Chris Harris on... Gordon Murray T.50 vs Aston Martin Valkyrie | Top Gear

chris it's the issue that's keeping billionaires awake at night the world over i'm not talking about the recession it's do you buy a valkyrie or do you buy a gordon murray t-50 you buy both don't you buy both probably i suspect if you drew the venn diagram there'd be quite a big overlap which cars do you like all the cars um so just to kick off what is exciting about each in turn i think the valkyrie fascinates because it feels like it might be the end point for the internal combustion engine hypercar yeah uh for its performance uh and the adrian newey thinking behind it and and the way that it's developed because you know i know one particular person who's doing all the development work and i think he's it's a good win from chris goodman's good mate mine from mclaren who did a lot of the great recent mclaren is now doing that project as well so newey goodwin bit red bull thinking aston martin what a lovely restaurant yeah absolutely but there is a big butt i don't know what you do with it i i i sat in one i've sat in the buck though yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah same here sat in the back with you with your feet somewhere above your ear no space in the bloody thing so i i just have this nagging doubt or nagging fear that the reason why you buy a valkyrie is to say you've got a valkyrie but you don't know what you're gonna do with it yeah the gordon murray is something that was off my radar for a long time it sort of went quiet is he going to make it isn't he going to make it a bit of a spy shot didn't look very good and then you see it in the flesh and it isn't the prettiest car you've ever seen but you've seen it it's a bit slap-side there's too much volume on the sides of it for me and therefore it looks a bit awkward in places but it's so small it's just weenie size of a footprint on the road boxster oh just tiny and i and then you you look at the purity behind what he wants to do with it and the way that he's executed it the engine and gearbox are tiny and it it seems to be the opposite or the antidote to all the other hypercars out there i mean if you stand and look at the thing you just go well it's another mccarran f1 gordon you did this in 1993. yes but the pedals weigh eight grand yeah i know i know and i like all that but he's such a clever man his response to me on that was great well you know for everyone that can't have mclaren f1 because they're 20 million quid come by one of these it's three i'm more intrigued by the gordon murray card now than i am the valkyrie i know you had a good chat with him on your podcast and it's just it's magic talking to him he's he's just a legend but i but i if you could get if i could get time with adrian newey yeah he'd be equally there's this sense that some of these great f1 designers don't always carry over the period their purity of thinking and execution when they do a road car or maybe maybe they're not quite as good at it as they are racing cars it stands to reason doesn't it i'm not being critical here i'm just saying that maybe you know they aren't as good at it and sometimes it gets a bit over complicated and goes too far yeah and the valkyrie is i'm sure it's going to be absolutely mind-bending i'm desperate to drive one yeah i love the way it looks and i love the concept i really do so exciting there is a sense though that this is you touched on it are we at the sort of end game basically of sort of combustion engine road cars because how fast can you get we've only got four contact patches to work with and also look we're looking at a car now that is a bit behind an f1 car but comparable to a formula one car around a certain type of track and yet you're allowed to drive it in shorts and t-shirt to the shops without a helmet on legally i mean this is a bonkers place for it isn't it yeah but it's great i'm not i'm not going to say it's any other than great but they are dangerous things and i sometimes you do i was yeah i was wobbling along in rural england yesterday and someone came the other way in a 599 which which conventionally now is not a very fast car 620 odd horsepower it's one of the affordable ferraris yeah exactly um and he came towards me and he barely had a handle on it you know he was bumping all over the road and he was taking up a bit of my side of the road he was just out with his mate trying to demonstrate how handy he was and he wasn't very and you think god if people are getting it a bit loose in one of those double the horsepower where where does it all end yes i'm a bit sort of over the hyper car thing and i've said it two minutes let's demonstrate we've talked about ferraris and you said what ferraris you want to see you want to see something small and simple and light and with the manual what's different about these two cars what's different about these two cars is it's adrian newey's that's his epic after the to the sport to the supercar isn't it and adrian knew he's doing it i mean the man is a genius and i'm anything that's got his name on is going to be great and i want to see it like i said i wonder whether the gordon murray adrian newey road car creations are as are as good as their racing cars i suspect not because they are ultimately racing car designers but it's still fascinating it's amazing fascinating to see how they how they've applied themselves to the subject what's interesting is in tandem of course mercedes got their project one hypercar going along um completely different that isn't attached to a certain design or anything that the the formula with that was can you take i think it's a 2015 f1 engine 1.6 uh and make it work and the answer is maybe