Raise your internet hand if you’ve been driving down the highway at a brisk-but-not-quite-speeding pace, everything’s going swell until you come up on some slower traffic. No worries, you pop into the left lane to pass and try to get your groove going again when suddenly you’re snapped out of your good space by a goddamn slowpoke hogging the lane. Do you see red? Because I see red.

Thankfully, the state of Nevada recognized this as a problem and went and did something about it: as of July 1, drivers are now legally required to drive at least the speed limit in the left lane, local news outlet 13 Action News reported.

The car weighed 2425 pounds dry. It came with a built-in 14.4k modem for sending diagnostic information to the factory, at a time when most of America didn’t have an Internet connection. McLaren famously flew mechanics around the world to service it

ROGER CHATFIELD(Composites technician, McLaren): When the company was that much smaller, they arranged for the whole factory . . . every person could have a run at one. For me, [McLaren director] Creighton Brown was driving. He said, “We’re going to start by demonstrating its torque ability.” Basically, he just put it in gear, didn’t touch the throttle. The car started moving away. Next gear, car moving away, still no throttle. We’re just going up through the gears with no throttle. It’s like, this is bogus. This shouldn’t be working.

MARK GRAIN (Senior technician, McLaren Cars/Motorsport): There was a German customer, a businessman. He lived in Cologne, commuted in the car every day. He said, “Oh, I’ve got a problem, this warning light. I’ve looked in the manual, can’t find anything. Can you send somebody out, see what it is?”

So one of the guys went. It turns out it was the engine cover lifting slightly. The warning light for the engine cover.

But the only time the car ever did it was 185, 190 mph. “It does it on the way to work, and it does it on the way back.” Every day.

NEARBURG: You can tell by the way it responds. You just feel the lightness immediately. It’s a joy to drive, a very honest car. Sitting in the middle isn’t disorienting, and the only thing that’s complicated is paying tolls in a foreign country. When you have half of Italy behind you, standing on their horn, when you’re trying to figure out how to get the toll in the damn booth.

RAY BELLM (Racing driver): I have a contract to [run the McLaren F1 Owners Club], because I went to Ron [Dennis, McLaren’s then chairman] in 2011. I said, “Ron, these cars, they’re all sitting there doing nothing. No one uses them.” Anyone who has a car is a member, just by the fact that they’ve got a car, and we run tours and do probably 700 or 800 kilometers over three days. But the result has been that, in 2011, the cars were worth about $3 million, and they’re now $15 million. Rich people always want to do something no one else can. So the entry ticket is a McLaren F1.

HENRY WINKWORTH-SMITH (McLaren Special Operations Heritage Manager): There are more cars being used now than when I started 10 years ago. People have suddenly gone, “Actually, I can’t get this experience in anything else.” And because the values have climbed, people haven’t been quite so worried about increasing mileage.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: Paul Rosche, rest his soul, said, “This engine should be designed, developed, like any other BMW series engine. It should not need an opening for 250,000 kilometers.”

LENO: Talk about getting something right the first time! There are a number of them that have [huge] miles. I’ve never known anybody to have any trouble with it.

BILL AUBERLEN (Factory racing driver, BMW): The GTR had sequential shifting, right? Every sequential I’ve ever been in is pull to shift up. Gordon’s idea was that you’re stronger when seated, so the GTR was push to shift up. Three in the morning at Le Mans, you’re almost asleep in the car, and all of a sudden—you shift the wrong way.

Luckily, the engine is bulletproof. There are stories about where a water hose fell off and they drove it all the way [back to the pits]. It’s melting everything around it, and it makes it.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: The race engines were designed to do 9000 kilometers between big servicing. We had one road engine that the customer decided to send his car to a nontrained servicing place. They used the wrong oil—we found a lot of wear. It’d been foaming up and not pumping around the engine properly. And they tightened up what they thought was a chain tensioner. That put too much tension on the timing-chain assembly—one of the bolts loosened and started smashing up and down underneath the pistons.

So we had that engine back. It went back to BMW Motorsport, got stripped and rebuilt, even re-Nikasil’d. And it’s a good story, but that’s the only time I’ve heard of it happening.

MATT FARAH (Journalist): My favorite McLaren F1 story is from Ralph [Lauren, a family friend]. About the year 2000. One of his three F1s. The car wasn’t running right, so he plugs it into the wall. The car dials McLaren. Two guys in tweed jackets come over from England, they show up at his house. They go, “Okay, give us the keys.” They come back and go, “You’re not shifting high enough,” and fly back to England. That was it, the whole problem. That’s what owning a McLaren F1 is like.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: Until three months ago, we were using those [original 1990s] laptops [for diagnostics]. Our technicians were being stopped in airports and asked to prove that it was a real laptop, because [security] thought it was a bomb. They were like, “No one uses those laptops anymore.”

MEYER: It runs on a DOS program!

