Someone Paid $75,000 for a $300,000 McLaren, but There's Something Terribly Wrong With It

The McLaren 720S is powered by a mid-mounted 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8, engineered to pump out 710 horsepower (720 metric horsepower) and 568 pound-feet (770 Newton meters) of torque. A dual-clutch seven-speed automatic transmission puts the power down through the rear wheels.

Those make the 720S rocket from 0 to 60 mph (0 to 60 mph) in a mind-blowing 2.5 seconds and hit a top speed of 216 mph (348 kph). We should probably switch all those verbs to Past Tense, because, right now, the top speed of this McLaren is that of the forklift that carries it around.

Remmy Evans, who calls himself "a kid trying to make the YouTube dream come true," has just accomplished his dream of owning a McLaren. He is, in fact, a car rebuild expert, who has just bought this 2019 McLaren 720S at an auction. The car came with a salvage title and is literally in pieces. The insurance company labeled it as damaged beyond repair and declared it a write-off.

Remmy actually bought the car some three months ago, when he placed the winning bid from an airport, but he has just decided to rebuild it. He paid $75,000 to get the McLaren in his driveway. He actually won the auction with a $80,725.

But IAAI refused that final offer and listed the car again, the following day, with a Buy It Now price of $75,000. So, Remmy bought it right then and there, at 5 in the morning, and days later, he went to pick it up from an Insurance Auto Auctions yard located just a 15-minute drive from his shop. With all the taxes, he ended up paying $79,759.

When new, the car set wheels on American soil with an MSRP of $321,000. Over the years, in the used car market. However, this McLaren doesn't run, doesn't drive, and is severely deformed. If everything goes according to plan, the expense for the McLaren would be around $35,000, which is under what he paid on his heavily modified, 1,000-horsepower Honda Civic.

The passenger side doesn't have a single scratch. But the front end and the driver's side took one for the team. All that the new owner knows is that the previous owner was driving on a gravel road when he lost control and totaled the $300,000 McLaren.

Now, Remmy will have to replace the front bumper, hood, driver's door, and quarter panel. And that's the easy part. The subframe is badly bent as well, and every single fluid line on the car should be dislocated and replaced with a new one.

When he puts the car on a lift, he will see the condition of the framerails. The McLaren is built around a carbon fiber structure that would be terribly expensive to replace.

The McLaren has covered 26,000 miles, which made it the lowest-mileage 720S on the market at the time of the purchase, clean or salvage title.