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One might think that putting a race car livery on your road car is a bit naff, but somehow, McLaren has made it look awesome. It doesn't hurt when your road car, a 675hp 675LT, can annihilate most race cars already, and it helps even more when the livery you're talking about is the iconic Gulf Oil Racing colours from the 1990s McLaren F1 GTR Longtail.
If you've managed to forget, the McLaren F1, in spite of being designed as a pure road car, won race after race in the mid-nineties in the BPR global endurance championship (the forerunner of today's WEC) and took a dramatic win at the 1995 Le Mans 24hrs. In 1997, the cars were upgraded to 'Longtail' spec, to try and take the fight to the likes of Porsche's barely-road-legal 911 GT1, and it's this model that the 675 LY pays homage to already - the LT in the same standing for Longtail.
Now, this specific one pays direct tribute to the F1 GTR campaigned by GTC Racing, which wore a striking colour scheme of Gulf Racing blue-and-orange, and Davidoff aftershave's black-and-red.
In fact, Gulf Oil has to give its assent to have the road-going colour scheme creates (trademarks and all that) but once that was given, it still took the McLaren Special Operations (MSO) team more than 1,000 hours to finish the car, and 800 hours of that was just the application of the paint itself.
"Creating a car like this unique McLaren 675LT, crafted to individual customer specification, is exactly the type of demanding commission that MSO Bespoke was formed to embrace," explained Ansar Ali, Managing Director, McLaren Special Operations. "Transforming the existing car from its original single colour paintwork to a tribute to the McLaren F1 GTR 'Longtail' in Gulf Racing livery was incredibly demanding in its own right, but was only part of the brief; we also replaced numerous standard 675LT components with MSO parts and further personalised the car to clearly identify it with its owner, a service that an increasing number of MSO customers request."
As well as the paintjob, there are 20-inch alloys in dayglo orange, vented front wings, a roof-scoop for the air intake, while inside there's lots of Gulf blue and orange stitching and trim highlights, including the (doubtless wealthy) owners' initials stitched into the seats.
Its inspiration, Chassis 20R, was delivered to the Gulf-Davidoff GTC Motorsport team. Wearing number 41, the car was driven by Pierre-Henri Raphanel, Jean-Marc Gounon and Anders Olofsson to class victory and second position overall at the 1997 24 Hours of Le Mans.