Text by Bryce Womeldurf
Video sourced from TopGear’s YouTube channel
Photography courtesy of Gordon Murray Automotive
On Tuesday, automotive design legend Gordon Murray unveiled his latest car, the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50. Gordon calls it the last of the analog supercars and says it’s something of a hyper-GT. Essentially, it’s a car that combines hauling ass with comfortably hauling you and your luggage across the country for many miles without incident. Performance with great packaging.
In the video below, from TopGear, he goes through the details of the car and compares it against the car he’s perhaps most well known for, his McLaren F1. And when I say “his McLaren F1” I don’t just mean he designed it, but the one in the video is one of the “XP” prototype cars, known as “XP3” that he owned and drove during the testing process. This was the third of five total prototypes created before the F1 went into production, one of three surviving, and it’s the one that was driven the most. Gordon estimates that he drove it something like 30,000 miles, many of them in testing.
That 30,000 mile figure is impressive, because the F1 was built back before fast cars had so much safety technology to protect the driver from destroying the car and themselves. It didn’t have power steering or antilock brakes, because those things would have added weight and affected the connection with the car, getting in the way of the driver’s involvement.
In that way, the GMA T.50 continues the F1’s role, as GMA say – by having been “engineered to be the most driver-centric vehicle ever built.” Everything is focused around the driver’s connection with the car. The steering is only powered part of the time, at low speeds for ease of parking. The rest of the time, it’s just you and the car. Like the F1, the T.50 features a central driving position. Unlike it though, it has working air conditioning. There are no touch screens; instead, everything is controlled by haptic switches on the steering wheel.
There are no stalks for the indicators. Those duties are handled by a pair of buttons on the steering wheel, along with buttons for the horn and high beams, similar to the F1. No big screens or in-you-face infotainment. Just a screen on the right for music or phone, and one on the left side for instruments. It’s less flashy than my Subaru.
And he speaks a lot about that lack of flash. In an age when so many high performance cars are festooned with vents and swoops and aggressive visible ductwork, this will instead be an understated car; “a return to beauty” as Gordon puts it. The T.50 gracefully hides most of its aero tricks. The only visible part being the fan on the back. The fan works semi-intelligently to automatically work for the driver in two modes and manually in one of 5 selectable modes. There was similar fan technology on the rear of the F1, but it was much earlier in development and therefor less effective, only adding between 3-5% more downforce. The fan on the T.50 creates up to 100% of additional downforce and apparently can create an aerodynamic effect that’s equivalent to the car having a 1 meter longtail for stability at high speeds, and in a package that is much smaller and lighter.
A lot of thought has also gone into the packaging of engine access and ease of luggage loading. This car actually spreads itself open in a gullwing split at the back, similar to the old DeTomaso Mangusta. Easier access and it’s just plain pretty.
Like many people on social media, you might be thinking “so what, how does this relate to me?” You might be wishing all of this thought had gone into something that more people could drive and experience. After all, there will only be 100 of these made for the road and an additional 25 made for motorsport use. In addition to being rare, they’ll be expensive with a cost of
£2.86 million with VAT. The good news is that half of them were sold the day that the first sketch of this car was drawn, with about two-thirds now sold in advance. That should help GMA pay for the design and production of the T.43, a more affordable sports car that they will be producing in the future. Production is expected to start in 2022 of the T.50. We’ll have to see when the T.43 is shown, if it has an available date, and how attainable its price will be.
For now though, I just found the video interesting in that he broke down so well how everything was thought through. Too many cars these days are made to be all things to all people. And so of course, you end up with a jack of all trades, master of none. This instead is a very rare case of engineering to be the master of one thing and one thing only. Pure connection. Let’s just hope that more of us will get to feel it.
