McMurtry Automotive wants you to know one thing before you shell out more than 1 million pounds (about $1.34 million) for a new car. That’s really terrible.
Deliveries to customers will begin this year of the Spéirling PURE, an electric single-seater hypercar capable of generating so much downforce that it literally turns the world of motorsport upside down.
Founded in 2016 by Irish billionaire and inventor Sir David McMurtry, the manufacturer has developed a patented fan system called Downforce on Demand. In this system, two high-speed fans create huge suction under the car, effectively “sucking” the car onto the road and giving it extra grip, similar to a vacuum cleaner.
Fans spinning at up to 23,000 rpm (revolutions per minute) draw air from an enclosed area under the chassis through a filter, generating up to 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of downforce. This is much more than the car’s weight of approximately 1,300 kilograms (2,866 pounds).
Along with a 100kwh lithium-ion battery, this fan is the basis for propelling the car’s 1m-tall carbon frame, which is roughly the length and width of a standard MINI Cooper hatchback, from 0 to 60mph in 1.55 seconds and on to a top speed of 190mph.
“We wanted to create this tiny little creation that had some kind of craziness in a little package,” Thomas Yates, managing director and co-founder of McMurtry Automotive, told CNN.
Importantly, unlike traditional aerodynamic systems found in other hypercars and even F1, Spelling (Irish for thunderstorm) can engineer huge downforce from a standstill.
Last April, McMurtry successfully tested the hypothesis that this principle could allow Spielling to completely defy gravity and travel upside down. Yates steered the custom-built rig, which rotated 180 degrees, allowing the fully inverted car to drive several feet forward on the platform.
When it started spinning, Mr Yates felt “absolutely terrified”. Not for my own health or lack of faith in science, but for the anticipation of seeing a million-dollar product clatter to the tarmac below.
“I had a recurring dream that the rig broke down and I was stuck upside down,” Yates said.
“Eventually the battery dies, the car falls, and this incredibly valuable property is destroyed in a horrifyingly slow manner,” he added with a laugh.
It’s a world first that caught the eye of Earth’s biggest YouTube star, MrBeast, who drove around and was suspended inside a car as part of a video published on his channel last month. It has already been viewed over 116 million times.
In 2022, the car, piloted by former F1 driver Max Chilton, made history at Britain’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, completing the famous 1.16-mile hill climb route in just 39.08 seconds, beating the previous record set at the annual motorsport event by 0.82 seconds.
Last year, an even longer-standing record was shattered when the car broke the fastest lap set on a test track used on the BBC’s Top Gear.
Spielling, driven by the show’s anonymous racing driver The Stig, completed the iconic Dunsfold Airfield circuit in 55.9 seconds. This was 3.1 seconds faster than the lap record set in 2004 with a Renault F1 car.
This is a glimpse into the myriad of exciting possibilities that McMurtry’s downforce technology could create for the future of F1 and wider elite motorsport, potentially delivering safer wheel-to-wheel racing.
“We have the ability to extract almost full downforce when we’re in bumper-to-bumper contact with the car in front of us… so we can also be very close when going through corners,” Yates explained.
“But even if we’re going backwards, we’re generating full downforce… So even if the driver loses the car, most of the time the driver still has control of the car. The driver can decide whether to slam on the brakes and stay on course. Or, if there’s a lot of oncoming traffic, they can let go of the brakes and still go as if they were going into a wall. In that respect, this is really, really great.”
McMurtry’s long-term goal is to create a road-legal model, but for now the Spéirling PURE is designed exclusively for track days and high-performance driving events.
Only 100 PURE vehicles will be produced, and each vehicle will take approximately three months to manufacture. Prices start at £995,000 ($1.3 million) excluding tax, shipping and customization options.
Twenty-four build slots have already been allocated to customers, around half of which are from the US, with first deliveries expected to begin this summer from McMurtry’s new factory in the county of Gloucestershire in southwest England.
Unveiled last month, the 2,700 square meter (29,000 square foot) manufacturing facility has nine build bays and the company aims to produce two builds a month.
“When you have 24 orders with a maximum value of £1 million, that’s a real challenge,” Mr Yates said.
“It made me so happy to know that there are other crazy people in the world who believe in your crazy efforts to make something stupid.”
