Sweet soul music
The last time Gordon Murray penned a supercar (we’ll ignore the Mercedes McLaren SLR, which he was less than enamoured with), it won Le Mans. That car was, of course, the McLaren F1 and, while his latest creation, the T.50, is being built primarily as a road car, there will be a limited run of track-only specials.
His concept for the T.50 was straightforward – create the ultimate driver’s car. However, the execution of this aim is considerably more complex. Murray set his sights on ensuring every element of the driving experience is optimised to provide maximum driver engagement, from the steering weight and feedback to the engine note and even the tactility of the cockpit controls. To this end, the T.50 is both beguilingly simple, yet replete with some very advanced engineering concepts, such as the fan-assisted aerodynamic package (see sidebar on p32). It is also almost entirely bereft of the trinkets one has come to expect of a modern supercar. There is a stereo, but no all-singing digital HMI and, thanks to weekly weight watchers meetings during the design and development process, the overall weight has been kept to a hair under 1000kg.
At its heart
