GORDON MURRAY'S GMA T.50 EXTENSIVELY TESTED OVER 1,450 KM BY TOP GEAR'S OLLIE MARRIAGE.
Gordon Murray is a legend in automotive circles, the man has been involved in the creation of a whole host of amazing road and racecars, and the man still hasn’t slowed down. It’s pretty cool that the man has South African roots too, and his automotive obsession saw his start racing, he didn’t have the money to buy a competitive racecar, so he did what any self-respecting car nut would do - he built his own. The car looked similar to the iconic Lotus 7 and it was powered by a motor borrowed from Ford, but it was lighter, stiffer and faster. He called it the T.1. This creation is what started his automotive design career, which also put paid to his racing career. Murray’s last serious stint with an automotive manufacturer was when he was at McLaren, but in 2007 he split off and started Gordon Murray Design, and then in 2017 he started his own bespoke automotive concern called Gordon Murray Automotive, or GMA. The man has been busy designing some pretty cool cars, like the GMA T.33 and the T.50. It’s not clear if his creations all run in consecutive order, but we only care about the T.50 right now. First revealed just over a year ago, the T50 is a mid-engined supercar touted as a successor to 1992’s iconic McLaren. To date, the T50 is the lightest and most driver-focused supercar ever built, and to make it even more special and talked about, it uses a refined version of the ground-effect ‘fan car’ technology that Murray introduced in Formula 1 in 1978 with the Brabham BT46B - and was subsequently banned.
The GMA T.50 features a normally-aspirated 4.0-litre Cosworth V12 that’s rated to deliver a rather impressive 478 kW of power, but making it even more impressive is the powerplant’s ability to hit an astounding 12 100 rev limit. A mere 100 road-legal units are planned for production and they cost an eye-wateringly high £2,360,000 - roughly R56,000,000. This seems to have not been an issue for the world’s bazillionaire car guys because they’ve pretty much all been spoken for. There will be a further 25 track-prepped units produced named after iconic F1 driver Niki Lauda. The GMA T.50 is available to drive, and when a car of this calibre hits the market, it usually ends up in the hands of Top Gear for a bit of rompy pompy before anyone else gets to play with it. It’s no different this time, the car was recently given to Ollie Marriage, Top Gear Magazine’s Head of Car Testing. To get a proper insight into the car, the features and most importantly, how it drives when you give it the full beans. Marriage didn’t just take the car on the usual Top Gear test track, the Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, U.K to find out everything there is to know about the car, instead he took the car on an extra-long test drive that covered a whopping 1,450 km drive from Barcelona to Bilbao, via the amazingly picturesque mountain roads that wind along the Spanish Pyrenees, one of Europe’s star attractions. As expected, this amazing road trip was filmed with the usual Top Gear high quality, and that alone makes it worth the watch.
Take a look at the YouTube video that shows Top Gear's Ollie Marriage taking the amazing GMA T.50 by Gordon Murray Automotive on an extensive road trip to test out all the cool things that the car offers up, including that high 12,100 RPM redline that sees the Cosworth 4.0-litre V12 screaming with a sound that makes our man bits happy: FIRST DRIVE: GMA T.50 – McLaren F1 Successor’s 900-mile road trip | Top Gear
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News Roadtrip Ollie Marriage Top Gear Top Gear Magazine Supercar Fan Car T.50 SXdrv Gordon Murray Automotive GMA Gordon Murray