Gordon Murray might be working flat out on his T25 city car family, as reported last week by CAR Online – but he’s also planning a successor to the landmark McLaren F1. The F1 remains a glittering high point on Murray’s CV and he harbours ambitions to redraw the supercar landscape with a radical sports car shaped by refreshingly new thinking.
‘It will be the world’s next F1,’ Murray told CAR exclusively. He plans to start work in earnest on his final supercar once a handful of iStream licences are sold. This iStream technology is the new, more efficient way of building cars that will underpin his T25 city cars.
Gordon Murray’s new supercar: more details
How can anyone top the McLaren F1? Many say it’s not possible, but if anyone can, one of its original architects can. Murray claims his new supercar will offer the ultimate in driver appeal and engineering exquisiteness, and still be highly expensive and exclusive.
‘However, it will be a dramatic step backward in power and top speed,’ he vowed. And that’s music to CAR’s ears. Aren’t we all fed up with ever-spiralling power and mph figures? We know you’re as keen as us to see a retreat to proper engineering solutions rather than more of everything.
So is Gordon Murray’s successor to the McLaren F1 going after Ferrari and Lamborghini?
‘I will do one more supercar – but it’ll be a new breed,’ Murray revealed exclusively to us. ‘The way supercars are done right now, they’ve got no future at all.’
He has yet to target precise weight, power and capacity targets, but Murray promises it will be much lighter and smaller yet more involving for the driver than the iconic F1.
Murray’s supercar blueprint has evolved from the P8, the stillborn successor to the F1 he designed in his last year with McLaren. ‘The P8 was going to be a really funky ultra-lightweight sort of F2, with much more emphasis on handling and excitement,’ he said.
Since leaving McLaren, the proposed supercar has ‘taken several steps forward,’ according to Murray. He disclosed the new supercar would not be built on the same iStream principles as the T25.