T he McLaren F1 GTR chassis No. 10R is striking for its immediacy: a blood-red body set against yellow wheels and the oversized “GTR” script derived from Gordon Murray’s own handwriting. Conceived as McLaren’s press and development prototype, this was how the marque chose to introduce the 1996 GTR to the world—not as a neutral racing chassis awaiting sponsorship, but as a resolved and charged visual object.
The F1 is usually written about in terms of performance, rarity or race history. But this specific chassis can be read in another way: as an object in which form, image and cultural meaning are present from the outset and have only intensified over time. Its story is not only one of engineering, but of how something becomes recognizable and stays that way.
Most racing cars come into the world unfinished in visual terms. They leave the factory to be defined later by the teams that run them—Gulf blue and orange or Harrods green set against yellow—branding applied once the car has already been built. In such cases, color and graphics arrive as an overlay, tied to sponsorship, allegiance and the contingencies of a racing season. The 10R did not follow that sequence.
Its “presentation livery” was devised during a period when Murray was closely involved in the appearance of McLaren’s prototypes, selecting their colors, liveries and interior finishes himself. “Color is something that you just think about all the time,” says Murray. Color does not begin and end with the bodywork. It extends to anodized aluminum, carbon-fiber tints, castings and mechanical components, each contributing to how the object is perceived. In the F1, color forms part of the object’s internal logic, shaping not only its appearance but the legibility of its construction.
That attitude reflects an unusually broad background. Before turning to technical drawing, Murray began in art, winning a bursary in a school competition and continuing to draw and paint throughout his life. This detail is revealing not because it explains the F1, but because it suggests that questions of appearance, color and composition were present in his thinking long before the project began.
Murray’s design for the F1 is often reduced to a set of headline features, but what stands out more on closer inspection is the consistency of its decisions. The central driving position establishes a single axis through the car, and the surrounding structure follows from it. The windshield, the roofline and the taper of the rear bodywork all align with that logic. There is very little that feels incidental and very little that has been introduced for effect. The car reads less as a collection of solutions than as a single idea pursued with unusual discipline.
The same clarity carries into the car’s construction. The BMW V12 sits within an engine bay lined in gold foil, a solution developed for heat management but one that leaves the mechanical elements unusually visible. The cam covers, intake plenums and surrounding structure are not concealed; they are arranged and legible. What is normally hidden becomes part of the car’s presence, not as display, but as a consequence of how it has been made. It is this legibility—the sense that the car can be read through its parts and how they meet—that gives it a particular authority as an object.
The project also brought together a set of complementary disciplines. The shaping of the body fell to chief designer Peter Stevens, whose training combined sculpture and product design. Before McLaren, he studied under Anthony Caro at Central Saint Martins and later under Misha Black at the Royal College of Art. That background does not announce itself, but it can be felt in the way the car resolves. The surfaces are continuous, the volumes controlled and the whole reads without fragmentation. It behaves less like an assemblage than a single, held form.
“The big GTR down the side is actually my handwriting.”
The base red color was carefully chosen. Murray wanted a darker hue than the brighter, more orange-toned reds that had become common on contemporary performance cars. The choice carried another dimension. Ron Dennis, then chairman and chief executive officer of McLaren, disliked red because of its association with Ferrari. Murray therefore selected it for the prototype. The gesture was mischievous, but not arbitrary. One of motorsport’s most recognizable colors was lifted from its expected setting and redeployed elsewhere. The result feels unexpectedly close to Pop: playful, irreverent and faintly iconoclastic.
The graphics were conceived in a similarly direct manner. “The big GTR down the side is actually my handwriting,” Murray recalls. The script was enlarged and adapted by McLaren’s graphics department, but its source remained personal. Rather than functioning as branding in the conventional sense, the lettering became part of the car’s identity, repeated across the bodywork at a scale that made it legible from a distance and instantly recognizable in photographs. The effect was graphic, but also authorial. The image carried the mark of its creator.
The underlying ambition was unusual. Murray remembers the prototype liveries as “a conscious effort to create what they call art cars.” Whether or not the term is applied strictly, it places 10R within a wider tradition in which color, graphics and form are conceived together. And that story begins well beyond motorsport.
