“I'M BUILDING THE LAST GREAT ANALOGUE SUPERCAR” - GORDON MURRAY

HIS WORK HERE IS NOT DONE: AN HEIR TO THE MCLAREN F1 IS JUST ONE OF MANY PROJECTS BEING HATCHED BY THE VISIONARY DESIGNER

- GAVIN GREEN

THE MAN WHO gave us the world’s greatest supercar is ready to raise the bar higher. Gordon Murray’s T.50 is a new sports car from a new sports car company called Gordon Murray Automotive. It’s the spiritual successor to Murray’s marvellous McLaren F1. “It’s everything you like about the McLaren F1 but slightly better,” he tells me. “It may well be the last great analogue supercar.”

So we go to Murray’s home in leafy rural Surrey, UK – “The only house in Surrey that has one bedroom and 22 garages” – to talk T.50. We also discuss the past, the present and the future, and go for a drive in one of his many cars, all of them lightweight and driver-focused. He’s chosen his Lotus Elan today.

We get a guided tour through those 22 garages and then go to the only drive-in cinema in Surrey. It’s certainly the only one where you can watch movies from inside a 1959 Cadillac flat-top sedan, starlit sky twinkling seductively above. In fact, they’re 120 fibre-optic ‘stars’ embedded in a black ceiling. Murray’s drive-in is actually in a big loft above one of his garages. But it feels like Happy Days circa 1959.

Murray is wearing a colourful patterned shirt, as always, sports a neatly trimmed ’tache, as always, and does not look or behave anything like his 73 years. His CV is extraordinary. Design boss of Brabham for a decade from the mid-1970s, technical director of McLaren’s GP team during the dominant Senna and Prost years, designer and mastermind of the McLaren F1 road car, owner of a successful design consultancy, creator of a potentially revolutionary new car manufacturing process (iStream), champion of eco-friendly lightweight design, and now – as if all that is not enough – founder of a new car company making the spiritual successor to the McLaren F1 in a new factory at Dunsfold in Surrey.