When McLaren said to me “we’ll see if we can get you down to the unit as well” after spending some time with them at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, I was a bit stunned.
I remember hearing about that place as a kid. It was like the car world’s Atlantis – a mythical place that existed only in folklore. Pictures of it were rare, solid information even rarer. There’s no way it could possibly exist in real life. Except it does. And I’ve been.
It might as well not exist, though. I’m not allowed to divulge where it is, and when the team finally passed on its exact location so I could get there, Google Maps got confused – the papaya team’s partner inadvertently doing its bit to keep Formula 1’s best-kept secret under wraps.
I eventually found my way though, and when I arrived, I wasn’t met by much – a parking lot full of generic daily drivers outside an unassuming warehouse-like structure. Its front door and corridors gave the impression that the place hadn’t been touched since the ’80s, but I wasn’t here to survey the property. What was contained within the walls was what I was itching to see, and good lord was it something…
“Welcome to to the Heritage Unit,” I heard as I stepped into the building’s main space, a greeting that was followed by a laugh, my face obviously saying more than enough as I struggled to remember how to speak actual words. As soon as you walk in, there’s history everywhere you look – the sheer magnitude of what McLaren has done over the years hits you like a punch in the face. It was a fitting coincidence that I was taking all of this in on Bruce McLaren’s birthday, too.
An ex-Alain Prost MP4/2 greeted me as I walked in; steeds once helmed by the likes of Mika Hakkinen, Niki Lauda, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso, and Lewis Hamilton caught my eye next and there was a rack containing more than 30 other priceless examples of McLaren’s Formula 1 pedigree as well.
Head up to the building’s second story and there’s six more cars seemingly sleeping under black shrouds, and even a kart once driven by Hamilton along with bodywork and seats from aforementioned machines being attended to on the shop floor.
The unit was once where long-time McLaren boss Ron Dennis stashed away retired racing cars and equipment when they reached the end of their competitive lives, away from prying eyes, never to be seen again. As you’ve probably gathered by now, it still kind of serves that purpose today, but it’s primarily the home of McLaren’s burgeoning Heritage department – something that’s far from your typical archive. It’s a living, breathing creature, with everything in constant rotation and kept in running order.
“That’s what this storage facility is used for – we swap [cars] in to keep that story alive all the time,” McLaren’s chief operation officer Piers Thynne tells RACER.
Much like the Formula 1 team itself, McLaren Heritage is thinking several months – and in some cases, years – ahead.
“For example, we are preparing our [1974 Indianapolis 500-winning] Indy car that we ran at Goodwood for anniversary events next year, so that’s already in pieces and the engine’s away in America getting rebuilt,” Thynne explains. “All the cars in here are in a rotating plan, which is three years ahead, where we ensure they’re not degrading.
“We pull out between six and eight cars a year, fully strip, service, fire up, check – and once you’ve done that [with all of them], you go around again. So the maintenance of the assets is hugely important and that’s a rolling three year program.”
The service plan of these cars is a world away from the sort that’s included with the warranty of your road car; and it’s a process made even more tricky by the fact that racing cars are effectively disposable tools with short shelf lives.
“Keeping things that are designed to have a year’s life going longer-term is very complicated, so we apply all current Formula 1 servicing standards,” Thynne says. “They’re exactly the same here. There’s no difference and all build processes are exactly the same.
“There is no strategy inside current Formula 1 for heritage thinking in the future, because it’s not what matters. When the output of Formula 1 happens, there’s a huge amount of information exchange from those that are inside the [cost] cap to the team that is outside of the cap – idiosyncrasies, running methods, specifics in procedures, anything different, anything weird – to make sure that that’s documented as that continues to run inside heritage.”
That knowledge is vital, because many of these still require multiple people just to get them going.
“The older red and white cars, especially if they’re Cosworth cars, you can get away with just a couple of people on them,” explains Gary Wheeler, a McLaren veteran who got his start working with Prost in 1984 after a stints with the Fittipaldi and ATS teams, and who on the day of our visit is fine-tuning MP4/2A-01 driven by Lauda in 1984.
“Other cars, like the Vodafone cars, you need a small army to run them with all the technology and the hydraulics and the computers and everything talking to one another. So as it progresses and gets more technical, the personnel increases.”
Thynne adds that earlier cars that can be easily preheated and started with a battery are relatively easy to run, but for the more recent cars, maintaining a strong relationship with Mercedes – McLaren’s engine supplier from 1995-2014 (being works partner for much of that time) and from 2021 to the present day – has been crucial. Mercedes’ UK-based F1 engine operation accompanies McLaren at all of its Heritage tests and events, and like McLaren itself, treats the whole exercise as if it were a real grand prix.
“Mercedes comes whenever we run the cars,” Thynne says. “We need to ensure that the on-car systems are maintained in exactly the same way as we would as it ran in period, and Mercedes are observing in exactly the same way as they would in period.”
When it comes to driving, it would be safe to assume that the cars are coddled. But Mika Hakkinen – who drove his 1999 championship-winning MP4/14 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed earlier this year – tells RACER that there are no such restrictions, although respect for a car’s age and history means they’re naturally looked after anyway.
