as The Farm located north of Sydney, after losing his driver’s license in another incident.
He imported it through Monarch Motor Imports, a company in which Wills was a large stakeholder, and was said to have been fitted with a ‘Green’ ADR compliance plate. Its rumoured that the centre seat was shifted three millimetres to the right in order to help classify it as a right-hand drive vehicle, saving the car from requiring a separate permit.
It wasn’t always in pristine condition. In 1997, the McLaren was heavily damaged when a BMW Sydney technician took it for an unauthorised joyride following a service, resulting in a high-speed crash around West Head. The repair bill was significant, reportedly just shy of $2 million in today’s money or $1 million at the time. This took the podium for the largest repair claim in Australian automotive history.
Though, as McLaren F1’s have appreciated so much in value, they can never be written off, as the repair/rebuild costs will never reach the heights of the car’s true worth. A handy perk for those that own one. Rowan Atkinson’s McLaren F1 was the perfect example of this, crashing it twice and still selling it for a $10 million profit.
After the crash, the car was shipped back to McLarens Working headquarters for a full rebuild, during that time it was resprayed a slightly darker grey than its original Magnesium Silver.
Following nearly 10 years of ownership, Wills sold the car to Tony Raftis in 2005, who then sold it to businessman Barry Fitzgeraldn in 2006, who eventually became the longest serving owner of the F1, keeping it for nearly two decades before its eventual foreign sale.
Despite the immense value, Fitzgerald regularly drove the F1, which suffered another off-road mishap during a McLaren driving tour in New Zealand in 2016, but once again the repair costs were far less than the value of the car. It was repaired at the factory and sent back to Fitzgerald. Through the years it was commonly seen cruising through the streets of Melbourne, putting smiles on the faces of enthusiasts who caught a glimpse of the ultra-rare machine.
As it departs to the UK, Australia has lost of the greatest motor vehicles that exists. It was the only ever registered McLaren F1 in the country, and there is a slim chance we will ever see another one.
The McLaren F1 launched in 1992 with a 627-horsepower BMW V12 and is widely considered the greatest supercar ever built. It briefly set the record for the fastest road-legal car at 240 mph (386 km/h) at the Ehra-Lessien test track in Germany. The rarity, performance and heritage have kept their value soaring to levels that very few cars ever reach.