Page 26 Daily Mail, Wednesday, August 7, 2019
IT may be a quarter of a century old,
but this lean, mean 240mph driving
machine can still put many modern
supercars to shame.
The good news for petrol-heads is that
the super-rare McLaren F1 LM is for sale.
The bad news is that you’ll need excep-
tionally deep pockets, with this cosset-
ted example expected to fetch £19million
- which would make it the most expen-
sive British car sold at auction.
One of only two road cars to be uprated to
racing ‘LM’ specification by McLaren in
tribute to the firm’s Le Mans victory in 1995,
it has just 13,352 miles on the clock.
Unusually, it takes three people in a row,
with the driver’s seat set slightly forward
in the centre.
In keeping with the car’s exclusivity, the
engine bay is lined with gold – not for brag-
ging rights, but because the precious metal
makes an excellent heat shield for the enor-
mous V12 6.1-litre 680bhp engine.
If it reaches its estimate, the 1994 model,
which is being sold by auctioneer RM
Sotheby’s in Monterey, California, next
Thursday, will beat the £18.5million record
set by an Aston Martin DBR1 in 2017. The
1956 Aston went for £18.5million, making it
the eighth most expensive car ever sold.
The McLaren spent its first six years as a
standard F1. It was upgraded by the Sur-
rey-based car maker to LM specifications in
2000, with a more powerful engine, a racing
exhaust system, revised bodywork, bigger
wheels and beefier brakes. RM Sotheby’sexpert Alexander Weaver said: ‘The
McLaren F1 is the ultimate supercar and
has long been regarded as the benchmark
by which all others are compared.
‘No other car stirs more emotions and
evokes more excitement. The “holy grail”
admiration associated with the F1 is sec-
ond only to the Ferrari 250 GTO.’
In fact, the most expensive car ever sold
was a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO that changed
hands privately for £57million last summer.Going, going...vroom! £19m
car bidding for auction record
Hot metal: The gold-plated engine bay
Daily Mail Reporter
Nobel author dies aged 88
From Tom Leonard in New York
Slavery themes: Toni MorrisonPage 26
Hot metal: The gold plated engine bay
Quick sale: The McLaren F1 LM has three seats, right, with the driver in the centreShe was the pioneering
black author who won the
Nobel prize for literature
after writing powerfully
about slavery and
African-Americans.
Toni Morrison, 88, died on
Monday in hospital after suf-
fering complications from
pneumonia.
Former US President Barack
Obama was among those to pay
tribute to the American writer
yesterday, saying: ‘What a gift to
breathe the same air as her, if only
for a while.’ he called her ‘a
national treasure, as good a story-
teller, as captivating, in person as
she was on the page’.
Considered one of the greatest
US novelists of her generation,
Morrison broke literary ground in
putting African-American women
at the centre of her novels. Slavery
and its effect on black lives was a
key theme in her writing. She won
the Nobel prize in 1993 and, in
accepting the award, said: ‘We die.That may be the meaning of life.
But we do language. That may be
the measure of our lives.’
Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize
for her 1987 novel Beloved which
was made into a film starring
Oprah Winfrey in 1998. It told thestory of a runaway slave haunted
by the ghost of the baby she killed
to save her from captivity.
The author’s admirers included
the Duchess of Sussex, Marlon
Brando and hillary Clinton. Scot-
land’s First Minister Nicola Stur-
geon called her death ‘such a loss’,
saying: ‘The world needs voices like
Toni Morrison’s today more than
ever.’ Former tennis champion and
women’s rights activist Billie Jean
King said: ‘May she rest in power.’
During a prolific career from 1970
to 2019, Morrison wrote 11 novels
including The Bluest eye, Song of
Solomon and Paradise. She also
penned essays and song lyrics and
was the first African-American
woman to win a Nobel prize.
The writer, who was born in Ohio,
said her father, George Wofford, a
shipyard welder, ‘was very, very
serious in his hatred of white peo-
ple’ because of segregation. herlove of literature developed when
she was 14 and read classic novels
by Jane Austen and Tolstoy.
She had a seven-year marriage to
harold Morrison, an architect from
Jamaica, and gave birth to two
sons. Morrison joined a writing
group and wrote her first story
about a young black girl who
prayed for blue eyes. One of her
sons, Slade, a painter, died, aged
45, from pancreatic cancer in 2010.
In choosing to honour Morrison,
the Swedish Nobel Academy sin-
gled out the way she ‘delves into
the language itself, a language she
wants to liberate from the fetters
of race’. Asked in 2015 how she
wanted to be remembered, she
replied: ‘Trustworthy’.
After her death in New York,
Morrison’s family said: ‘Although
her passing represents a tremen-
dous loss, we are grateful she had
a long, well-lived life.’Tributes to
pioneering
writer feted
by Obama
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