Interview: Gordon Murray on racing the T.50 at Le Mans

On T.50 and T.33

E: How’s it been going? Are you pleased with how people received the car? 

GM: “It was a fantastic weekend really. The customers obviously loved hearing the car for the first time. But the best thing for me being at Goodwood was the public reaction. These days with virtual launches, the public don’t get to see these things. So we thought Goodwood would be the perfect place to launch it for the first time, and the reactions have been fantastic."

E: The F1 is obviously a high watermark, one that you’re aiming for with the T.50. It genuinely baffles us, why has no one done this again?

GM: “Thank goodness they haven’t – that’s why we did T.50. A few had a crack at it. Porsche, Ferrari with the Carrera GT and F50. They were probably the two best cracks at beating the F1 with the NA engine but they didn’t quite do it, they didn’t have the same focus on the driver experience. Since then, the supercar world has gone crazy. It’s all about horsepower, top speed, 0-60, 0-100 and the styling seems to be some competition to see who can be the maddest. 

“We got to 50 years of car design in 2017, we thought we should do something. We thought nobody else has done an F1, with the focus, the engineering detail, driver-centric and lightweight. So we decided to do the T.50. We were well into it when McLaren announced the Speedtail. I stopped the team, got them together and said “they’re surrounded by F1s, they for sure are going to do a better F1”. When we saw the Speedtail, we went “right, we’re back on!”. It’s a GT and designed for top speeds.

"The only record we want is for the T.50 to be better than the F1 as a driver’s car. Of course, the engine is 50 per cent of the driving experience, so we went to Cosworth and said, ‘you’ve just got to push the boundaries here. You’ve got to do us an engine to end all engines. An engine forever.’ It’s really not a lot of difference to the V12 Senna, a few laps before.”

Gordon is of course referring to the McLaren MP4-6 Formula 1 car from 1991, which Ayrton Senna drove to his third and final World Championship title. It got regular exercise at the hands of Bruno Senna at the 78^th Members’ Meeting, celebrating 30 years since Senna’s last championship win. He’s really not exaggerating with the comparisons between the T.50 that ran that day and the 3.5-litre Honda V12 in the McLaren. Both were aural tonics of a similar composition, sonically filling the grounds of the Motor Circuit with a near-equal unavoidable density of sound.

E: It’s amazing to think that just 1,500 revs separate those two cars – one a no-compromise F1 championship winner, the other a versatile road car with three seats and luggage space. Surely you’ll have to quieten it down? Does it even idle like most road cars?

GM: “Yes, it’s interesting. There are ways of getting around it. What will really be the best sound in the T.50, as in the F1, is the induction sound inside. You can’t actually hear the exhaust that much when that’s sorted. It started in the F1 around 2,500rpm. With this, it starts around 4,500 but we haven’t tuned it yet. We might get it a bit lower. The idle is at around 1,200rpm – there’s no flywheel and it’s a very low inertia engine.”

E: Have you been tempted to get an F1 in to have alongside and to compare?
GM: “Absolutely. We have a lot of young engineers that have never even seen an F1. I borrowed one for three months and immersed them all in it.”

E: I bet they loved that!
GM: “They did, but it was really useful to give them a grounding and an understanding of the starting point and the principles.”

E: “How has the process of creating a car like this changed and improved now, with the digitisation of engineering, design, with how computers can do a lot of the maths for you in terms of aerodynamics, loads and stresses?

GM: “From a styling point of view, we don’t really use clay anymore. We dabbled with virtual reality but we went back to surface modelling. From an analysis point of view, in engineering design, my goodness. The amount of detail you go into with carbon is incredible. This chassis, with similar geometry to the McLaren F1, is 70kg lighter than the F1’s and is twice as torsionally rigid. It’s all to do with the modelling tools and knowing where to put the carbon and what carbon to use.

“We were going to use a wind tunnel, but we couldn’t because of Covid-19. So we had to rely 100 per cent on CFD and it’s turned out to be absolutely spot on. The other level that’s moved on in 30 years, is manufacturing. A lot of the car is printed. You just can’t believe it. The door handles are aluminium. With the F1, they would have been cast. Today we print it and it’s 20 percent of the weight. It’s very expensive but when weight is the target, you do what you have to do.”

E: What do you think of the Czinger 21C, with its very organic-looking AI-dictated printed components? Is it sort of on the same lines?

GM: “It’s interesting, yes and no. There is a fine line between just making what the computer tells you to do, and actually having something that’s an engineering work of art. We tend to err on the side of engineering art.”

E: Okay, you can obviously say nothing on this because that’s the way these things are but we know there’s a trademark on a name – T.33 – and you’ve teased that something is coming after T.50. Can you tell us anything about that?

GM: “We’re certainly not going for one and done so we are working on the next car. We’ve got a car company of a few hundred people so we’re not just shutting down. The T.50 will always be the halo car, that’s my promise to the team and the owners but the next car is coming. The principles that make the T.50 won’t change but there will be more on that soon.”

On Alpine, F1 and LMH

Aside from running his own car company, you might have heard that Gordon has something of a history in motorsport and indeed, an interest in road cars in general, so we moved away from matters strictly GMA to get his view on things. It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that one of the key figures in more than two decades of a number of F1 golden eras, who then followed that up with the last road-biased car to win Le Mans, has a few choice opinions on the direction modern top-flight motorsport is headed…

E: Famously, you’re an Alpine A110 owner and a big fan of the car. What do you think of the idea of the next A110 being an EV and developed in conjunction with Lotus?

GM: “I loved the concept of the original, of it being about driving. The idea of the next one doesn’t really interest me. The original was all about vehicle dynamics and being lightweight, a little version of us really. But yeah, when they talk about where they’re going next, you can only hope they stay with the same principles.”

E: Just generally, what do you think about the future of sportscars and F1, with the coming rule changes?

GM: “There’s a bit of a shakeup needed in F1 I think. I outlined some of my ideas for what F1 needed in an article for Motorsport Magazine, I think in 2014. They’re sort of going in that direction but nowhere near to the extent that’s needed.

“The hypercar thing is in my opinion a massive missed opportunity. For two years we courted the FIA and the ACO and Aston, ourselves, Ferrari, bought into it thinking it was going to be a GT series, like BPR in the ‘90s. When they announced it, it was this slightly ludicrous silhouette LMP2 hybrid at 1,100kg. A good example of how stupid it is, is if we wanted to raced the Niki Lauda T.50S, we’d have to put 250kg of ballast in it, which is just insane. It wouldn’t be safe. Can you imagine a Le Mans with Ferrari, Aston, McLaren, us, Lamborghini? It would be phenomenal – proper GT cars, what the public want.”

E: I suppose the grid will be packed out nonetheless and the racing ought to be good but it’s certainly not what some will have expected. Do you think there will be a rebuttal to that?

GM: “I think our best hope is with Stephane Ratel, who runs 90 per cent of the world’s GT3 championships. He’s talking about reviving some sort of GT series. We’ve been working closely with him on that for the last 18 months.”

E: That sounds promising. Our final question before we let you go, perhaps an obvious answer, your favourite moment of the event? Have you had a wander round? If you get time, you really must do so.

GM: “I think it’s the public’s reaction to the car, because the customers already have an insight. And hearing it for the first time on the track. It was slightly insane!”