Five reasons you need this McLaren P1 GTR

Not long after McLaren revealed it’d be building 45 P1 GTRs with 986bhp to the street P1’s 916bhp, more aero and less weight, a British racecar outfit called Lanzante announced they’d be ‘unofficially’ offering a road legalisation package to allow owners to drive their GTR on the public highway. 

This particular P1 GTR has already undergone Lanzante conversion and been registered in the UK, so it’s got treaded tyres, indicators and even three-point seatbelts to make day-today use a tad easier. That’s a weight off your mind, right?

There’s no getting away from it: the particular P1 GTR’s combination of Cerulean Blue with fluro-orange flashes on the wing-tips looks utterly sublime. There’s something about the use of garish colours that gives the car a Nineties race livery vibe, as it if would’ve have looked out of place at Le Mans during McLaren’s famous 1995 endurance victory. Yum.

Who wants a leggy P1 GTR? That’s right, us. But if you’re actually in the market for a near-1000bhp road-racer, you’d likely prefer one that’s seen as little use and abuse as possible. In that case, the fact chassis no.9 here has only racked up 152 miles on the clock should be most agreeable to Sir or Madam.

Bag yourself a P1 GTR that’s set up for road as well as circuit and you’ll have little time for surfing well-known online auction websites chasing down spares in case of a sudden and dramatic lapse in talent. Happily, this one, which is for sale at CarLink International in the Netherlands, comes with a full set of spares, full wet-weather tyres, and a laptop for on-the-fly track set-up. 

Emphasis on ‘sort of’. Because whichever way you slice it, an asking price of €3,193,000 is a mountain-sized pile of money. A rotund £2.86m, in Her Majesty’s sterling. Even the most affluent oligarch would struggle to call that a snip.

However, in the rarefied atmosphere of P1 GTRs, it’s not too bad at all. Another example for sale in Holland right now is asking €3.9m (£3.5m), and that’s for a stealthy all-black paint-job. Certainly sinister, but we’re still smitten with ol’ blue bumpers here. Anyone got a lottery ticket they’ve been meaning to check?