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Long before the term “art car” entered common use, artists and designers were already exploring how they might alter the way a vehicle was perceived. Writing in The Automobile (September 2024), Paul d’Orléans traces one of the earliest examples to Paris in the 1920s and the work of Sonia Delaunay, co-founder of the Orphist movement. Delaunay’s practice did not begin with the car, but with color itself. Working alongside Robert Delaunay, she developed the idea of simultanéisme, exploring how adjacent colors could alter perception and how rhythm, light and movement might be conveyed without representation. Color, in other words, was not merely decorative. It shaped the experience of the object.
That logic extended beyond painting. In 1925, Delaunay applied her abstract patterns—blocks and bands of color derived from her textile designs—to the body of an Ariès motorcar exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The exhibition was one of the defining showcases of modern design between the wars, bringing together architecture, furniture, fashion, graphics and industrial production, and would later lend its name to the Art Deco movement itself. By placing a motorcar within that environment, Delaunay treated it not simply as a machine, but as part of a broader visual culture. The intervention did not alter the form of the vehicle. Instead, it altered the way that form was read.
The BMW Art Car program, initiated a half-century later in the 1970s, approached the same idea from a different direction—devised, appropriately, by the French art auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulain. Rather than shaping the design of a car from the outset, artists were invited to work directly onto completed racing machines. The automobile became a canvas in the most literal sense.
The results varied according to the artist. In 1975, Alexander Calder covered the BMW 3.0 CSL in broad fields of primary color, allowing red, blue and yellow to move across the bodywork with little regard for its underlying structure. Color became the primary agent of movement, overriding the form beneath.
Frank Stella approached the same object through structure. His 1976 design treated the car as a technical surface, enclosing it within an enlarged grid that recalls engineering diagrams as much as painting. The body is mapped, measured and fixed within a system of lines.
Roy Lichtenstein’s BMW 320i Turbo of 1977 operated differently again. Drawing on the language of comics and commercial imagery, he introduced speed lines and bands of color that depict motion rather than assist it. The car becomes illustrative, carrying an image of movement across its surface.
Andy Warhol’s intervention, applied to the BMW M1 in 1979, was more direct still. Paint was applied quickly and visibly by hand, intended to evoke the blur of movement through gesture. The surface records the act of painting as much as it does the idea of speed.
Most recently, in 2024, the program saw Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu’s BMW M Hybrid V8 unveiled at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her contribution draws together elements of several predecessors, blending the graffiti-like scale and graphic immediacy of 10R’s oversized script with the Ben-Day dots that animate Lichtenstein’s compositions on both canvas and sheet metal. More than a century after Delaunay’s Ariès, the automobile remains a site for experimentation with color, image and perception.
Chassis 10R begins from a different position. Rather than being imposed upon the car, the image emerged from within the project itself. The difference can be seen most clearly in how the graphics relate to the body beneath them. Stella’s grids impose a system upon the car; the repeated “GTR” script of 10R follows the contours of the body, stretching and compressing as the surfaces change. The lettering does not enclose the form so much as move with it. Likewise, where Lichtenstein’s speed lines depict motion, 10R’s graphics function within motion, designed to remain legible at speed and in photographs.
By the mid-1990s, the McLaren F1 GTR was already circulating beyond the race tracks for which it had been built. For many, it appeared first in magazines, on bedroom walls or through early driving franchises such as Need for Speed. Chassis 10R intensified that effect. Its long residence within the collection of Nick Mason, drummer of Pink Floyd and one of the foremost collectors of historic competition cars, ensured it remained in circulation. During his 25 years of ownership, 10R appeared at exhibitions, demonstrations and events, becoming one of the most publicly visible examples of the F1 GTR. The encounter was often indirect, but the recognition remained immediate.
Today, Murray continues to develop a new generation of collector cars at Gordon Murray Automotive in Surrey. He designed the company’s headquarters and selected much of the art displayed within it, including works by Pop pioneers Peter Blake and Andy Warhol. Reflecting on that work, he recalls receiving a letter from Ralph Lauren in which the American designer described Murray’s latest cars—and the F1 before them—as “pieces of art” rather than simply automobiles. The observation is striking. Few modern designers have done more to create enduring cultural icons. That Lauren should recognize the F1 in those terms suggests how far the car had traveled from its origins as a supercar project.
Semiotician Roland Barthes described the car as a modern equivalent of the Gothic cathedral: an object produced by many hands, but received collectively through image and recognition as much as through use. The McLaren F1 sits comfortably within that condition. Long before most people encountered one in person, they already knew what it looked like.
The irony of chassis 10R is that it was conceived as a prototype. It was intended to present an idea. Instead, it became one.
Many racing cars acquire meaning over time. Chassis 10R arrived with one.
