How to break the FOS Hill record

Following on from its record-breaking appearance at the Festival, the McMurtry team attended July’s GRRC Breakfast Club at the Goodwood Motor Circuit. There was a permanent crowd gathered around the Spéirling, even as temperatures crept towards 30 degrees, proof enough of exactly how popular this new machine was. The scenes at the Festival of Speed as this car launched up the Hill at implausible speeds had clearly struck a chord with the GRRC members, as Max Chilton found himself mobbed for the majority of the morning. The record run was awesome, bordering on ridiculous, and without doubt one of the highlights, if not the highlight, of the weekend.

Chilton noted that it had been near on exactly a year to the day since he had first come into contact with McMurtry with a chance meeting at the 2021 Festival: “I was just walking around with some friends; I wasn’t there with any sponsors or any company I was just there enjoying myself as a fan because I’ve always loved the event. And Dave Turton saw me, obviously being a racing fan, he said ‘Oh Max have you got five minutes to come and have a look at this car we’ve designed.’ I said ‘Yeah why not’, went down there and was instantly impressed by it.”

“I like things that are unique and there’s nothing I knew that was out there like this, and I was thinking I was going to be stopping IndyCar anyway so I was thinking ‘I might try and get my foot through the door here and just see if they’ve got a test driver’”. At that time, it was hillclimb ace Alex Summers who was carrying out testing duties for McMurtry, including the car’s Hill runs in 2021, but Chilton’s experience from Formula 1 and IndyCar proved to be too good an opportunity to miss, and Dave Turton was keen in impress the impact he has had on the car: “Max has been instrumental in stuff like aero-stability work. The rear wing is something that he’s really pushed for since driving the car”.

Since the start of 2022 the McMurtry car has undergone a handful of test days at Silverstone, a circuit that Chilton knows well from his time in Formula 1, and the driver has overseen a range of improvements in that short time: “It has transformed. When I first drove it on the November test, the fan system wasn’t working – we still hadn’t finished it, so we didn’t even turn it on. Basically, I was driving a car which was designed to have downforce but didn’t have any. So it was quite an entertaining test but I could sense the basis of the car was brilliant and the power was outrageous, and I knew that was only going to get better once we put the fan system on because it can’t deploy all of its power without having its full downforce.

“The first thing which is a product of my time on the car is the rear wing. The car last year didn’t have a rear wing, and then I very quickly put a rear wing on it because we did a lot of our testing at Silverstone and I felt like the balance was just not quite right. So we put the rear wing on which made it a lot more stable. There have been a few different mods along the way but it’s a team effort, we’re constantly finding things.”

Turton explained that it was this time out on circuit that helped to shape the team’s Goodwood success. “We started testing the car at Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit, really starting to stretch its legs and really starting to get Max’s feedback into the development of the car. And at that point you’ve got some really good data, you know your speed and your grip so maybe a couple of months before Festival of Speed we ran the simulations and realised that we could be in with an outside chance. Obviously, simulations are very different to real life because of the fear factor as the track gets narrower and narrower as you go through the hay bales and the flint wall. But we kind of knew that if everything performed well a win at the event would be possible depending on what the competition would be.”

The team was clearly confident, because a few weeks before the Festival of Speed, it put out a press release stating its intentions to break the Hill record, a fact that Chilton said added an awful lot of pressure, especially considering it would be his first ever attempt at the Timed Shootout. “I was definitely stressed. Basically every time we went out that week from the Thursday we went quicker. And then I was at a wedding on Saturday so we put Alex Summers, who’s leading the British Hillclimb championship, in on the Saturday and he ended up going quicker than I did and just shy of the record. So then I felt the pressure to get in and go quicker again. I had a pretty sleepless night on Saturday knowing that I sort of needed to break the record.”

Despite the internal pressure, looking at it from the outside things certainly looked relaxed when the car took to the Hill for its first run as it trundled to a relatively tame 49-second time. This, according to Turton, was all part of the plan: “For us it was mainly about getting the drivers as much confidence as possible, reviewing the onboards. From the car side, it was basically turning up the downforce and the power, so over the first three runs of the weekend we were turning the car progressively up and up and up on both those metrics and by the time we got to Saturday, when Alex did his first run, that was everything on the table in the car’s current configuration.”

