Mr. Bean is selling his F1...what do you think his thoughts?
Only $12Mil.!!! w/ history of two accidents!
<header style="box-sizing: border-box;">Rowan Atkinson on his McLaren F1 - and why he's selling it
After 17 years and 41,000 miles, Rowan Atkinson is selling the ultra-rare McLaren F1 that he has owned from new. He tells Andrew Frankel about his fondness for the definitive supercar
<figure style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;">
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0.1rem none rgb(204, 204, 204); font-size: 1.4rem; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.8rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: inherit;">The McLaren F1 has a 6.1-litre V12 engine that produces 627bhp and gives it a top speed of 240mph / Photo: James Lipman</figcaption></figure></header><footer style="box-sizing: border-box;"><time itemprop="datePublished" datetime="9:58AM GMT 23 Jan 2015" class="article-date-published" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(131, 131, 131); font-size: 1.4rem; line-height: 1.8rem;">9:58AM GMT 23 Jan 2015</time><time itemprop="datePublished" datetime="9:58AM GMT 23 Jan 2015" class="article-date-published" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(131, 131, 131); font-size: 1.4rem; line-height: 1.8rem;"></time>
</footer><article itemprop="articleBody" style="box-sizing: border-box;">There are, I am sure, many more surreal ways of passing the time than being driven around rural Oxfordshire in a McLaren F1 piloted by Rowan Atkinson, but at the time I must confess to not being able to think of any.
All 6ft 4in of me is squeezed into the passenger seat on the right and slightly set back from the centrally located carbon-fibre bucket in which the star of Blackadder, Mr Bean and Not the Nine O’ Clock News is now expertly operating.
To make matters ever so slightly stranger, I am wearing a coat lent to me by Atkinson who had earlier rather touchingly decided I was going to be too cold hanging around while photographs were taken on this crisp winter morning and ferreted around in his house until he’d found something that fitted. It carries the legend “Keeping Mum Cast & Crew 2005”, a film in which he played a repressed vicar and Dame Maggie Smith, perhaps a touch more against type, a deranged serial killer.
We’re here because after 17 years, two crashes and 41,000 miles, Atkinson has decided it is time to part with a car he has owned from new. “It was never bought as an investment,” he says. “I bought it for the quality of the thinking that went into its design, and now it has become a thing of value, it is time for it to be enjoyed by someone else.”
Calling it a thing of value is some understatement, and is the language in which Atkinson chooses to converse. I don’t know how much he is asking for the car but looking at current prices, I’d expect the price to have eight digits. Why so much? Well, not only does the F1 occupy a unique territory among all supercars as the most purely conceived of all, but in total McLaren made just 107, of which many were pure race versions. Standard road cars like this number just 64.
<figure style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;">
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(30, 30, 30); font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem;">Butterfly doors and a central driver's seat contribute to the F1's special feel Photo: James Lipma</figcaption></figure>Atkinson is passionate about cars and has owned Aston Martins, a Ferrari and Rolls-Royces, not to mention various old racers, including a Ford Falcon and a very special magnesium-bodiedJaguar Mk VII.
I know him a little through our shared love of historic motorsport and having watched helplessly as he drove away from me in a race at the Goodwood RevivaI meeting a few years back, I can confirm his talents extend beyond the stage and studio.
I ask him to expand on the thinking that led him to keep his F1 longer than any other car he has owned. Given that it’s a 627bhp, 240mph supercar we are discussing, his reply is entirely unexpected.
“What I enjoyed most about it when I first drove it was how lovely it was to drive slowly. To pootle is a pleasure. Of course I’ve gone to a track and done 200mph in it, but for me it was always the vision of its designer Gordon Murray that made the F1 unique.
"Look at a modern supercar of comparable performance and it will be vast, heavy and offer little or no space for your luggage. By comparison the F1 is tiny, yet it will seat three, store enough for you all to go on holiday and still finds space for a proper, normally aspirated 6.1-litre V12 engine. And it weighs the same as a shopping car. Nothing has ever been designed before or since with such imagination and clarity of thought.”
Atkinson drives quickly but with respect for the fact that the roads are cold and damp and this is an entirely analogue car lacking not just any form of electronic safety net, but also such staples as power assistance for the steering and brakes. He likes it that way: “I don’t mind having to press hard on the brake, you get more feel through the pedal.”
Besides, he’s already come to grief in the car, once not too badly, but the second time in an accident from which he emerged without serious injury thanks only to the car’s massively strong carbon fibre construction. On both occasions the car was repaired by McLaren with the kind of fastidious attention to every detail for which the company is rightly famed and often teased.
