The latest project of Gordon Murray, a South African-born British designer of Formula 1 cars, is a super sports car T.50, for which information has been released bit by bit. Now the T.50 is finally being unveiled in its entirety for the first time, including the finished exterior and interior design.
Exotic and fast – the new car from the former F-1 engineer’s own company “Gordon Murray Automotive” is not just another powerful supercar, it brings some really interesting things that you don’t see every day. The T.50 was designed to be the purest, lightest, and a most driver-centered super sports car to date. At the same time, according to its creator, the T.50 has the most advanced and effective aerodynamics ever seen in a streetcar.
The Gordon Murray T.50 is powered by a 100% bespoke 3.9-liter, V12 engine with 663 hp, which turns to record-breaking 12,100 rpm. The maximum torque is 467-newton meters at 9000 rpm. Next to it is a six-speed manual gearbox and, as expected, only the rear wheels are driven. There is no information yet about the acceleration and the maximum speed.
The T.50 is 4.36 meters long, 1.85 meters wide, but only 1.16 meters high, and has 2.70 meters wheelbase. The T.50’s kerb weight of 986kg makes it the lightest supercar of the modern era, lower than the average supercar weight by almost a third. Thanks to the focus on lightweighting, the car offers unparalleled levels of agility, responsiveness, and driver focus. By the way: there are 288 liters of luggage space in the car.
The most dominant characteristics of the T.50 exterior design are its purity and balance, free from the wings, skirts, and vents that adorn most modern-day supercars. In the front, there are two air intakes that send air to the engine cooler. The purity of the silhouette is broken dramatically when the pair of dihedral doors rise up and forwards, coming to rest high above the passenger cabin.
The 400mm rear-mounted fan expands the car’s performance capabilities significantly versus an ordinary ground-effect supercar. In combination with ram-air induction, the fan adds around 50 hp to the car’s output and cut braking distance by 10m from 150mph.
Inside, similar to the McLaren F1, the driver-centered approach is clearly recognizable – from the central, jet-fighter-like driving position, to the aerospace-grade primary and secondary controls arranged in an ‘ergonomic bubble’ around the driver. British suppliers are responsible for every key component in the entire interior, as well as every facet of the car’s underbody.
There is a cold air intake directly above the driver’s head, and carefully manufactured carbon fiber panels in the roof serve as loudspeakers that amplify the engine sound in the cabin.
The T.50 shown now is only a prototype, and not everything is completely finished. Only 100 units of the new supercar will be manufactured, each of which will cost £2.36 million (around $3.09 million). The team will begin building customer versions of the 986kg supercar in January 2022.
