‘I Think It Will Probably Be The Last Great True Analogue Driver's Supercar'

Following last month’s announcement that Gordon Murray is to build a new supercar, we sit him down to get the full story

- Adam Towler

It’s like a Lotus Elise with a 650BHP V12 in the back that revs to 12,000rpm. That’s what it is!’

Gordon Murray isn’t actually rebodying an Elise, obviously; he’s simply trying to express in layman’s terms just how brutal and frenziedly exciting his new T.50 hypercar will be from behind the wheel, and I’m hearing him loud and clear, my heart rate rising just at the thought. The maestro is on top form, the excitement writ large across his face and clear in his voice. He’s back on the supercar trail after 25 years, and thriving on it.

Murray, along with a very select band of people such as Adrian Newey, is one of those individuals who even if they were to announce a new type of rabbit hutch you’d still take note. But it was the purist doctrine that left us literally gasping: a hypercar that weighed under a ton, had a naturally aspirated V12, revved to over 12,000rpm and with a manual gearbox? Pass the smelling salts, quick.

For Murray, the reasons for going ahead with the T.50 are also clear: ‘Firstly, I thought what better way to celebrate 50 years of car design than by doing one more supercar – one that exorcises all the stuff I hate about modern supercars. Second reason, nobody else has done it. Why not set out all those targets again that we had with the [McLaren] F1, but now with 30 more years in my toolbox of technology, materials – everything has moved on so much in three decades, which is why we get to 980kg. The mass track at the moment is 983kg, with fluids and everything but no fuel; we don’t do this dry weight rubbish. It’s what the car needs to run. What we call real weight.’