The McLaren F1 Road Car is still to this day, the single, undisputed, best car ever produced in history, and the racing version of it that's under the spotlight this week is simply a better version of the best car.
That really could've been the end of the review. But no one's here for that, are they?
History and hyperbole aside, the F1 GTR is a bit of a misfit in Gran Turismo Sport. Originally a car built to GT1 specifications, it sits uncomfortably in between modern day's GT3 and GT500 cars in terms of outright pace, and is dumped by the game into the GT3 equivalent class, Gr.3, with severe crippling to its power and mass via Balance of Performance, such that it produces lap times roughly within the same century of the much more modern GT3, GTE and Gr.3 machinery. For some context, the F1 GTR is by far and away the oldest car in Gr.3, with the second oldest being the 2012 Aston V12.
Not that running at roughly the same pace helps the hypercar from 1995 to stick out any less in Gr.3 however, seeing as the only notable bits the F1 GTR boasts over the road going car externally is a pair of dinky lights on the bonnet, subtly redesigned bumpers, and an adjustable wing on the back. In that sense, the F1 GTR looks almost like an F1 Gr.4 if such a thing existed, and that's exactly how I'd describe the driving dynamics of the F1 GTR, actually: like a Gr.4 car given 600HP. Lacking the black magic of downforce both by design and technological limitations 20 years ago, the F1 GTR simply will not behave or drive like a Gr.3 car, requiring drivers to slow down for turns so much in comparison to everything else in Gr.3 that it's downright dangerous to share a track with them. Even after scrubbing off enough speed, the F1 does have a very strong bias towards understeer, built for a wide open, high speed, bumpy track that is la Sarthe. To give some context on how closely the F1 GTR resembles the road car, the road car can even annoy and harass the race car around la Sarthe when shod with the same racing tyres. Funnily enough, I think the road car is to the GTR, what the GTR is to the rest of Gr.3: fast as hell on the straights, but will sandbag dangerously in the bends.
In spite of all this, the F1 GTR is nonetheless a rather common sight in high level Sport Mode races, simply because, even with a 21% mass increase and 11% power drop as it stands with BoP applied at the time of writing, there is simply no blunting the intent of the Mulsanne Missile that is the F1 GTR when the roads straighten out for a long while, almost as if a car possessed by the will of its engineers. If you've ever had the far fetched fantasy of gapping a competitor of the same class as you in a sanctioned race as they sit in your slipstream, the F1 will grant you that pipe dream even if you didn't know you had that fantasy before, and as such, it's a rather difficult car to overtake in most good overtaking spots on tracks because its completely unethical straight line speed makes getting close to it, let alone lined up alongside it on hard braking zones a very difficult ask. At tracks defined by their cross-country straights then, such as Toukyo East and the aforementioned la Sarthe, only the cream of the crop of Gr.3, such as the Supra, Ford GT, Aston V12, or the GT1 DBR9 can even hope to hang onto the slipstream of the F1 GTR.
Of course, that's a very exacting scenario, one that, while not totally unheard of, is nonetheless not nonexistent. For most other scenarios, better balanced cars with an edge in acceleration, such as the Aston V12, will fit most of your Sport Mode needs regardless of prevailing BoP, meaning that the F1 is a bit of a niche car at best in the context of this game. It's an amazing car, don't get me wrong. It won a race it wasn't "supposed" to win. If that isn't the definition of a Sleeper, then I don't know what is. Sure, it's hard to blame a fish for not being able to walk well on land. But that's just where it finds itself in GT Sport, and it's either waltz or wilt on the racetrack, and, you know, this is a review, not a "gush about the McF1 for two million words" writeup, tempting as that may be. If you can somehow purge all knowledge and expectation that it is a Gr.3 car and simply experience it for what it is with an open mind, it's a pretty solid car. I bought mine the day it was released, just to be a pretty orange garage queen, whom I take out for a spin every now and then and for the occasional photo shoot, and haven't regretted it for a moment. It's why some of the photos in this review are dated all the way back in 2019 if you've noticed.
While it is a complete misfit in Gr.3, I'm very glad that's where it ended up in, nonetheless, instead of being relegated to the dumping ground of Gr.X, because it means that the F1 GTR still has some relevance and use in this game, unlike the P1 GTR. A part of me still wonders if it'd be a better fit into Gr.4 though, if Polyphony Digital had allowed its power to dip that low and mass to rise that high. And I'm very glad that, unlike the Group C cars lumped into Gr.1, the F1 GTR hasn't been given unrealistic aero just because of the category it's in. Plus, being a Gr.3 car, that means it comes priced at 450,000 Credits, which is less than half the million credit asking price of the road going variant (or you can just be sponsored the car without even being required to run one race with it and never return it; your call).
And speaking of Group C cars, I wanted to try pitting another Le Mans winner, the 787B, against the F1 GTR in the rain, seeing as the F1 did beat out purpose built prototypes due to seventeen hours of rain back in 1995's race. Of course, in the simplistic virtual world of Gran Turismo Sport, it's a safe, foregone conclusion that the 787B with its unrealistic aero would blow the brawns out of the F1 through the latter's eardrums, but as per our lobbies' usual restrictions, the 787B has been handicapped to bring it up to the F1 GTR's stock mass of 1,050kg (2,315lbs) and down to its stock power of 600HP (447kW), for a closer fight between the two. And hoo boy, what a close fight I wound up with indeed!
...just not with a McLaren. Instead, a rather fiesty Hyundai appeared to rain on the Le Mans parade:
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