UP FRONT Project OveRland•Murray’s T.50• Test Drive•Appreciating Depreciation •Citroën 100•BMW M8•What’s On •Angry Man
When you go to test-drive a potential new car, it’s natural
to bring someone along with you for a second opinion: a mate
who knows about those particular cars, or a parent who’s good
at handing out advice, or a mechanic to diagnose any weird
noises it might make. But according to some recent research
by cargurus.co.uk, a lot of people have been bypassing this
logic in favour of bringing some rather odd stuff along for the
ride. The car-buying website polled the nation’s dealers and
discovered some pretty weird and wonderful stuff had turned
up with customers, including a 12-foot snake, a mattress, a rifle,
a ‘lucky egg’, and an accordion. One punter turned up in a pair
of slippers, reasoning that they’re what she usually liked to drive
in, while another was carrying the ashes of a deceased relative
in an urn. Perhaps weirdest of all is the person who came along
with a pair of parrots. Yeah, OK, we can understand bringing a
parrot, that makes perfect sense – but two of them? That’s just silly.TESTING... TESTING...
Back in 1992, a Formula One designer by the name of Gordon Murray
decided that the supercar designers of the era weren’t trying hard enough,
and so he showed them how it was done. While the likes of the Ferrari F
and Porsche 959 were squabbling over who could edge past 200mph,
Murray’s radical design – the McLaren F1 – comprehensively blew them out
of the water with its 240mph top speed. And this wasn’t just a toy designed
for high speed runs; Murray placed the steering wheel in the middle to
optimise weight distribution with the driver on board, and designed the car
so that it could take a decent amount of luggage too.
In 2019, it seems that Murray is once again despairing of the supercar genre.
While we’re all endlessly blown away by the Chirons, 918s and LaFerraris, all
Gordon sees is inefficiency; heavy cars with needless mechanical complexity.
As such, he’s done it again: the drawings of his new T.50 are pretty eye-
watering, and the specs make for impressive reading. The vision is to create a
car that weighs just 980kg, with the highest-revving ever V12 mounted in the
middle – a 3.9-litre Cosworth Gordon Murray Automotive unit offering 650bhp
and revving to an insane 12,100rpm. The T.50 will have a ground-effect fan as
part of the most advanced aerodynamic package seen on any road car and,
just like the F1, it’s been designed from the off to be everyday-usable; that
means it’ll be easy to get in and out of, have sensible service intervals, and
decent luggage capacity. And best of all, that naturally-aspirated V12 is mated
to a proper manual H-pattern gearbox. We can’t wait to see this thing come to
life – a guaranteed game-changer of a car.GORDON MURRAYREINVENTS
THE SUPERCAR, AGAIN
008 http://www.fastcar.co.uk