IN THE SHADOW OF GIANTS

The S1 LM is a tribute to arguably the world's greatest racing car, based on the world's best supercar. Here's how it happened, from the man who dreamed it up...

- JACK RIX

The world is awash in restomods, continuation cars and misty eyed tributes these days, cars that lean on stories from the past to charge exorbitant amounts in the present. Monterey Car Week is the epicentre of this feeding frenzy and this year saw an explosion of short run specials with telephone number pricetags... only one forced us to park our cynicism.

Here was something based on the otherworldly V12, manual, three seat underpinnings of the GMA T.50, styled to look like a Le Mans winning McLaren F1 GTR that had tripped into a time machine and been lavished with an even more exotic mechanical menu. Only five will ever be built, costing many millions each, all sold to the same man. But this isn’t Gordon Murray plundering his back catalogue and hawking it to the highest bidder, it was an intense collaboration with one customer who had a vision and goaded Gordon into green lighting the project... then drove it through with determination, obsessive attention to detail, and yes, quite a bit of cash.

We tracked down that customer, who wishes to remain anonymous, sat with him just a few hours before the car's public debut at the Quail, and asked for the GMSV S1 LM story, beginning to end. Here it is, in his words...

I was born in a tiny village in northeast Morocco - no running water, no electricity - to parents who never went to school. As humble beginnings as you can get, but from a really young age I always loved cars, especially sports cars. That fuelled my ambition, because I realised to get close to any of them I had to make real money - it was a selfish thing, but I also wanted to look after my family. I dropped out of school at 16, got into business, did well at an early age, retired my dad when I was 19 years old and then I started buying cars in my early 20s. I was a big BWW M3 nut - I bought an E46 CSL recently in fact, I've had the manual conversion.