McLaren is flogging five iconic F1 cars with an eye watering price tag

If you’ve ever wondered how to turn a lottery win into the world’s most impractical garage, McLaren has just made your day. The team is selling five of its old Formula 1 cars, including a Senna-era chassis from 1991, and the combined price could reach £50 million.

The sale covers 32 years of McLaren history and is being handled by dealer Tom Hartley Jnr, who previously sold Bernie Ecclestone’s collection of historic grand prix cars, a haul reportedly worth around £250 million.

All five cars have been kept by McLaren since they last raced, and the team will prepare them for their new owners. Nobody has officially announced prices, but reports puts each car at somewhere between £5 million and £10 million.

The headline act is a pair of 1991 MP4/6As, which belong to the season Ayrton Senna won his third and final world title. Two chassis are available, numbers 4 and 7. Senna tested both, while Gerhard Berger raced them.

The collection also features some classics from the V8 era with a 2012 MP4/27A, a car that won seven races in the hands of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

McLaren are also selling off their 2021 MCL35M, the car that saw McLaren return to Mercedes power. Daniel Ricciardo drove it to victory at Monza that year, the team’s first win since Button’s in Brazil in 2012. The fifth and final car is their 2023 challenger MCL37A driven by Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. 

McLaren boss Zak Brown says the team is parting with the cars because leaving them in storage does them a disservice. In his view, they were built to be driven and raced, and getting them out with enthusiastic owners is the best way to keep the team’s heritage alive.

Hartley says it’s unusual for collectors to get race-driven grand prix cars straight from the team that built them, and he believes values still have room to rise. The cars are being offered individually, but a single buyer taking all five isn’t out of the question, as happened with both the Ecclestone collection and the one belonging to the late McLaren shareholder Mansour Ojjeh. Hartley says there’s no rush to sell.