hard yeah only just yeah and i heard that the main problem was the with the engine was idling yeah yeah that for for missions you have to idle at 12.50 and they don't they either history tells us that when there's a bit of a weapons race going on between car companies in a particular sector there are normally odds-on favorites to be successful and to win the test you know people have decided what's the best one before they've even been made so f40 versus 959 then you go later on you can you can choose your famous rivals throughout history but history tells us that quite often the one that presented itself as being not good enough a bit lacking on paper and not as exciting comes through after time to to become the one that you admire more i think the best example of that is the 918 spider yeah i knew you again there so so it's true it was a bit it was the sort of like we're all you know when you saw the laferrari specs and the p1 you all went porsche what have you been up to you've you've been caught sleeping here but they haven't they they'd actually developed a better car and actually the sf90 is very similar to 918 in exactly so so maybe this project one's going to sneak out and basically kick some ass which could be really interesting and of course if it doesn't then it doesn't really matter because tobias has buggered off to aston martin anyway so it's not his problem now is it i can't deal with that yeah while we're here um why not talk about the other sort of corner of hypercar world that's going on at the moment which is pure electric hypercars because we've got the rimac uh c2 the pinafarina batista which is based on the same stuff and then the lotus avaya which are all supposedly the legends what lotus avaya what'd you call it the avidja i don't even know what it means there's a point at which performance becomes unpleasant right and so the only thing the electric hypercar can do to demonstrate that it's better than the internal combustion engine equivalence is to go faster because they don't operate on an emotional level at all and they're heavy so what they have got is brilliant traction because they're pushing their tires into the ground from the moment they're just sitting there because they're so heavy and they can produce monstrous monster talk and therefore they can accelerate in a way that you can't understand but once you get to sort of one and a half something g's of just you know straight line acceleration beyond that it's just unpleasant we were doing sort of full bore starts in the thai can the other day which has yeah 700 horsepower i was feeling sick after the second one enough of that it's a very limited party trick you know it really is it is like walking into a rumble of people and telling the same joke 13 times i'm just not really interested in them that's okay but you're allowed to be not in tears just so it's a bit early it feels like they've gone early look if the if the tech was um because the problem is you drive them like they're intended to be driven and they're going to do two laps of a decent track before they need a charge they're not for that they're just for sprinting away from the lights in front of people aren't they so they're welcome to it and the rimac story is fascinating you know when porsche come along and invest in your company you know you've done something spectacular but also isn't it equally interesting that last week porsche announced that it was going to invest in synthetic fuel technology as well because maybe people are deciding that it's not all going to be about electric hedging experts yeah all right so we'll bring it back to the two cars we started off on the valkyrie the t50 yeah you've got to pick a side now once and for all um here's the situation the car's going to be waiting outside for you you've got to drive from here to germany and do one lap of the nurburgring which one makes you more excited oh that's really difficult because i need both the drive to the nurburgring i do in the in the in the gordon murray car yeah and the lap i do in the valkyrie i'll tell you what i'll go away i'll we'll go and convoy yeah if we get the two of them together ever which might be quite tricky that's the test we'll do for the magazine and i would love to do it it sounds like the t50s won you over more but you're you're open it was just i'm totally open to the valkyrie it's going to blow my mind whereas the the murray car isn't trying to define itself on track yeah you ask him how fast it's going to be around the track because i couldn't give don't care have you seen the luggage pods though exactly and just the anything that anything that goes away from the current supercar hyper car vernacular and goes off at a tangent from it for me is appealing right now these car companies are run by clever people what's this what's the supercar that that is just going for more and more money in the used market it's the mclaren f1 and it's going because it's got normally aspirated amazing v12 and a manual gearbox so why aren't they making a modern version of it it's quite clear people are willing to pay millions of pounds for them and gordon murray's done that yeah

Channel: Top Gear

Views: 623,062

Keywords: Top Gear, Top Gear Series, Car Review, Car Compare, Super Car, street car, BBC, BBC Studios, Chris Harris, Gordon Murray, Gordon Murray T.50, T50, Top Gear T50, GMA T.50, Gordon Murray Automotive, V12, Cosworth V12, Aston Martin, Aston MArtin Valkyrie, Vulcan, Chris Harris On Cars, Top Gear Aston Martin, Chris HArris Gordon Murray, Valkyrie T.50, Review, mclaren f1, gordon murray t50, aston martin hypercar, aston martin valkyrie v12

Id: o3Y-znvqqmI

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020