Gordon Murray Automotive T.50

Murray's brief to himself was that nothing on the outside should exist for effect. No fixed wing, no skirts, no vents cut into the bodywork to look purposeful. The fan is what makes that possible, because it works the underbody directly instead of asking the shape to generate downforce, so the shape is free to be clean. What is left reads as a corrected F1. The central driving position with two outboard passenger seats, the upward-opening doors, the small hinged ticket window let into otherwise fixed side glass. The monocoque is bonded carbon fibre sandwich panels over an aluminium honeycomb core, 30kg lighter than the F1's, with monolithic and cored carbon panels over the top. Inside, the hierarchy is unmistakable. A 350mm carbon fibre steering wheel, a 120mm analogue rev counter directly ahead, screens pushed out to either side, an aluminium brake pedal, an aluminium clutch pedal and a titanium throttle. Forged aluminium wheels, 19 inches front and 20 rear on Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, held by Formula One style centre-lock nuts. At the back, the fan sits behind a mesh, entirely visible, and settles the argument about what the car is.

The T.50 races nothing, and that is deliberate rather than incidental. Murray conceived the McLaren F1 as a road car and was then pushed into turning it into a racer, an experience he has said plainly he did not want to repeat. So the T.50s Niki Lauda was drawn from the start as a separate car rather than developed out of the road one, and even it competes in no series. There is no GT class it fits, no homologation behind it, and no factory programme. The pedigree sits in the fan instead, and it is real. The 400mm unit at the back descends directly from the Brabham BT46B that Murray designed in 1978, where the fan was justified to the scrutineers as an engine cooling device because it also drew air through the radiator. Niki Lauda won the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp with it on 17 June 1978, by 34.6 seconds from Riccardo Patrese, and Bernie Ecclestone withdrew the car afterwards. It never started another World Championship race. That is why the track car carries Lauda's name, and why each of its 25 chassis is named after one of Murray's own Grand Prix wins.

The T.50 landed in August 2020 into an argument enthusiasts had already been having for twenty years: whether the McLaren F1 could have a successor, and whether McLaren's own Speedtail counted as one. Murray's answer was to build his and let people compare, and the fact that all 100 sold in forty-eight hours without a public showing suggests the audience had decided in advance. Coverage has centred on the man as much as the car, which is unusual for a hypercar and entirely reasonable here. The name is a career count: the fiftieth design in a fifty-year run that includes the Brabham BT46B, the BT52 and the F1. Hagerty ran a piece built entirely around putting a T.50 next to an F1, which is the comparison every article eventually reaches. For most people the car exists on a screen. It was added to Forza Motorsport, and it turns up regularly at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where the fan is audible from some distance away. What it has not done, and probably never will, is appear in traffic.

Nobody yet knows what goes wrong with a T.50, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than inventing a fault list. The cars are three years old at most, almost all are with their first owners, and no failure pattern has surfaced in public. What is knowable is the discipline the car asks for. The V12 has so little inertia that a lazy upshift at low speed drops the revs below the gear you are reaching for, so the manual gearbox punishes inattention in a way that a modern dual-clutch cannot. That is a skill, not a fault, but it is the first thing an owner has to learn. The bigger practical issue is the opposite of use. Both cars that have reached public auction had delivery mileage, which means most of the run is being stored, and stored cars develop their own problems: flat batteries, tired fluids, seals that dry out. A T.50 driven regularly is likely to be the healthier car. The good news is unusual for this class. Air conditioning that works, 288 litres of luggage space, three seats and fitted luggage were designed in, not bolted on.