Fan-tastic phwoar
/The electric micro batmobile that blitzed Goodwood was worked on by a Brit who ran at the 2020 NZGP meeting.
INSANE performance is all that’s required for a car to make headlines at the annual Goodwood festival of speed hill climb – but, just for good measure, one tiny stopwatch-stopper with a quasi-Kiwi connection this year added in bonkers looks as well.
No need to use your imagination to conjure what a single-seater electric hypercar apparently taking design cues from the Batmobile might look like in real life.
Attendees at the just-concluded 2021 festival got to see and hear it for real.
The McMurtry Speirling has become an internet sensation due to its appearance, monster power and a screaming 120 decibel soundtrack – the last resulting from it running a underbody fan that adds 500kg of downforce at a standstill.
The fan is a trick first employed by British design Gordon Murray, initially on a Brabham Formula One car and more latterly on his latest road car.
The Speirling isn’t a Murray project, but it does has a F1 connection because some of the specialists who developed it come from that background.
Among those is a young Briton, Dave Turton, whose name might ring a bell with Kiwi motorsport fans.
A keen competitor in Mazda MX-5 club racing in the UK, he became a bit of media celebrity here when he wangled a drive in the type’s NZ category when it pitched as a support class at the 2020 New Zealand Grand Prix.
Turton, who was in the country on an extended holiday with his wife Jo, taken after he’d left a job with the Mercedes F1 team. He had also worked for Williams. He also proved to be a handy driver – winning two of the three MX-5 heats on Manfeild Circuit Chris Amon.
Turton has latterly communicated his excitement about seeing the Speirling run at Goodwood in the hands of a renowned motorsport legend, five-times Le Mans winner Derek Bell.
McMurtry Automotive has yet to spell out the full future for its car, which is still designated ‘experimental’ and was designed to be the ultimate no-rules track car “by exploring the route that uninhibited technical evolution would have taken from the golden age of racing to shape the motorsport of today.”
A full-carbon body just 3.2 metres long, 1.05m high and 1.5m wide makes it a cosy fit for its sole occupant, but the pay-off is that it cuts through air with great efficiency.
It's powered by a rear wheel drive two-motor e-axle system of McMurtry's own design, running off a 60kWh battery pack kept low and central.
Final power figures have not been made available, but the company promises it offers at least one horsepower per kilogram of weight, with the final weight figure under 1000 kg. That’s enough power, the company says, to comfortably achieve zero-300kmh in less than nine seconds. For safety’s sake, this wasn’t tested on Lord March’s Goodwood estate course – also the main driveway.
In order to put that kind of power down through just two poor 240-section rear tires – and indeed to help it pull serious cornering G-forces with such a narrow wheelbase – McMurtry decided to run 56kW fans under the car.
The only other car on the market doing this is Murray’s T.50, with its screaming Cosworth V12 and ground-sucking fan arrangement.
Where most electric cars are very quiet, the Speirling's fan system makes quite a racket – 120 decibels' worth of jet turbine-like racket. McMurtry still sees it as a "happy accident" that adds a touch of missing drama to the electric performance car world.
