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SOME 30 YEARS LATER, GORDON MURRAY'S GMA T.50 ATTEMPTS ΤΟ PERFECT THE ICONIC MCLAREN F1, CENTER SEAT AND ALL.

- ELANA SCHERR

THE GORDON MURRAY AUTOMOTIVE (GMA) T.50 is not a world-beating numbers car. It does not boast the biggest engine. It does not make jaw-dropping horsepower or tractor-like torque. Its shift speeds will be limited by the skill of its driver, as will its lateral and launch results. None of this is by mistake. If Gordon Murray wanted to make a world-beating numbers car, he could have. He did it multiple times on the racetrack with Formula 1 designs for Brabham and McLaren that led to several constructors' and drivers' championships. He's also done it with a street machine. The naturally aspirated McLaren F1 held a record for the world's fastest production car from 1993 until 2005, when the Bugatti Veyron outran it—with the help of four turbochargers.

Murray could have built his own big turbocharged, electrified, grippy aero machine and gone up against the Rimacs and Koenigseggs, but he wanted to make a driver's car. By his definition, that's a three-seater with a central driving position and a naturally aspirated V-12 like the F1, but this time lighter, more fuel efficient, and better balanced.

“The brakes never worked really well,” Murray tells us. “The air conditioning didn’t work very well. The clutch needed adjusting regularly. The fuel tank needed changing every five years. From an aesthetic point of view, there were always a few things on the F1 that I really didn’t like. I had a very low budget and a very short time [with it]. When I finished the tooling, I would have loved to have changed those things, but I couldn’t. And every time I see an F1, it grates.”

Murray didn’t sit and sulk about it. He founded a design and engineering firm in 2007 and developed an award-winning city-car prototype (the T.25). After a corporate restructuring, the sale of the Gordon Murray Technologies side of the business allowed GMA to fix all the flaws that had been bugging Murray about the F1.