The secrets behind Gordon Murray's £2.5m, 650bhp T.50 hypercar and McLaren F1 (4K) | Top Gear

[Music] is [Music] this is the golden murray t-50 and i don't think i've ever been quite as excited about a new supercar in all my years as a car lover because almost 30 years on this is gordon murray picking up where he left off with the mclaren f1 and in his own words making it better in every way in an effort to recapture the purity of the f1's driving experience it uses a bespoke naturally aspirated 650 horsepower v12 engine that revs to over 12 000 rpm it has a manual gearbox it's rear-wheel drive it has three seats and the f1 central driving position and it's light really light 150 kilograms lighter than a mclaren f1 and with only kilograms to push along that's just a few bags of sugar more than a fiat panda performance should be stratospheric famously though gordon murray couldn't give two hoots about performance figures and metrics those are just things that happen when you design a good car not targets to aim for the aim with the t50 is to make the last great analog supercar the greatest supercar in the world and to do that it has to be more tactile more forensically engineered even more thrilling to drive than the mclaren f1 that's no mean feat when it arrived in the early 90s it was a car the likes of which the world had never seen sharper faster smaller lighter than anything that had come before it made the competition look sloppy and the reason for its success gordon murray an f1 designer with 20 years experience already by then and world championship winning success this was to be his vision of the perfect supercar usable bespoke from the ground up no compromises and materials no gram unaccounted for and above all a visceral adrenaline pumping experience from behind the central steering wheel when it hit 240.1 miles an hour in 1998 to become the fastest production car in the world a record it held for the best part of 15 years it was almost just a sideshow the battle was already won because to this day there's still nothing quite like it to drive right gordon we brought along something you might be familiar with this is your x f1 if you like and just to be clear we track this car down we transported it down today i don't think you knew we were gonna bring this no i didn't it is nice to see the old girl again yeah so you must have done tens of thousands of miles on this i did i think i literally did about 30 000 miles a lot of them in testing yeah because i did a lot of the attire development and ride and handling myself and uh yeah yeah but my favorite image is is you just popping to the shops in this obviously it was a very usable but still is it's a very usable motorcar you know it's that's what it was meant to be yeah and uh and thank goodness a lot of the owners did use them good miles on them now i must ask um why did you get rid of it it became a little bit untenable to own really because when when they were started they started to go up they're worth a million that's not too bad when they started to edge up over 20 mil um just paying the insurance and and but it wasn't just that it was you know before that i used to take people for a drive sunday morning wet roads slide the rear around and stuff when it was worth that you know you think a bit you think twice about backing it into a tree or something yeah so it just it just became it just got to a point where i wasn't using it yeah and i love using everything i've got you know and there was another reason too uh i sold the car with my complete collection of sketches private photographs drawings and everything and i wanted it to go to somebody that would keep those together for me and uh and i found the right person well it's a very very special car because this is the oldest surviving f1 isn't it xp one and two crashed and they're gone yes this one one was a control crash and one wasn't yeah yeah one on purpose well the other and i know this car has some quirks that didn't make it through to the to the actual production run yeah could you just point them out for us yeah the the most um the most sort of noticeable one was these um indicators on the production cars we made them much longer so they fitted the shape of this light a little bit better and the other one was the door shut um this one has a a v gap in the door and that was um not on production cars we got that shotgun much better and the third one was um this recess here uh we only discovered during testing that uh on a frosty morning the door sealed stuck and you there was nowhere to get your hand in yeah so we ran in production i ran this into there so there was a little it's a little lit for your fingers but that's about it really the rest of it is pretty much fine details production all right so now for the big question um almost 30 years on there must be bits about the f1 that you aren't so fond of anymore bits that you could improve on these days what are those okay but they fall into various yeah they fall into various categories actually start with the obvious which is the styling i mean i knew what i wanted from day one with with the f1 the shape and the purity and timeless and all that stuff but in those days we worked in clay and we signed off in clay and you can't really see highlights that well in clay so by the time you got to sign off the full-size clay model the next time you saw it it was cut out a tooling block and when you get to that stage you can really only get wet and dry and take take height move highlights a little bit you can't change it and there were things i really didn't like the one that drives me insane every time i see one is the spine's too wide for the width of the car it's about 50 mil too wide yep and every time i see one i shudder and the other thing is i wanted a bit more shape across the rear deck and it just came out a bit flat we've only got this little crease here yeah i wanted that to be this to be a bit more muscular yep a bit more curve for the wheel a bit more a bit more power in this bit um those are the main things really on the styling and then um there were certain things on the f1 which were rubbish really um that just didn't work they hold headlamps yeah headlamps were like glowworms this is technology of the yeah but it wasn't just that to save money i just bought standard lamp units the rear ones are often a vecco truck and the front ones were helpful or something you know and and they were glow worms in a jar i mean you couldn't see anything over 100 miles an hour so air conditioning aircon didn't work at all um for two reasons one was that the um the compressor on the engine had to survive at 8 000 so it idle it wasn't doing very much but the one thing i got wrong was the cabin exit air which comes out of here yeah um the exit valve is probably a third of the cross-sectional area it needs to be i just couldn't fit a bigger one in yeah so i managed to fix all that on on the new one well i could say brakes as well i mean famous air brakes instead of brakes were they were okay um they were they had good modulation but you had to push quite hard and the reason for that is you have to sign the car off with repeated stops from 90 v max which in our case was over 200 miles an hour yeah and uh and the pads are so hard to resist that they annoyingly squeak all the time although that becomes a bit of an f1 thing if you own one you know you you want the brakes to squeak yes yeah it shows you've been using it yep yeah um if we put softer pads in it wouldn't have been legal but the brake pedal would have felt a lot better and the performance would have been a lot better but these were sort of limitations of the technology yeah you're working around these things yeah and then there was um loading the luggage uh this this pops out against your legs it's hinged along the bottom line and fitting the suitcases in through that triangle was always down interior storage wasn't enough really for a proper gt motor car and then on the maintenance side uh the clutch needed adjusting if depending on how good about a driver you were clutch needed adjusting every five to fifteen thousand miles which owners hated yeah the fuel tank was a bag tank which was a big mistake because every five mile every five years he had to take the bag out which meant engine out and uh there were things like that so you know all those things stuck in my head and uh percolated for several decades and and they just sat there as a list and and i knew if i did another one one day i could fix them all okay well in terms of philosophy i know that when you were designing this car you had some some sort of guiding principles in your head that you stuck rigidly to and you want to carry those same principles over to the t50 what are they but also yeah why didn't anyone else just go and copy it why hasn't there been an f1 since that's an amazing question i've i've before we started the next one i i rarely thought about that a lot for a year or two and i think i know the answer first of all the principle behind this even though i've said it many times and people don't believe me i had no targets for performance it was going to be a quick motor car you know it was going to be 1100 kilos 600 or something horsepower yeah um so i set out to try i i actually if you read all the the preamble before the launch i never said we are i always said we're going to try and make the best driver's car there's ever been and of course a big part of that was sitting in the middle and the light weight and the rest of it was just keeping it you know pure simple geometry trying not to have anything that interferes with the driver field in any way shape or form and and the lightest car obviously um and that those are the principles and basically i've done that again yeah i think the reason why people haven't done an f1 there's two reasons and it's probably a mixture i think i don't think anybody really understood the formula um the things i've just said i don't think anybody understood it but if they did understand it they were in such a big layered organization they weren't allowed to do it this is a totally focused motor car every single element of the car is a piece of large small team very nimble answer to a committee nothing nothing went to committee i did everything from styling through to engine um spec and everything gearbox we designed the gearbox and house yeah um so i think it's probably those two things well what a way to set the scene and believe it or not this isn't actually the car we're here to see this is a mere amuse boosh for the main event which is through this door so should we go and talk about the t50 excellent let's do it okay so there it is the first thing i've noticed is it feels quite small like the f1 yep that has the footprint of a porsche boxster i read somewhere how how far off is this this is pretty much the same um it's uh i think it's 60 millimeters longer and it's 15 millimeters a side wider because i wanted to get a bit more space in the cabin but that's about it so this is the same this is a bit shorter than a modern boxster yeah and about 40 50 mil uh wider that's it so buy supercar hypercar standards this is that's tiny it's absolutely yeah yeah which is part of the usability yeah you know that's that's why i kept that small so you can actually use the thing on that road absolutely because it does seem that supercars are just getting wider and wider and right yeah i don't know for the purposes of drama i suppose i don't i don't know why i mean the weight and the size of modern supercars just seems to be on a runaway train now the styling um obviously super clean uh no wings no vents that are unnecessary what was your brief with the styling on this um i wanted to do exactly what i did on the f1 i wanted i didn't want something that was going to be out of date in 5 or 10 years i wanted something that was a return to beauty let's call it because i once again i know everybody likes different types of styling but i think supercars are sort of trying to compete with one another to get more and more outrageous sure and the problem with that is in five years time or ten years time that's out of date those big ducks and holes and scoops and things you know and a lot of them aren't aerodynamics a lot of them are just marketing yeah on some of the cars so i wanted this to be very clean and a return to beauty and a bit timeless again which is why we went to great lengths to hide ducting yeah in particular you pointed out a few bits you know it's this some here ahead of the yeah this this here this slot here is the um inlet for the air conditioning there and heating yeah and uh and you're mentioning the the these are the next generation led lights and you need to call the lights yes they're circulating around those clusters so it's it's easy to turn things like when you need slots like they're on the rear lights so it's easy to turn them into something that looks nice you try hard okay i can't really wait any longer we need to go around the back and talk about the engine 3.9 liters v12 12 000 rpm 650 horsepower cosworth built it how did you end up at those numbers if you like well actually i wanted um i i wanted to go back to the sort of the beautiful little v12s we had in the 60s i mean the most famous one is a 250 ferrari three liter v12 in those days three liters was a big engine this is another race i don't understand why we need six and seven and eight liter engines you know if the car's light you don't need a big engine and i actually wanted a 3.3 v12 okay but we worked out the car would have had to weigh under 900 kilos to get the same push the f1's got with the torque and the weight yeah and uh a quick sum showed us that we weren't going to hit 900 keys essentially you wanted the engine to be as small as small as possible as light as possible absolutely so everything comes back to that first prince so then we turned around so we said okay what can we make the car so we did a another calculation and we reckon we could hit 980 and if we hit 980 a four liter would do 3.94 liter would do and that's how we picked the engine size what about the revs and i wanted it to be i just wanted it to be the highest revving engine because one of the lovely things about the old f1 is the is the pickup speed it's like a thousand cc bike you know it's the pickup speed but also the fact it revs freely up to nearly eight and and in those days it was higher revving than i said to russia i don't care what it raised to it has to be higher than any ferrari and it was out ferrari ferrari yeah in those days and this time um the road car record is another car i did called the light car company rocket which revs out at 11 5 so i said to cosworth it has to beat that you know it has to be more than 11.5 it can't build a new supercar and the rocket is still quicker so um they there's a lot of sucking of teeth to start with and they went on valve springs i'm not sure well they knew when they took a meeting with gordon murray it wasn't going to be easy no no and the weight target anyway um they came back um and oh i said yeah i said it has to rev more than the rocket and it also has to have a pickup speed more than the f1 and the f1 is around about 10 000 about twice for the turnpike and they came back last february over a year ago with a little email said i think we've met your targets how's 12 1 and 28 400 reads the second sound that'll do yep yeah that's the one and and much lighter than the f1 engine oh yeah i mean it's this is um this is rarely the next generation it doesn't oh apart from background knowledge it doesn't know anything to the valkyrie engine at all it's the next generation i was going to bring it up of course so valkyrie again another bespoke quite high revving v12 from cosworth um i mean just a coincidence did it use any learning from that engine i'm sure the background knowledge absolutely but there's no component so this is a this one for example the valkyrie's got straight valves this has got inclined valve angles it's like the next generation okay and it's got a lot of titanium in it and am i right i'm thinking there's a couple of engine maps so you can switch the map yes i shot myself in the foot a bit i must admit i i grew up i grew up in a period in the 60s where you either had revs or torque yeah and you couldn't have you know because it was throttle cable there were no maps there were no variable valve timing and stuff like that and kosovo said you don't need that and i said i want it so that's what we're doing we've got one that runs out of sort of ferrari red nine five so that's you that's your supermarket that's supermarket take the kids to school yeah still make 600 horsepower still nine and a half still more than than an half one yeah and and then the other one is jump in it you want to hear 12 grand through the tunnel you know click here mate listen to this however cosworth when i got the final talk and power curves last year in in high revving mode it makes 71 percent of its maximum talk at two thousand five hundred percent so it's gonna leap away like a wild animal you know it's uh so i needn't have bothered really but yeah but at least you have got a softer mode if it's raining or something you can that's a nice story dial it down something to talk about now we can't ignore the fan for any longer at the back obviously you have history with this technology bt46 um the mclaren f1 2 had had a fan which you know i certainly didn't know until recently yeah it's much more hidden isn't it yes there's two fans actually they're about 140mm diameter and they only interact with two tiny parts of the diffuser i wasn't sure about the technology it worked in the wind tunnel we had little fans on the wind tunnel but we sort of ran out of time and i didn't want to take a chance over the whole car underneath so i just used it in two sections and it was about i think it was three four five percent more downfall something i wasn't much okay um so this is obviously the next next next next next next generation um what is the overarching principle of having the fan because it is not just maximum downforce at all times no no no no it's too it's to make the two things it's to make the fat the downfalls more controllable yeah and give the driver some control over what mode he wants the car to be in um and then it's also um to enhance the downforce at lower speeds but the main reason i did it was i knew i wouldn't need any fancy splitters and spoilers and stuff all over the car and i could get whatever downforce i wanted so these are little active yes these are active these work yeah stand still so what what are the various modes because there's some really fun stuff in there yeah there's six modes four of them are driver selectable and two of them are auto but the principle is exactly the same as the f1 it just works over more of the car and now the control systems are more sophisticated i i could play a bit you know so it actually interacts not just with the under surface but with the top surface as well yeah so when we're writing the algorithms for that control unit um it's it's sort of semi-intelligent so it'll do some things automatically and some things that driver can can select so the six modes in auto mode the fan's not running um the way it works is the diffuser underneath is very steep incredibly it's a reflex shape and it's very very steep and the air would never follow it every designer on the planet would love a diffused like that if you had arrows to say to the air this way um so it stalls so you just get a slight sweep up small diffuser effect like a normal supercar yeah and and you get a bubble store stalling in the steep bit um so without the fan arm and these not active uh it's just a normal ground effect supercar like any other yeah and it makes a normal amount of downfall makes two or three times more downforce than the f1 but that didn't make very much attack okay because of the top speed um so that's auto mode you call it and then if you brake heavily [Music] the f1 was the first car to have that it i monitored uh we didn't have accelerometers on the car so i monitored brake line pressure and car speed and the algorithm decides if you're going quick enough to need aero or you're pushing the brake hard enough at a high enough speed and the little flat pops up at the back and you have 30 percent more downforce um and drag the center pressure back that's how the f1 worked this one's a bit more sophisticated so under braking we now measure the deceleration longitudinally and the car speed and the algorithm decides the same thing these pop up to 45 degrees the fan spills up to maximum and we open the valves and we use the whole diffuser and we get 50 percent more a bigger pardon under braking 100 more downforce what does that translate to in terms of uh stopping stopping yeah so from 150 miles an hour it's 10 meters shorter which is massive you know so it's a big safety feature and then we have uh the most funky one i think is streamline mode so what happens with uh ground effect or any error loads on a car they go up with a square of the speed it's parabolic okay go up with the square of the speed like the drag does and to have enough downforce let's say 80 you know to have a bit of fun the problem is when you get to 150 or 160 you've got three times that downforce and you're using up valuable wheel wheel movements and if you drive some supercars really quickly they're on the bump stops basically and you know and then you've got uncomfortable the rest of the time yeah so you have to have really stiff yeah so yeah the way around that is you start with high natural frequencies very stiff springs and uh that makes the car uncomfortable i don't like cars sprung like that i'll have cars that are comfortable so um you see this is a gt don't you yeah i found that fascinating you know absolutely you assume hardcore track focus hypercar but no this is a long distance absolutely yeah so we've got streamline mode which actually negates all those issues so um if you select that and you don't have to be doing 150 you know just be on a bit of dual carriageway you select streamline mode these go to -10 which reduces they drop down and it reduces the base suction what makes the diffuser work behind a car is the is the low pressure which we call the base suction that all the vortices here help pull the air through that's how ground effect works so that reduces the base suction behind the car we spool the fan up but we shut the valves to the floor so we stall the diffuser and lose half its downforce yeah and we pull the air from inside here to clean the air up and and reduce drag over here yeah so the fan pulls the air from here and not underneath yeah and that gives us um that makes the car settle down it's quieter it's calmer in cruise mode uh better fuel consumption of course and it gives us a twelve and a half percent reduction in drag is it sort of effectively a long tail that's another thing it does another two things yeah the one is it the the eflux the exit from the fan i mean this this thing shifts a massive amount of air at 5 000 roads yeah uh it it fills in the trailing wake of the car the bubbles and the vortices and makes effectively makes a long tail car so you buy a t50 you get a t50 long tail phone in for free yes it makes the car about a meter longer yeah and then the final thing it does it produces 15 kilos of thrust of course so and that's not insignificant in drag 15 kilos of drag on a car like this is quite significant actually you know yeah in pounds falls could you i heard correct me if i'm wrong the car's at standstill in neutral and you run that could you make the car creep forward just on the fan yes it depends on the stiction and the bearings and things but it's it's it's a 15 kilo push so yeah it's something i want to try yeah it's a nice it's a nice party trick what other modes have we got so uh yeah so that's um streamline and then for a bit of fun and we did it only because we could yeah when you're in streamline mode and just for fun a sort of push to pass button you if you click onto vmax boost there's an integrated starter generator on the front of the crank which is making 48 bolts for the fan drive to keep the motor small and for the air conditioning and that takes about 30 horsepower when it's flat out and when you when you select vmax boost it actually takes the power from the battery pack at the front of the car the little battery pack and actually switches that back into the crank so you get a 30 horsepower kick but only for for a few minutes for a few minutes yeah so that was just a bit of fun and then the final mode is both show-off and safety so the final mode is test mode and i did it on the f1 because that was the first car with a movable arrow and i thought hey it'd be nice to know if it's working before you set out so when the car stopped and switched off you put it on and the flap pops up and and b show your mates yeah this is movable fan up to five thousand yeah so this scrolls through all its functions when you go into test mode so the fan will spool up to maximum these go through all their angles and the valves open and shut in the bottom and this valve open and shut so before you head off on a trip you in about 15 seconds they all return to rest position of course you can test it or you can show your mates how it all works yeah i think the latter mainly but uh i wanted to come back to weight of course so 980 kilograms you mentioned it earlier you said look that was the target we did the sums when you were speccing the engine um i mean it's a phenomenal achievement because it's 150 kilos lighter than the f1 yeah and the f1 which itself was you know and still is an extremely light car yeah um what is the most what is the one piece of weight saving in this car you're most proud of i think the engine because i i wanted the engine to be around 50 to 60 kilos lighter than the s70 and it's over 60 kilos lighter and the gearbox too i didn't think i mean extract and cosworth have been fantastic partners right from day one i wanted this to be a british supercar so all the major suppliers major components are uk based so we can honestly put our hand on our heart and say this is all uk yeah so the gearbox 10 10 kilos lighter 10 yeah about 10 9 and a half actually lighter the other weight saving is technology so the carbon the f1 was the world's first carbon or carbon car body and chassis and i just used i mean it wasn't trick i just used formula one technology but now the technology is way past formula one from the 80s yeah so the body the complete body everything and the chassis is only 150 kilos which is i think 40 40 something kilos lighter than the f1 yeah and stiffer i presume and twice the stiffness wow yeah yeah and of course once you've got so little weight to push around you've got that virtuous circle so the tyres i noticed aren't they're not massive steamrollers are they and uh and i assume that means that the tyres themselves don't cost 10 grand a pop or no there's another thing wrong with the f1 people um people said you know after 20 years i think i think michelin want a hundred thousand pounds worth of tires made before they'll set it all up and make them you know so we've made sure we've worked with mission really well this time but we've made sure the mold size is standard so the f1 was actually absolutely bespoke um so that should so feel free to burn through a set of tyres on this yeah because they're they're standard tyres yeah yeah probably won't find them at quick fit but um no no but uh easier to get hold of than the f1 right i'm dying to have a look inside sure so should we yep should we step inside it's a bit easier isn't it than the f1 because you don't have this it is yeah we've moved the uh the main structural chassis members from either side of the driver to these rocker panels out here so um so you've got clear passages and we did three seating bucks uh with a whole bunch of people to um try and make this easier to get in and out and it is quite a bit easier yeah all right so let's talk about this incredible driver-centric display that you've got in front of you clearly you're not a fan of touch screens no i hate the things yeah i mean in a fast car they actually they shouldn't be allowed in a fast car they really shouldn't the same as steering wheels i mean uh it's you know my alpine's got buttons on the wheel i still don't know what they do you know because trying to drive and take one hand off to do something is ridiculous you know so we've kept the controls to an absolute minimum we've got no no stalks column stalks yep so you don't have to reach behind the wheel for anything these uh paddles here are horn and flash they're not flash like the f1 yeah the indicators are these two little buttons here these little scroll and push to select buttons here with your thumb you can operate with your thumb this one controls the right screen and this one controls the left screen and the screens are super simple graphics black and white right yeah absolutely no very much logos dancing across no colors flashing all over the place really clear and the right hand screen is infotainment so that's everything you would expect in a modern car you know sat nav radio um music and all that stuff everything works from your phone yeah wirelessly and then the left-hand screen is uh car information engine information and aero so one funky bit is the the 46b brabham the fan car had a pitot tube on it and that measured we just measured static pressure with that and the other end of the transducer was under the car to measure the suction yeah and we went to break his yard and we bought two altimeters out of a plane and all the altimeter does is measure pressure differential and it converts it into height basically so um in the race if if the drive is because we were entering a third gear corner 30 miles an hour faster than a lotus and uh if the skirts had broken the driver would have just plowed straight on so he needed to know so he needed to know so we had this we had this big we had to make a bump in the cockpit this big altimeter and we just had a green zone and a red zone and i said to them every time you're entering a corner make sure we're in the green if you're in the red back off and nikki louder said he drove the whole race just watch watching the ultimate he didn't look at the rev counts it was fantastic so what we've got is a similar thing here um we've got a pitot tube um the camera is on the car at the moment but they don't add width they're brilliant little things one of them has a pitot tube in it and the other end of the transducer is underneath the diffuser so when you select an arrow mode um it pops up on the screen you can see the suction you're making with a fan that's fantastic so it's like a turbo boost gauge taken yeah to the next level yeah you mentioned the wing the cameras for wing mirrors so two little screens here now was that uh i imagine it's an aerodynamic not really it was an aesthetic decision because since the f1 the size of the mirrors have gone up twice that you need a cross-sectional area of the glass and i shot myself in the foot because the reason why the f1 looks so different then and still does is because a central driving position with with the wheel intrusion allows you to move the driver for 250 mil so it's very forward cabin if you look at the car you know and i wanted this to be even more dramatic so i moved everything forward another 30 35 mil um the screen and everything and that moved the a-pillars forward which meant i couldn't have the mirrors we didn't meet the angle 55 degrees yep so they had to go in front and they were going to be right on top of the wing there and they looked this big yeah yeah they just looked horrible okay and actually the technology's there yeah and actually i think i think you get a better rear view we've also got to make this more practical in the f1 we've got a reversing camera in the middle of the fan cal as well oh wow good place to have it yeah i'm just looking at the pedals down there in the footwell they look extremely lightweight i bet you got a story about that yeah well i i designed the pedals on the f1 and i did the stress calculations for them obviously and when we started doing this we had a young guy working on it and i said to him you know look at the f1 pedals but you won't get them any lighter and then i actually thought i'm going to have a go so i took a job back to designer pedals and we've actually saved 300 grams on the pedals and i never thought we did and the gear change uh we saved 800 grams this is all titanium this time everything and that is pure arc so you've exposed the linkage you've got this kind of carbon fiber yeah some of the owners who eventually got to see their f1 parts out on a bench for the gear change um gave me a bit of a headache because they um they said they were they were works of art you couldn't see them they were buried so this time i did this hybrid cantilevered system with carbon and billet aluminium so the the linkage pokes at the bottom yeah so i think a few people will be buying spares of those and putting them in a study here probably the um the thing that is overriding in the f1 and and actually i don't think it's been done since is everything is bespoke for the motor car well 98 we had a few carryover switches and air vents and things um i didn't want air vents here to mess this up so the air vents come out here above the screen there we are um and there's a foot well then too and the passengers get their own air vents this time because in the door yeah i never got to the passengers in the f1 it was totally forgotten so everything on the f1 was an engineering work of art for weight but also for feel and the tactile bit you know the haptics and the switches and stuff everything was machined from solid aluminium and although the f1 was good it wasn't perfect because the switches all had a little bit of play in the spindle which i hate absolutely hate and the haptics on the switches were a little bit too soft this time we've gone to a switch company and we started from scratch and they make stuff for airplanes and high quality people costs a fortune oh yeah now the haptics are absolutely you know it's i kept saying to the designers high-end camera just think high-end camera i don't want colors i want everything to feel absolutely fantastic and that goes through the whole motorcar on the f1 even the bits that owners will never see our works of art yeah and i don't think there's been a focus on a car like that since the f1 there's been you know pagani zonda has you know bits in it and stuff but it's a carryover v12 and it you know it's i think the f1 still stands clear with bespoke stuff sure and this this takes it to another level another level i'm interested actually how did you um how did you react when you heard mclaren were doing the speed tell someone how they took her to stop the program all right yeah i've got the whole team together because we just started talking about what we were going to do and they announced it and i got everybody together and i said i think we're not going to do this guys because i wanted to do another central driving position and uh so you got wind mclaren were doing a three-seater not exactly what it was no i didn't know what it was and and i said to everybody at work you know they they're surrounded by f1s they've got the formula and then when they launched well they showed the speed we were back on again because there's nothing like the f1 yeah you know their own admission i think that their styling guy said the only thing in common with the f1 is it has three seats yeah it's entirely different yeah and just a quick word on the steering because i know there's a steering is one of your sort of personal bug bears if you like but this has a very clever system doesn't it so it's assisted and non-assisted yes so the f1 was manual um and and perfect geometry on the f1 for the steering not corrupted because we had any power steering was perfect but it was a pain to park low speed you know under 10 mile an hour under five mile an hour dreadful and so we've got a system where again we've got pure absolutely pure geometry designed for manual steering and steering is manual but we clutch in a small amount of electric assistance under a predetermined speed we don't know yet until we run xp cars but probably around 10 miles an hour and it just helps you park basically that's fantastic yeah best of both worlds yeah and and the funky thing is um i say to the team every day you know the funky thing is there's nobody else on the planet making one of these nobody not even close you know it's not like well there's a few nice little b12s out there and they're around 11 1200 kilos you know um so you don't see the valkyrie is that i mean for me in terms of performance in terms of engineering purity i would say the valkyrie right now is is the car that's closest to this but you