On one straight he allows the F1 to stretch its legs just a little. And in that instant the BMW-designed V12 engine, whose presence hitherto had been felt only as the distant whirrings of a Swiss watch, suddenly snarls and flings the McLaren up the road. Others may now ultimately be even quicker than this, but in my experience no other road car has been able to match the immediacy and drama of an F1 answering the call of your right foot.
“It’s a car that keeps you on your toes,” Atkinson observes over the rising growl, howl, scream and shriek of the engine, “and I like that too. Today’s cars are so good and so controlled they can make you feel more like a manager than a driver.”
I ask him to tell me of something of the epic adventures he’s had in the car and his face lights up, but once more not for reasons I’m expecting.
“The whole point of the car, the thing no-one ever writes about, is you don’t need to go to the Stelvio Pass or the Nurburgring to enjoy it. It’s so quiet, so comfortable that you can use it – and enjoy it – on any journey. Most of the miles I have done it in are journeys you might do in any other car – going to Sainsburys or doing the school run.”
I suggest that if you do want that adrenalin rush, you’ll find more coursing through your veins after a quick blast down a short straight in the F1 than most cars would be able to provide in a lifetime’s skidding around race tracks or over mountain passes. “Exactly.”
<figure style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;">
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(30, 30, 30); font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem; display: inline !important;">You don't have to take the F1 to an epic road to enjoy it, says Rowan Atkinson Photo: James Lipman</figcaption>
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(30, 30, 30); font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem;">Atkinson did however take it to the Belgian Grand Prix last year and loved every second of it. “Having this car for so long has not been an ownership experience so much as a partnership. You feel the car putting its arm around you and saying let’s go for a drive – together. It’s that sense of a car’s character I love so much.”</figcaption></figure>How much, then, will he miss his driving buddy? “Oh quite a bit, but I don’t use it as much as I used to and the time feels right.”
As he reverses it back into its garage and reconnects the trickle charger that ensures he’ll never return to a flat battery, I sense Atkinson has already put some emotional distance between himself and the car, perhaps as a means of dealing with its imminent departure from his life.
Driving home it occurs to me that there is much that the F1 and Atkinson share, beyond obviously being famed for being as good as they come in their respective worlds. Both are somewhat different to their public personae.
The F1 is known for the unique distinction of holding the record of being the world’s fastest car for over a decade, but to see it as such is merely to glimpse a corner of its personality.
Likewise the man: I don’t imagine it would be easy to inhabit so completely characters like Bean or Blackadder without there being at least fragments of them in him, but that is not the Rowan Atkinson who drove me around rural Oxfordshire in his Dark Burgundy McLaren F1. Quiet, private, serious, considered and considerate, I expect he will miss this car more than he would care to say.
Rowan Atkinson’s McLaren F1 is being sold by Taylor & Crawley
</article>
Only $12Mil.!!! w/ history of two accidents!
<header style="box-sizing: border-box;">Rowan Atkinson on his McLaren F1 - and why he's selling it
After 17 years and 41,000 miles, Rowan Atkinson is selling the ultra-rare McLaren F1 that he has owned from new. He tells Andrew Frankel about his fondness for the definitive supercar
<figure style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;">
</footer><article itemprop="articleBody" style="box-sizing: border-box;">There are, I am sure, many more surreal ways of passing the time than being driven around rural Oxfordshire in a McLaren F1 piloted by Rowan Atkinson, but at the time I must confess to not being able to think of any.
All 6ft 4in of me is squeezed into the passenger seat on the right and slightly set back from the centrally located carbon-fibre bucket in which the star of Blackadder, Mr Bean and Not the Nine O’ Clock News is now expertly operating.
To make matters ever so slightly stranger, I am wearing a coat lent to me by Atkinson who had earlier rather touchingly decided I was going to be too cold hanging around while photographs were taken on this crisp winter morning and ferreted around in his house until he’d found something that fitted. It carries the legend “Keeping Mum Cast & Crew 2005”, a film in which he played a repressed vicar and Dame Maggie Smith, perhaps a touch more against type, a deranged serial killer.
We’re here because after 17 years, two crashes and 41,000 miles, Atkinson has decided it is time to part with a car he has owned from new. “It was never bought as an investment,” he says. “I bought it for the quality of the thinking that went into its design, and now it has become a thing of value, it is time for it to be enjoyed by someone else.”
Calling it a thing of value is some understatement, and is the language in which Atkinson chooses to converse. I don’t know how much he is asking for the car but looking at current prices, I’d expect the price to have eight digits. Why so much? Well, not only does the F1 occupy a unique territory among all supercars as the most purely conceived of all, but in total McLaren made just 107, of which many were pure race versions. Standard road cars like this number just 64.
