“I’ll be up at 6:00 a.m. and have already been getting texts from Gordon for an hour,” says Dario Franchitti, a development driver for Gordon Murray Automotive's (GMA) breathtaking T.50 hypercar.
“‘What about this? What if we did this?’” Murray asks Franchitti.
Even if the T.50's development is technically finished (25 of the planned 100 cars have been delivered), Murray’s brain can’t stop tinkering in the present. Or with GMA's future.
“We have plans until 2040,” Franchitti says.
The three-time Indy winner and four-time IndyCar champion has been an integral part of the GMA development team. You'd think having a race car driver on board would make for a nightmarish road car, but that's not the case. Franchitti and Murray are on the same page: they want to build an engaging and enthralling road car, but most of all, they want to build a fun one.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid the comparisons between the T.50 and Murray’s other roadgoing masterpiece, the McLaren F1. Both are lightweight three-seaters with bespoke V-12s, manual gearboxes, and a focus on sublime road manners over absolute speed. That the F1 was the world’s fastest car for years was a happy accident. It also spurred on a horsepower and top speed war that rages today.
While supercars are quicker, faster, and more capable than ever, driver engagement has gone down across the board. The T.50 offers an antidote to these doldrums, built with modern components.
Standing next to the T.50, the first thing you notice is just how small it is. It's Boxster-sized and weighs 2200 pounds, slightly less than the F1. It's an astonishing for a modern car, strapped down by all the safety equipment that wasn’t required when the F1 was released in the Nineties.
T.50's 4.0-liter Cosworth V-12 makes 654 hp, slightly more than the F1. Thing is, the F1’s 6.1-liter BMW V-12 revved to 7500 RPM. The T.50’s smaller displacement engine hits its limiter at 12,400 rpm. That is not a typo. It promises to be an incredible experience.
Hopping in, the T.50 is tight, with the driver—Franchitti in this case—sitting front and center, the passengers flanking him behind. I’m six feet tall and squirm to get comfortable in the rear seat, ducking so my head doesn't get bashed in by the closing door.
On the start of our short drive, Franchitti is keen to show off the usability and ride quality of the T.50. We hit speed bumps easily and pull out of a steep driveway without scraping. Even more impressive when he says that the car doesn’t have a front axle lift because it would add weight.
The engine makes a first impression. It's so tractable, handling 20 mph even in 5th gear. Because the V-12's internals are so light and because the drivetrain lacks a flywheel, there’s instant throttle response. You could run second gear from 20 mph all the way up to 186 mph. It'll sound incredible the whole way.
Carmel Valley Road is the kind of road where the T.50 excels. It’s a narrow band of highway with crummy pavement, but also tons of variation in the corners and their banking. During our brief time, the T.50 shines. It soaks up bumps I'd avoid in any other supercar. Its passive dampers feature no modes to adjust ride quality.
You get one option, and it’s the one Murray, Franchitti, and the GMA team thought was best, developed with an off-the-shelf Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tire in mind. When Franchitti was driving in IndyCar and working on setup, he’d go for whatever was fastest even if the car was a nightmare to drive. Here?
“The focus is fun, making it fun to drive,” he tells me.
Sometimes, Franchitti says, the development team went a little far, making the T.50 stiff and serious. They had to walk back from the edge, tone it down, and remind themselves of the T.50's ultimate goals.
The experience for a passenger is also different than the experience for the driver. What I mean is that because the seating positions are so different in relation to the axles, the reaction to imperfections in the road and how its communicated through the dampers will be felt in different ways, and the T.50 is tuned for the driver.
Then there’s the engine. There may not be adjustable modes for the suspension, but there are different throttle maps with levels of aggression adjusted for tip-in and lift-off depending on the type of driving. GT mode makes lift-off less aggressive and smoother, while Sport sees a quick shift to no throttle, giving you quicker, more abrupt weight transfer.
Cosworth has made something incredible with this engine, it sounds manic and in lower gears its power delivery absolutely is, but it’s also smooth and tractable around town. That it’s linked to a manual gearbox and there is no paddle-shift option on the road car is even more refreshing.
The problem with a ridealong, especially in a car like this, is that there’s only so much you can glean from the experience. On our way back, Franchitti tells me the biggest developments since the F1 are the brakes and the headlights. The brakes' quality, usability, and performance has increased, while the weight of the car has come way down, meaning less work for an improved system.
Obviously, I can’t tell you for certain that the brakes feel better. We’ll have to wait until we drive the T.50 to make that determination, but I believe Franchitti [Editor's Note: I'll double down on this one. Having driven the F1 on a racetrack, its brakes and ancient tires were the only letdowns].
It’s also impressive that the T.50 uses off-the-shelf brakes, the smallest carbon ceramics that Brembo makes. The team at GMA wanted to go smaller, but nobody would build bespoke brakes in the limited quantities they need without charging gazillions.
As the car cools and we go over its many details, it becomes clear just how much attention has been paid to every detail. The fan at the back, which some see as a gimmick, is effective at keeping the platform level under high-speed braking and stable in high-speed cornering. The engine is low and as far forward as it can possibly be. There are no ancillaries hanging off of the T.50, just one small fan unit to handle everything at the back.
The interior is impressive, everything finely milled like it came from a Swiss wristwatch factory. Every control has a satisfying click or thunk, no capacitive touch or massive screens to deal with.
Franchitti says GMA's customer base is made up of people from their mid-twenties to their mid-eighties, and all of them bought the car to use, not to sit. Apparently, Gordon wants to give an award each year to the owner who puts the most miles on their T.50 and wants owners bragging about just how far they’ve been going, not how they’ve kept it in a garage all year. After all, they built this supercar to be driven. As it should be.
