Automotive

McMurtry Spéirling may be the fastest, loudest electric car ever built

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The McMurtry Spéirling looks like a mini Batmobile, but it's a single-seat electric hypercar with monster power and a screaming underbody fan adding 500 kg of downforce and 120 decibels
Jayson Fong/Goodwood Festival of Speed
The McMurtry Spéirling looks like a mini Batmobile, but it's a single-seat electric hypercar with monster power and a screaming underbody fan adding 500 kg of downforce and 120 decibels
Jayson Fong/Goodwood Festival of Speed
Rear view shows aerodynamic ducting
McMurtry Automotive
So compact it looks like a Hot Wheels car
McMurtry Automotive
The Spéirling is track-only for the time being, with a swag of world records in its sights
McMurtry Automotive
McMurtry Spéirling fact sheet
McMurtry Automotive
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British company McMurtry Automotive has gone to Goodwood to show off its new Spéirling, a miniature electric hypercar with a Gordon Murray-style fan system in the back capable of generating more than 500 kg (1,100 lb) of downforce at a standstill.

However exactly you're supposed to pronounce it, the Spéirling is a tiny little single-seater designed purely for track use – at least, to start with. Its full-carbon body is just 3.2 m (10.5 ft) long, 1.05 m (3.4 ft) high and 1.5 m (4.9 ft) wide, all the better to cut through air more efficiently.

It's powered by a rear wheel drive two-motor e-axle system of McMurtry's own design, running off a 60-kWh battery pack kept low and central. Final power figures aren't yet available, but the company promises it'll offer at least one horsepower per kilogram of weight, with the final weight figure under 1,000 kg (2,205 lb). It'll be enough power, the company says, to comfortably escort you from 0 to 300 km/h (0-186 mph) in less than nine seconds.

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 has decided to run 80-horsepower fans under the car, which can generate more than 50 percent of the car's weight in downforce even before it starts moving.

Rear view shows aerodynamic ducting
McMurtry Automotive

The only other car on the market right now that's doing this sort of thing is Gordon Murray's very un-electric T.50, with its screaming Cosworth V12 and ground-sucking fan arrangement. Interestingly, Murray's monster also weighs less than 1,000 kg.

Where most electric cars are very quiet, the Spéirling's fan system makes quite a racket – 120 decibels' worth of jet turbine-like racket, McMurtry tells AutoTrader in a recent video interview, or some 30 decibels louder than the law lets you run a new car in Detroit. That's a proper din – indeed, one that might not be welcome on some race tracks – but McMurtry still sees it as a "happy accident" that adds a touch of missing drama to the electric performance car world.

So compact it looks like a Hot Wheels car
McMurtry Automotive

This'll be fun: "McMurtry intends to launch an assault on a number of world records with the Spéirling demonstrator in the coming year," says the website, and we don't doubt a machine like this might have a genuine stab at some of the Volkswagen ID.R's records. Get this thing to the Nurburgring post-haste!

We don't know when or where it'll launch, or how much it'll cost; the Spéirling is still an early stage prototype with some work ahead of it. But you can sure see that epic downforce at work in the video below, as it heads very briskly up the hill at Goodwood. Enjoy! (This car appears at 3:10)

Source: McMurtry Automotive

View gallery - 5 images
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6 comments
Gizmowiz
If you really want to produce maximum down thrust simply make the racing roads with stainless steel and then use electro magnets on the underside of a race car less than .5 inches from the surface. You can produce hundreds of thousands of pound of downforce without increasing rolling resistance if you make the tires hard rubber that don't flex. With so much down pressure cars can't slide, can't flip over, and speeds around corners would defy the minds ability to grasp how they can go so fast. Slot cars have been doing this for years and they can drive upside down on tracks and go over 2,000 scale mph and accelerate in the blink of an eye (less than .25 seconds to 2,000 scale mph). Real cars can do the same thing without any wheelspin simply by using the incredible power of magnets.
Trylon
McMurtry should approach Roomba for a sponsorship.
Nobody
VincentWolf, stainless steel isn't magnetic or only slightly so depending on what alloy you use.
vince
Nobody. Cant imagine why my magnetic clips hold my family pics on our refrigerator then. Or my siding on my trailer which is stainless steel to prevent rust and the magnetic signs attached to it.
Jese Temo
How will this fare against the Tesla Roadster?
Aross
This sounds an awful lot like the old Chaparral cars from the 1960s.