<figure style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;">
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(30, 30, 30); font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem;">Butterfly doors and a central driver's seat contribute to the F1's special feel Photo: James Lipma</figcaption></figure>Atkinson is passionate about cars and has owned Aston Martins, a Ferrari and Rolls-Royces, not to mention various old racers, including a Ford Falcon and a very special magnesium-bodiedJaguar Mk VII.
I know him a little through our shared love of historic motorsport and having watched helplessly as he drove away from me in a race at the Goodwood RevivaI meeting a few years back, I can confirm his talents extend beyond the stage and studio.
I ask him to expand on the thinking that led him to keep his F1 longer than any other car he has owned. Given that it’s a 627bhp, 240mph supercar we are discussing, his reply is entirely unexpected.
“What I enjoyed most about it when I first drove it was how lovely it was to drive slowly. To pootle is a pleasure. Of course I’ve gone to a track and done 200mph in it, but for me it was always the vision of its designer Gordon Murray that made the F1 unique.
"Look at a modern supercar of comparable performance and it will be vast, heavy and offer little or no space for your luggage. By comparison the F1 is tiny, yet it will seat three, store enough for you all to go on holiday and still finds space for a proper, normally aspirated 6.1-litre V12 engine. And it weighs the same as a shopping car. Nothing has ever been designed before or since with such imagination and clarity of thought.”
Atkinson drives quickly but with respect for the fact that the roads are cold and damp and this is an entirely analogue car lacking not just any form of electronic safety net, but also such staples as power assistance for the steering and brakes. He likes it that way: “I don’t mind having to press hard on the brake, you get more feel through the pedal.”
Besides, he’s already come to grief in the car, once not too badly, but the second time in an accident from which he emerged without serious injury thanks only to the car’s massively strong carbon fibre construction. On both occasions the car was repaired by McLaren with the kind of fastidious attention to every detail for which the company is rightly famed and often teased.
On one straight he allows the F1 to stretch its legs just a little. And in that instant the BMW-designed V12 engine, whose presence hitherto had been felt only as the distant whirrings of a Swiss watch, suddenly snarls and flings the McLaren up the road. Others may now ultimately be even quicker than this, but in my experience no other road car has been able to match the immediacy and drama of an F1 answering the call of your right foot.
“It’s a car that keeps you on your toes,” Atkinson observes over the rising growl, howl, scream and shriek of the engine, “and I like that too. Today’s cars are so good and so controlled they can make you feel more like a manager than a driver.”
I ask him to tell me of something of the epic adventures he’s had in the car and his face lights up, but once more not for reasons I’m expecting.
“The whole point of the car, the thing no-one ever writes about, is you don’t need to go to the Stelvio Pass or the Nurburgring to enjoy it. It’s so quiet, so comfortable that you can use it – and enjoy it – on any journey. Most of the miles I have done it in are journeys you might do in any other car – going to Sainsburys or doing the school run.”
I suggest that if you do want that adrenalin rush, you’ll find more coursing through your veins after a quick blast down a short straight in the F1 than most cars would be able to provide in a lifetime’s skidding around race tracks or over mountain passes. “Exactly.”
<figure style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;">
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(30, 30, 30); font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem; display: inline !important;">You don't have to take the F1 to an epic road to enjoy it, says Rowan Atkinson Photo: James Lipman</figcaption>
<figcaption style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(30, 30, 30); font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 2rem; margin: 1rem 0.5rem 1rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem;">Atkinson did however take it to the Belgian Grand Prix last year and loved every second of it. “Having this car for so long has not been an ownership experience so much as a partnership. You feel the car putting its arm around you and saying let’s go for a drive – together. It’s that sense of a car’s character I love so much.”</figcaption></figure>How much, then, will he miss his driving buddy? “Oh quite a bit, but I don’t use it as much as I used to and the time feels right.”
As he reverses it back into its garage and reconnects the trickle charger that ensures he’ll never return to a flat battery, I sense Atkinson has already put some emotional distance between himself and the car, perhaps as a means of dealing with its imminent departure from his life.
Driving home it occurs to me that there is much that the F1 and Atkinson share, beyond obviously being famed for being as good as they come in their respective worlds. Both are somewhat different to their public personae.
The F1 is known for the unique distinction of holding the record of being the world’s fastest car for over a decade, but to see it as such is merely to glimpse a corner of its personality.
Likewise the man: I don’t imagine it would be easy to inhabit so completely characters like Bean or Blackadder without there being at least fragments of them in him, but that is not the Rowan Atkinson who drove me around rural Oxfordshire in his Dark Burgundy McLaren F1. Quiet, private, serious, considered and considerate, I expect he will miss this car more than he would care to say.
Rowan Atkinson’s McLaren F1 is being sold by Taylor & Crawley
</article>
Last edited:
