One to Buy: ex-Parabolica Motorsport / Team Lark 1997 McLaren F1 GTR
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Having swept to the top of international GT racing with a formidable BMW power unit, the McLaren F1 found itself firmly in the crosshairs of ‘Bee-Emm’s domestic rivals: Porsche and Mercedes-Benz. While Porsche and Mercedes began work on their own GT1 class contenders, over in Japan, Nissan also got in on the act with a Le Mans-only special.
However, rather than build their GT1 challengers from bona fide street cars originally conceived for road use, Porsche, Mercedes and Nissan started with out-and-out prototypes that they reverse engineered to comply with homologation requirements.
To counter this threat, for the 1997 season McLaren and BMW teamed up to develop the last and most radical iteration of the F1 GTR: the ‘Long Tail’.
Ten copies of the long tailed F1 GTR 97 were completed with four apiece used by the Schnitzer BMW and GTC Gulf Team Davidoff operations. The prototype was retained by McLaren and only one car was sold to a privateer, chassis 27R, which is currently on offer at the Girardo & Co. showroom in Oxfordshire.
27R was purchased by Goldman Sachs economist, noted collector and gentleman driver, David Morrison, who at the time also owned a McLaren F1 and F1 LM. Under the banner of Morrison’s Parabolica Motorsport equipe, 27R won its debut race, the British GT Championship opener at Silverstone, and scored a trio of top six FIA GT Championship finishes. It also ran at Le Mans in the sensational pink and graphite colours of Team Lark McLaren.
More recently, chassis 27R has undergone a £198,000 road conversion through a collaboration between Lanzante and Gordon Murray Automotive.
