GONE IN 1.38 SECONDS
BBC TopGear India|September 2024
The Spéirling isn't just a car, it's a technology revolution. Strap in, it's going to be a hell of a ride
OLLIE MARRIAGE
GONE IN 1.38 SECONDS

That’s not a car, it’s a cheat code,” whispers our sound recordist Andrei. He’s the only one able to talk. The rest of us have been rendered silent. Somewhere in the distance a fast receding blue speck flits out of sight.

There is no revolution in car design any more, goes the common thinking. Everything is incremental. A nudge more power, a tweak more downforce, a modest uplift in speed and grip. A gradual evolution of specification. Balls to that. You want radical? Welcome to the age of the fan.

I’ve never seen or experienced anything like the McMurtry Spéirling. Never driven a faster car, either in a straight line or around corners. In one package McMurtry has created a machine so bizarre it accelerates like a dragster, turns like an F1 car. Better than an F1 car in slow corners. No other car has ever – or probably will ever – do what this one does to low speed corners. Which is turn them into high speed corners.

Which is what happened at Hammerhead. The slowest corner on the TG track, complete with awkward braking, a flick left then hard right, now appears to be some sort of Scalextric corner. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to watch Max Chilton warming the shrunken Batmobile up, because the spectacle is a head scrambler. It’s so fast through the frame of my vision, moving at blurry superhero speeds, that all I can think when I’m left looking at the dirty brown rooster tail of its wake is “How am I ever going to do that?” The problem isn’t just mine. The silence that followed his passage was also “How do we film or photograph something that moves so fast?”.

This story is from the September 2024 edition of BBC TopGear India.

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This story is from the September 2024 edition of BBC TopGear India.

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