The McLaren F1 is considered one of the best driver's cars ever created. However, the latest example up for sale has barely been driven since it left the factory—almost three decades ago.
Auction house RM Sotheby's has a 1995 McLaren F1 with chassis number 029 up for grabs via an online auction. Its odometer reads just 254 miles. Yes, this is a legendary McLaren F1 with a little more than delivery miles on the clock.
The car's current owner bought it in 2021 for $20.465 million, and has added just 11 miles since then. That remains the highest known price paid for an F1.
Perhaps the owner has buyer's remorse, or sees the market cooling. Then there's the holding costs to consider. Even the F1's designer, Gordon Murray, reportedly sold his own example because of the insurance costs getting out of hand. Murray's example, the prototype XP3, is the oldest of all the F1s and features a silver paint finish.
McLaren F1 bearing chassis no. 029 - Photo credit: RM Sotheby's
Chassis no. 029 features a unique brown finish known as Creighton Brown. It also comes with many of the F1's original accessories, including custom-fitted luggage tailored to match the car’s trim, as well as the F1 tool set, and a Tag Heuer watch bearing the chassis number.
Spanning 1992 to 1998, McLaren F1 production totaled 106 cars, and this one is the 25th out of 64 roadgoing F1s built. The rest of the production were F1 GTR race cars, examples of which are just as desirable today as the road car.
Like all F1s, chassis 029 features a central driving position, carbon-fiber bodywork (a novelty at the time of the car's launch), and gold lining the engine bay for heat protection. The car is also wonderfully analog, sporting a high-revving 6.1-liter V-12 sourced from BMW, and a 6-speed manual transaxle.
Those ingredients made the F1 the fastest production car of its time, with a top speed of 240.1 mph. They also helped the racing version earn the outright victory at the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans against many dedicated sports prototypes.
