The McMurtry Spéirling has just redefined what "hypercar" actually means. The little single-seater electric beast dethroned a 21-year-old record held by a Formula 1 car at the Top Gear Test Track ... and not in a very subtle way. It went for the full usurper kill.
The Top Gear Test Track has been a benchmark for fast since 2002, when Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James "Captain Slow" May were the presenters. The Stig was the "test dummy for speed" on the Lotus-designed track, slaying tires and milking everything a car had to offer from the Ferrari FXX to the Reliant Robin.
Not only had the crew fielded some of the fastest, most expensive, most exotic and desirable cars around the track's 12 turns, but they've also stuffed a number of celebrities in the slowest, most practical and "reasonably priced" cars to let them slug it out for the title of the fastest lap.
Notably, characters like Sir Michael Gambon (RIP), whom they even named the last corner for when he nearly flipped his Suzuki Liana during an incredibly panic-inducing, Dumble-yeehaw, 1:55 lap. Or Tom Cruise in the Kia Cee'd, setting a Mission Improbable 2-wheeled, Gambon-shortcut 1:44.2 lap time. Even the Stig himself (itself?) only managed a 1:44.4 in the Liana.
In 2004, Renault's test driver, Heikki Kovalainen, dressed as the Stig set a blistering record pace of 59-seconds-flat. A lap time that has stood well out of reach of anything on this planet for over two decades. The runner up lap is a Lotus T125 – a slightly detuned 2010-era F1 car for rich folk – at 4.8-seconds slower than the Renault R24 Formula 1 car. That's a big gap in lap times.
And then this happened.
The McMurtry Spéirling Pure VP1 lapped the Top Gear Test Track at Dunsfold Aerodrome in 55.9 seconds under the white-knuckled grip of the Stig. The road-legal Spéirling did it 3.1 seconds faster than a top-tier Formula 1 racing car.
You really ought to watch the lap to understand how gravity-defying, physics-warping, and mind-bending it is.
"How?" you say?
The McMurtry Spéirling is a "fan" car. That is, it has two gigantic fans underneath it, sucking air from the bottom of the car like it's trying to tear up the asphalt itself and blast it out the back like an F-35 on afterburners. The fans produce 4,000 lb (1,814 kg) of downforce at a dead stop, giving it about as much grip as a gecko on sticky paper. So much grip, in fact, that days ago, the McMurtry drove while completely upside down.
Coupled, of course, with the fearlessness – or lack of any emotion, some say – of Stig at the wheel; with optimal lines, brake markers, and apexes hard-coded into its circuits.
Over the years, the Stig has been the enigmatic, faceless, genderless, shell of a humanoid test driver that only knows how to do one thing: go fast. Top Gear has always strived to keep the identity of the Stig secret and has done a pretty good job of it.
Inevitably, someone would crack the code and the Stig identity would be leaked, forcing the show to take drastic measures. Like when F1 test driver, Perry McCarthy, was ousted as the original "Black Stig," he met his watery grave having been catapulted off an aircraft carrier in an all-white Jaguar, ending season 2 (2002) of the show. Next came the iconic all-white-clad Stig. For seven years, no one knew its true identity was British racing and movie stunt driver (007 behind the wheel), Ben Collins ... until he told the world himself in his 2010 autobiography The Man in the White Suit.
"Sacrilege," I recall Clarkson saying about it. Needless to say, Ben never donned the famed white suit again.
There have been numerous "cousins" of Stig as well: The American Stig, African Stig, Chinese Stig, and Blind Stig to name a few. Now it looks like we also have the Spéirling Stig.
The Top Gear Test Track is so iconic that it's featured in heavyweight AAA racing games like Forza and Grand Turismo, where players can get a virtual taste of what it's like trying to top the leaderboards in both junkers and exotics alike.
Understeer-inducing corners like Hammerhead – named not only for the shape of the corner but for the shape of the car and driver trying to navigate through it – and flat-out fast bends like Follow Through really put a vehicle's capabilities to the test.
And on that bombshell, the McMurtry Spéirling Pure VP1 has an A+.
Source: McMurtry Automotive