WINKWORTH-SMITH: There was a Jalopnik post, someone took a picture of a laptop here. First off, our workshop manager was furious, because there was a car up in the background and it didn’t look all smart and neat. But that article was hilarious, because I probably got 45 or 50 emails offering me laptops. Ranged from, “I have one of these laptops. I’m not using it. I would like nothing more than the thought of that laptop looking after a McLaren F1. Please give me your address, and I will ship it,” to some guy who was like, “Well, if you haven’t got them, I’ve got one. I want $20,000.”

MEYER: Because the cars are driven very infrequently, servicing is by time. Every nine months was a basic service. Eighteen months was a major service. Every five years, the fuel cell has to be replaced.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: It’s an FIA-spec bag tank, which is brilliant for crash regulations, but . . .

MEYER: The whole back of the car comes off.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: About 25 or 30 hours? It’s easy, but it takes a long time. It’s not that everything is accessible. So the fuel tank, it’s engine-out. Water-temperature sensor, it’s engine-out.

But because you’ve taken the engine out, you need to do a suspension setup. And they’re hand-built; they’re not all the same. One car might set up really easy, and the other might be really difficult. To get all the ride heights and cross weights and everything dialed in, it could take a day. You just don’t know.

LENO: There are no parts. When you break one, they will make you the part. But there’s not a lot of off-the-shelf stuff.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: We’ve got very few windscreens left, for instance. They have this special coating between the two laminates, which means you don’t have wires in them, which gives you a heated windscreen.

To be British, they’re jolly expensive. And, you know, you could put a cheaper GTR screen in, but the voltage is different, you haven’t got your wiring, and it hasn’t got the same blue tint. So we said, Okay, the only way we could do it is to invest in [ordering a complete glass set]. It’s hundreds of thousands of pounds. But it’s important to do it, to keep these cars on the roads.

LENO: When I first got it to the dealer for service, they said, “Oh, replace the wiper blade.” I said, “Well, I don’t drive the car in the rain.” They said, “It’s part of the service.” I said, “How much is the wiper blade?” They said, “$1500.” I said, “You know what, don’t replace the wiper blade! I won’t take it out if it rains.”

You’re at the point now where anything on the car . . . it’s a house.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: I mean, insurance, kill me. We have this limit of two [in the shop at a time]. We had 14 in here at one point. I got a big telling off for insurance. I think the [extra] cost to us was substantial.

LENO: It’s still a car. It’s still a 20th-century automobile in the sense that you see where everything is. We broke a shifter fork on it; we made a new one. It’s just a shifter fork. It’s aluminum. It’s not that unusual. That’s the funny thing about it. All these cars have taken on this mythical status, but they’re still cars. More cleverly put together than most, by a long shot, but it’s still a car.

MAURIZIO ZAGARELLA (Technician, McLaren): We were called flight doctors. Anybody used to fly anywhere if there were any issues.

NEARBURG: Pani Tsouris has driven more miles and knows more about these cars than anybody alive, with the exception, I guess, of Gordon.

PANI TSOURIS (Traveling F1 technician, McLaren Special Operations): I just came back from the United States. A clutch in Minnesota and a fuel-tank replacement in Florida.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: Twenty-four/seven, both of us. I switch my phone off Christmas Day, my anniversary with my girlfriend, and her birthday. Pani’s test-driven cars at midnight.

TSOURIS: Nothing [I do] is an emergency, in terms of fly out tomorrow.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: I think the shortest trip—a guy in Europe got a flat tire. Within an hour and a half, there was a technician at Heathrow, with a wheel in his luggage, flying to the nearest city, who then got a taxi to this car on the side of the road. Three and a half hours later, he was there.

TSOURIS: [For jobs requiring] more than two and a half weeks of work, it’s in our best interests to bring the car back. Or try to, at least.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: These days, because of the value of the car, it’s almost impossible to write one off.

A good example is—if you do a bit of Googling, you’ll find out who I’m talking about. His car came in, and he’d had a fairly substantial shunt. The car was in two halves. It had split. The car had done brilliantly, because he’d hit it right in the middle. The passenger [cell] was absolutely perfect. We cut all the damage out of the tub, x-rayed it, crack-tested it, and then, using all the original body molds, the tooling, the layup books, and also some of the original staff that built these tubs back in the day, we rebuilt it.

DANNY ENGLAND (Composites technician, McLaren): We are, of course, the only company in the world that is physically capable of rebuilding F1s.

WINKWORTH-SMITH: And now that car is driving around, as good as it left the factory, even down to doing torsional-rigidity tests. And to do that, we had to measure it against another F1. So we stripped two other cars down to make sure it was gonna be the same.

PHIL HARDING (Development technician, McLaren): It’s not like you can go and pick another monocoque out and build a new car. It’s cost-effective to repair something worth 5 million pounds, isn’t it?

LENO: Right now, it’s kind of like champagne. It’s something you have once a month or on special occasions.

MEYER: If you think about when it was designed and built, everything on that thing was Formula 1. They were not saving any money on anything at all.

I loved it. I miss them terribly.