“Funnily enough, there’s no rules from the team,” he says. “They don’t say ‘slow down’ or ‘go slow’ or nothing! There’s no rules, but we’re all grown-ups and we understand this is a show for the fans to see these beautiful cars, so you don’t have to go a thousand miles per hour.
“You can just run a bit lower gear. If you get more RPM from the engine it sounds great, and that’s the idea. The temptation was there to really put the foot down but I knew… you can’t do that.”
Wheeler goes on to explain that the cars, in fact, need to be driven fast in order to function properly – even if they’re vintage vehicles.
“We’re quite lucky because they’re not pushed to the limits like they were when they were racing, so they will go on longer before service,” he says. “But at the same time, these cars are designed to go quick; nothing else. They don’t really work unless they’re honking on a bit.
“In fact, they’re pretty dodgy when people are trying to go round and wave to people. They need to be moving pretty rapid to come alive and work properly.”
The cars run often, because one freedom that the Heritage division has that the F1 team doesn’t, is testing. Thynne says that they hit the track “about every six weeks” because “you can’t prove that a car is right unless you run it at speed”
McLaren Heritage’s test track of choice is the 1.456 mile Pembrey circuit in south west Wales, which McLaren has used for testing since the days of Senna and Prost.
Nowadays though, it could be described as the Heritage Unit of race tracks because much like McLaren Heritage’s batcave, it’s an old, anonymous place that doesn’t fit modern F1’s glamorous image. It does, however, do the job of allowing McLaren to make sure its priceless relics remain in running order, with Heritage tester Rob Garofall on hand to do the driving.
“Going into Europe would be a bit impractical and because what we actually just need is ‘a track’, we don’t need any of the gloss or glamor,” Thynne explains. “Pembrey’s near, they’re okay… obviously these car’s aren’t quiet – that’s why we go to Pembrey, we have a fantastic relationship with them.
“We could pay £50,000 a day and go to Silverstone, or we could pay considerably less than that and go to Pembrey and you’d achieve the same thing. You can run at speed, it’s safe… it works for us.”
Much of McLaren’s historic running occurs with customers – a number of McLaren’s grand prix cars have entered private hands in recent years, and if you want one yourself, Thynne says that: “there are cars in the open market, it’s not a huge circle, and you can talk to us about cars that might be available and others are available through known dealers who are very much linked indirectly with us.”
Renowned classic and performance car dealer Tom Hartley Jr is part of that circle, having sold a number of McLaren grand prix cars in recent years. A number of historically significant McLarens have passed through Hartley’s hands, including James Hunt’s championship-winning M23 – his first McLaren grand prix sale – right the way through to an MP4-27 from 2012. He’ll only deal with race-winning cars, though.
“Some people want to buy a grand prix car just to experience themselves, so they’re not as fussy about its race history,” he says. “I only focus on grand prix winning cars because for the history of the car – you really want a car where you can say ‘this won Monza’ or ‘this won Spa’. If it won a grand prix with a world champion, then that’s a different level again. There’s only so many of those.”
One car in Hartley’s current inventory is MP4-22-01, the car that Hamilton took to the first two of his 103 grand prix victories, in Canada and the United States 16 years ago, as well as another win in the hands of Alonso later in the year.
“It’s hard to really describe the importance of that car,” he says. “To buy a grand prix-winning car is pretty special, to buy a grand prix-winning McLaren is very good, to be able to buy a car that the greatest driver of all time – which undoubtedly Lewis is today – and then to be topped off, apart from him having other podiums in that car, Fernando Alonso also won in the same chassis.”
While the market for yesteryear’s F1 machines is growing and more and more cars enter the open market, McLaren remains abreast of everything going on with its cars.
“We are constantly analyzing what the cars are doing in the world of privateers,” says Thynne. “What we want to ensure is that the provenance of cars is maintained and we’re supporting each other. So that’s sharing engineering data or sharing ideas, or parts to ensure all historic McLarens are running and in good order.
“The phone rings on a daily basis going ‘do you have one of these?’ or ‘I’m restoring this’, and we always want to help to ensure that the provenance of a McLaren is kept absolutely as it should be, and with cars that want to run, we try to do our utmost to unlock any barriers to help that happen.”
McLaren’s regular running of historic F1 cars with customers has opened up continued development avenues, too. Cars that may be a decade old, or even older, aren’t just restored to running order, they’re still being improved upon.
“A customer we ran at Pembrey a few weeks ago was seriously struggling with heat shield durability,” Thynne explains. “At the kind of events that he was doing, short run track days, Goodwood Festival of Speed, that kind of thing, the heat soak was much worse than you’re able to manage in a Formula 1 event.
“Looking back when the car was in period, we used to give it a set of new heat shields every event. What we wanted to do was take a 2006 set of heat shields and take 2022 composite technology, and marry the two together. The parts would look identical, but the base material is the latest material.
“They’re exact identical replicas, but you’re able to apply modern technology to a different solution that we only found when we started to run the car.”