McLaren’s MacGuffin
April 3, 2026
Alex KiersteinFor the price of a supercar you could make a McLaren F1—one of the cleanest-looking of its kind—into a lumpy disaster.
It was a cheeky sort of end-run around US safety requirements. Ameritech of Connecticut imported several McLaren F1s, gave them Ameritech VINs, and applied all sorts of ghastly modifications to meet the letter of FMVSS. Massive bumper warts. Horrible sealed beam headlights. Apparently all designed to be removed and trashed once whatever song-and-dance Ameritech needed to do was done. The internet abounds with a tale that six of the seven cars that Ameritech imported didn’t even get the mods. Once NHTSA found out, it told Ameritech to cease and desist, and so it did. That makes the Ameritech modification kit seen on eBay a very rare find.
Rare does not mean desirable, as countless used car listings over the years have made abundantly clear. The Ameritech kit seen in the listing is definitely rare. It seems complete, whatever that means, given the extremely small number of kits made. The painted parts are silver, like the Ameritech McLaren F1s all were originally. There’s a novelty appeal to it, I guess. If I was doing a museum display of the McLaren F1’s history, it’d be neat to apply the kit to a mock-up or silhouette of an F1’s nose.
But I’m not going to be doing that. For one, I don’t have a museum nor have I been contracted to work up a display. Secondly, the asking price is an eye-watering $300,000 (or best offer!!!). McLaren F1 values being what they are, perhaps this was priced based on some proportional formula, a bumper overrider value ratio to the car’s selling price. I don’t know. It’s ludicrous no matter what value the underlying car has.
I don’t fault the seller one bit. If you can find another Ameritech kit at a lower price, go buy it. If I had a new, uninstalled, crated kit, who knows what I’d list it for. Big money, for sure.
You’d have to be an idiot, objectively, to install this on a real McLaren F1, though. That’s judgemental, sure. And it seems to be eminently reversible. Maybe as a joke, temporarily. Even Ameritech (allegedly) didn’t intend to leave these on the car.
The real shame of it is, the McLaren F1 is now so valuable that it’s somewhat of a disincentive to drive them, even for the folks who can afford a $20,000,000 car. So maybe there is a reason to install the kit, now that I think of it. Perhaps it’d reduce the value of the car enough to make it rational to drive. Yeah, that’s it.
Recent Posts
All Posts
April 2, 2026
April 2, 2026
April 1, 2026
Leave a Reply