After all the months of preparation, and the gradual build-up of performance over the weekend, Sunday dawned, and there was a sense of expectation around the Estate that something special was about to happen. All of the simulations and practice runs pointed towards a new record being set. But Chilton still had to get in the car and put the time in. He said: “It’s a pretty hard record to beat, you do have to go pretty balls out to break it, but then also we knew we were live on ITV1 and YouTube there was probably 120,000 people there on Sunday and I just wanted to make sure I could get to the top of the Hill.”

We all know the outcome by now. The record time was beaten not once, but twice by Chilton on his two runs on Sunday, including in the one that really mattered, the Timed Shootout. Reminiscing on the day, he said: “I’ve been going [to the Festival of Speed] since I was four years old, I knew that record since I was a kid. I thought one day it might be beaten but I didn’t think it would be me so it’s just an amazing moment.” But, quite incredibly, Chilton believes he left some time on the table; “The crazy thing is there’s more in it. There’s probably another three or four tenths in myself by just cleaning it up. I made a mess of the last corner, clipped the hay bale and had to back out of the throttle, so there was definitely an easy 38 in there.”

Perhaps ominously for any manufacturers out there considering taking on McMurtry, both Chilton and Turton were keen to stress that there’s plenty of development still to go before it reaches its full potential. Turton noted that the Spéirling as it was at the Festival of Speed wasn’t even set up for the Hill: “It’s worth saying the car isn’t actually designed to do hillclimbs, it’s designed to go round circuits. We’re carrying a 60kWh battery, which is a big component of the car’s weight, for when we’re lapping Silverstone. When you compare it to the Volkswagen ID.R which had an 8kWh hillclimb special battery there’s still plenty more in the tank we could do with a hillclimb iteration, if we get the opportunity to try again in the future.” Meanwhile Chilton voiced his excitement at the prospect of making the car even quicker: “We’ve got a couple of mods we could do to the car for next year which we reckon are at least a couple of seconds quicker. So I think all in all there’s two and half seconds or more in the car left, which is quite ridiculous really but it probably is in there. which is nice to know. We’re right at the start of what the car can achieve, which is the exciting bit, hence why I think we can come back next year if we’re invited back and go even quicker again. If any other manufacturer tries: bring it on.”

It would seem as though we might well see the McMurtry back at Goodwood before too long, but Turton did have this to say about the record-breaking machine: “Now it’s achieved a record at Goodwood we’re actually going to retire it from risky activities. So you won’t see this car risking throwing it in the wall or anything else because it’s a piece of company history now and we hope to be able to bring it to events like this for many years to come. What we are going to do is build two more Spéirlings that are even faster, and they will then go on to do the next phase of the record-breaking programme and also contribute to the road car development.”

But it’s not just events here that the team has its eye on. Turton intimated that the Spéirling might be set loose on some of the world’s most prestigious race tracks in the future: “The car is designed to lap grand prix circuits rather than hillclimbs, you’ve seen the comparison to the ID.R, you’ve seen the comparison to a historic McLaren Formula 1 car, so now it’s up to us to translate that performance onto a wider circuit. You’ll see this car pop up in some interesting locations doing some headline grabbing things that involve speed and lap time.” There are clearly some big plans in the back pocket of this McMurtry team then, and Chilton is keen to carry on his journey along with it: “I just love it, I love all things British. It’s a British team, British design, British manufactured and a British driver so it’s a really cool combo and I think that’s part of the reason why it’s gone down so well with the Goodwood members.”

When asked about his end-game vision, Chilton said: “I think we’re basically going to be known as the market leaders in the electric supercar market. We might go on to develop more cost-effective road cars for day-to-day, because we can’t all keep driving around in these huge cars. What I want it to be is just a really successful and well established British electric car brand of the future. We’ve got ourselves on the map thanks to Goodwood and I think it can only grow from there, so I think we’re in a good place and I just can’t wait to see it grow.” Neither can we.

Interested in owning one of these? You may not have to wait too long to put your money down, as Turton outlines the team’s plans for getting the Spéirling out to the public: “We’ve had a fantastic response. We still haven’t got through all the emails yet. There are a lot of interested parties and we’re going to roll out the official purchase programme over the next few weeks so people who are interested can get a pre-order in. Hopefully the people who want to collect this car, or use it as a track or a road car – which is an interesting prospect – will get in early before the order books close.”

With that, we wave the McMurtry Spéirling goodbye. For now, at least…