wouldn't see them as i don't see it as in the same area really it's it's a racing car you know and it's much heavier okay one thing we forgot to talk about actually because this is the very first model and um they're not working yet is the way that you can take a look at the engine so there's some incredible engine covers going on here it's also luggage access as well so how do they work yeah so these uh these are hinged down the down the spine and they are gull wing so they the whole side of the entire panel right down right yeah from the b pillar back to here opens almost 90 degrees and you're getting a full side view of the absolutely yeah when those are open and the doors are open you can see through two-thirds of the car basically and i did that for two reasons one was luggage access to make it easier than the f1 but mainly because the engine's a work of art you know and when you open that and the suspension everything's on show you drop your bags in as opposed to feeding them in yeah yeah they just go in from the top and each side doors and these panels here open on the key and and you can open them individually so if you're walking towards the car and you want to put luggage on this side yeah you just open one side gas struts yeah yeah incredible and the sound of this car now we we're not going to stand around and try and describe what this naturally aspirated v12 is going to sound like at 12 000 rpm but there's something quite clever you've done it's not all exhaust noise is it no because you've got to pass the drive-by test so you know the exhausts aren't that noisy um with a valve shut anyway um so on the f1 what you're actually hearing is induction sound and it's through the roof so on a normally aspirated engine with a direct ram air box you get the noise back from the inlet valves because of course with the cams being high performance you get the inlet and exhaust valve open at the same time for part of the phase and that noise comes back as a wave up uh in through the and so you can see the through here that's why the the ram air intake here is directly above the driver's head yeah and on the f1 i tuned the thickness of the carbon so it resonated with the induction sound that's where you get that lovely growl which is not rev-dependent it's throttle opening dependent and i'm doing the same on this it's going to sound incredible i can't wait to drive it i've got a few things a few facts and figures to run past you just stop me when i get it wrong you're going to make 100 cars road cars 25 track cars price 2 million quid plus tax 2.36 tax 2.36 plus tax and now the big question is it sold out yet well amazingly we're we've sold more than pre-sold more than two-thirds of the cars when we started this program the directors were all sitting around going you know do you think we'll pre-sell before we show the car and i said yeah sure i mean i've got some later with f1s i'm sure they'll want one and we thought maybe 10 12 cars um and we sold the first half of the cars based on my ballpoint sketch that we put out last year has been one hell of a sketch it took me two hours to do a ballpoint schedule bought the car and a description of course sure which i think is a fantastic um you know i wouldn't have believed you would have pre-sold that many cars that's amazing and the lovely thing is i i've talked to or met virtually every owner and they're exactly the right sort of people that i think are going to use the car yeah so that was what the f1 did to people but you're saying there are a few slots left which is yeah there's still a chance this is the last yeah absolutely yeah um but i think after the launch we'll have a bit of a rush and people see because people quite naturally have been waiting just for two things i think they've been waiting to see the car and they want to make sure in this climate that the program's real and it's not another amg or aston where it's going to get delayed and delayed and delayed and we're bang on target for production and on budget so it's actually easier with a small company funnily enough if you've got a big company it's quite unwieldy and if you have a downturn or a problem it takes a long time to stop the tanker and turn around you know we've got a very flexible little company we don't answer to anybody and we make a mistake we changed our action well gordon it's been a complete honor for you to show us around the car today i wish you all the best with it um i would shake your hand but we're not allowed so i'm going to head off and go and buy a hundred quids worth of lottery tickets

Channel: Top Gear

Views: 1,479,350

Rating: 4.8616557 out of 5

Keywords: Top Gear, Top Gear Series, Car Review, Car Compare, Super Car, street car, BBC, BBC Studios, Chris Harris, gordon murray t50, gordon murray t50 sound, gordon murray mclaren f1, gordon murray interview, gordon murray fan car, gordon murray automotive, gordon murray t50 supercar, gordon murray t50 engine, gordon murray v12, Top Gear T.50, McLaren F1, Top Gear McLaren F1, T.50 Review, T.50 Drive

Id: K4EIYQ6fkG4

Length: 43min 33sec (2613 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Vested_Interested]

This was a great watch. Thorough walkthrough of both cars with Gordon being Gordon, honest to the last, and fantastically informative.