Mr. Bean Crashed a McLaren F1 Twice, Then Made Millions

Rowan Atkinson has spent decades playing men who can barely tie their shoes without disaster. Mr. Bean stumbles through life. Edmund Blackadder schemes and fails. But put Atkinson behind a real steering wheel, and the bumbling stops completely.

The Idiot Is an Illusion

Atkinson is a genuine motorsport enthusiast with real skill to back it up. He holds an electrical engineering degree from Newcastle University and a master's from Oxford, but cars, not comedy, were his first love.

He spent about a decade racing a heavily modified Aston Martin V8 Vantage Zagato, rebuilt to AMOC "Mildly Modified" specification with a stripped interior, lightened panels, and a tuned 535bhp engine.

He also appeared on Top Gear's Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment, where he set one of the quicker celebrity lap times of the era.

One of Only 64

In 1997, Atkinson bought a McLaren F1, the road car widely considered the greatest supercar ever built. Only 64 were made for the road.

Most owners locked theirs away as investments. Atkinson drove his constantly, eventually racking up around 41,000 miles on the odometer, an almost unheard of total for a car this rare.

Twice Wrecked

Driving it that much came with consequences. In 1999, Atkinson rear-ended another car in Lancashire, damaging the McLaren's nose.

Then, in August 2011, disaster struck again on the A605 near Peterborough. The car lost control on a wet road, spun, and struck a tree and a road sign before catching fire.

The impact was severe enough to eject the F1's 6.1-litre V12 engine roughly 20 yards from the wreckage.

Britain's Most Expensive Repair Bill

McLaren Special Operations took nearly a year to rebuild the car.

The repair bill reportedly came to around 910,000 pounds, more than the car's original purchase price, and was widely reported at the time as the largest single car insurance payout in British history.

The Car That Made Him Millions

Most people would have walked away. Atkinson had the McLaren fully restored and kept driving it.

In 2015, nearly two decades after buying it and after surviving two serious crashes, he sold the car through a private dealer for an estimated 8 million pounds, roughly 12 times what he had originally paid for it.

The man famous for playing an idiot had, without much fanfare, made one of the shrewder car investments in recent memory.