Gordon Murray: Breaking Rules, Shedding Grams
Gordon Murray's cars always feel like they've arrived from the future by mistake. They are so impossibly light, so fiendishly clever, and so utterly focused on their purpose that they make everything else on the road look like a clumsy, overweight dinosaur from a bygone era. For fifty years, this quiet South African has been a man on a holy crusade against the automotive industry's laziest deadly sin: weight. His sermon has been delivered in the form of some of the fastest and most innovative cars the world has ever seen.
Murray arrived in Britain in the late 1960s and landed a job at the Brabham Formula One team. It was here that his wildly creative thinking was first unleashed. While other designers were making small, safe improvements, Murray was coming up with ideas that seemed to operate on a different logical framework from the rest of humanity. His cars were famous for being low, light, and packed with brilliant ideas.
The Fan Car
His most famously unfair advantage was the 1978 Brabham BT46B, better known as the "fan car." Facing Lotus, the dominant team of the ground-effect era, Murray didn’t try to beat them at their own game - he made their game look ridiculous. He read the rulebook and found a loophole which said a fan was legal if its main purpose was cooling. So, he bolted a gigantic fan to the back of the car which, he claimed with a perfectly straight face, was for the engine. Its actual purpose, of course, was to suck the car to the road with such immense force that it was practically nailed to the tarmac. The car raced once, won by a colossal margin, and was promptly banned. It was a perfect piece of Murray genius.
Total Domination at McLaren
In the late 1980s, Murray moved to the McLaren Formula One team, where he and boss Ron Dennis created arguably the single most dominant racing car in history. The 1988 McLaren MP4/4, driven by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, was a masterpiece of ruthless efficiency. It was so far ahead of the competition that it won 15 of the 16 races that season. Having achieved a level of success that was almost boring, Murray wanted a new challenge. He wanted to build a road car.
The Greatest Road Car of All Time
The car he created was the 1992 McLaren F1. This was a demonstration of what happens when a genius is given a blank cheque and told not to compromise on anything. It was the first production car with a full carbon-fibre chassis. It had a central driving seat, like a fighter jet. Famously, the engine bay was lined with gold foil, simply because it was the best material for heat reflection. And at its heart was a magnificent, naturally aspirated BMW V12 engine.
The F1 was a machine of pure, unfiltered focus. There were no turbos, no driver aids, and no excuses. Its top speed of 240 mph was a world record that stood for years. It was a spectacular statement that remains, for many, the greatest supercar ever made. In a final, magnificent act of showing off, a racing version of the F1 won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1995, beating purpose-built prototypes. Having achieved road car perfection, Murray then did something very strange: he went off to design a city car.
A Return to the Fold
After leaving McLaren, he founded his own company, but instead of building more hypercars, he focused his immense brain on the problem of urban transport. It was a typically Murray-esque move: finding the most difficult problem and trying to solve it in the cleverest way possible. But the lure of the supercar is a powerful one. In recent years, he has returned to the arena he once dominated, this time under his own brand, Gordon Murray Automotive.
The T.50: The Fan Car Returns
His first new supercar, the GMA T.50, is a machine of breathtaking ambition. It is an ultra-lightweight, carbon-fibre hypercar with a central driving seat and a bespoke, naturally aspirated V12 engine that revs to an insane 12,100 rpm. And in a magnificent nod to his own naughty past, it has a large fan at the back. This time, the fan is part of a hugely complex active-aero system, but its spiritual link to the banned 1978 Brabham is unmistakable. It is Gordon Murray, once again, being cleverer than everyone else.
The story of Gordon Murray is a story of relentless, restless innovation. He is a man who seems physically pained by unnecessary weight and complexity. For Murray, the function of a car part is secondary to its mass; he has an X-ray-like ability to see the unnecessary grams hiding in every bracket and bolt. His career has been a fifty-year war against the conventional, a quest to prove that brainpower is always more effective than brute force. He is, without question, the cleverest man in the car business.