New Proposed T.50 Murray Design: Any Design comments (hard to do with no rear view...)

Gordon Murray’s Three-Seat V-12 Supercar


Not the old one, the new one….





Gordon Murray is famous for designing the supercar called the McLaren F1. That street car was a limited edition but one managed to win LeMans. And yet it was a street car.


Jay Leno loves his. (and what more complement do you need?)


Now he’s talking of a reborn 3 seater supercar, made by himself. This one called the T.50 (no word on why the odd punctuation instead of T-50 or T50) . It boasts The 650 horsepower, fan-powered aerodynamics (meaning fans help the aero) , and nod to the Gods of sports cars, a manual transmission.

Following the pattern of the latest supercars, it will be for the super-rich at $2.5 million each and a limited edition to boot, at 100 cars. Period.

Close in numbers in fact, to the McLaren F1, which back in the day cost a lot less than a million but was produced in numbers close to 100.

Murray is an ex-race car designer. In 1969 he moved to the UK and joined the Brabham Formula One Team as Technical Director, winning two world championships (1981 and 1983) during his 17 years with the team. He joined McLaren Racing as Technical Director in 1988 and three consecutive championship wins (1988, 1989 and 1990) followed. In 1990, He moved away from Formula One – after 50 Grand Prix wins – to concentrate on establishing a new company for the group, McLaren Cars Limited.

The original F1 he designed for McLaren was a pioneer in carbon-fiber. Nowadays that is a more well known and well utilized material.

Dimensions are 172.4 inches long and 72.83 inches wide, surprisingly smaller than a modern day Porsche 911.

Who to do to for an engine than a race car engine builder—Cosworth. In this case it will be an engine to rival Ferrari’s best street engines, a Cosworth-GMA 3.9-liter 65° V-12. It is a twin cam, not a four cam. It will be rated at 650 horsepower and wind out to and incredible 12,100 RPM—what Road & Track says is “a higher redline than any other road car in history. “

One reason it can wind this high is that it doesn’t have a flywheel.

Going against Ferrari’s trend the gearbox is a manual shift, a 6-speed H-pattern manual gearbox made by Xtrac. The car also has a limited-slip differential.

One can hardly believe the weight-- 2160 lbs.

The brakes are the state of the art carbon ceramics with monobloc calipers.

Murray was famous with the use of fans to help aero (which he pioneered in the banned Brabham BT46B Formula 1 car). He had it in his F1 design for McLaren and what it did was use air coming in, speeded up by a fan, to control downforce. In this new car he will have a full-width diffuser using fan-assist to adjust the airflow for active ground effects and variable brake balance.


His own company will make the car. The engineering planning, plus all interior and exterior styling of the new vehicle has been carried out by Gordon Murray Design. It will be manufactured in the UK by Gordon Murray Automotive – a new company first announced in late 2017 at the One Formula exhibition. The event celebrated 50 years of Murray’s career in motorsport and automotive design and engineering, plus it previewed plans to build a limited-run supercar – the T.50. Every race or road car penned by Murray so far has featured a ‘T’ designation; and the T.50 will be the 50thin a highly illustrious line.

He didn’t quote the top end, which is what you use to sell supercars (in this case, I’d say over 200 mph…) telling Road & Track “ I have absolutely no interest in chasing records for top speed or acceleration. Our focus is instead on delivering the purest, most rewarding driving experience of any supercar ever built—but, rest assured, it will be quick.”

The question is: how many rabbits can the old wizard pull out of the hat? I would say Murray is facing much more of a challenge today than he did decades ago with the F1. The question is: Is his new proposed car entering a market too crowded at the top? Is it too high priced considering you can buy 30 or more similarly-shaped 2020 Corvettes for the same price? He seems to be counting on his use of fan technology to be the one big advantage, but as soon as his rivals get ahold of one of his first cars and devise their own fan-assisted airflow, it won't be so unique.

Time will tell.


Meanwhile here’s some thoughts on the shape, based on press drawings:

FRONT:Very generic, looking like many another mid engined car going back to the gullwinged Dino prototype with 206 chassis.

SIDE: Again very much like all the other mid engine coupes currently on the market but at least his vents on the side will be tied in with fan driven airflow to accomplish specific goals, not just to vent out hot air that's been through the radiator.

REAR: No rear view was published.

INTERIOR: No interior view was published. But at least it will be another try at a three seater. Interestingly Pininfarina built a 3 seater one-off many decades ago on a mid engined race car chassis.

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There's a rear view in the latest issue of CAR but that big fan, I don't know if I'd want to be a pedestrian walking by the car if thar fan, over a foot in diameter about 3 ft. off the ground might be blowin' something fierce...