Play it again, Gordon
I HAVE BEEN fortunate to meet Prof Gordon Murray on several occasions, but sadly most have been journalist ensemble pieces when no conversation is truly private and few answers off-message. However, in 2018 I enjoyed an unforgettable dinner – the Peninsula Classics Best of the Best Awards in Paris; sorry, but yes, it was exactly as amazing as it sounds – at which the poor Professor was trapped beside me for the duration.
What stuck with me every bit as much as what he said that evening was the manner in which he said it. When the notably calm and measured Gordon Murray gets animated on a subject there is an almost Doc Brown undercurrent to him; his fascination with the hard science of why things work (and how they can be made to work better) is totally infectious, and no napkin or scrap of paper is safe as he batters out the theorems and then the numbers.
As someone who barely scraped through physics and was told I would never pass chemistry as long as there are birds in the sky, I did my best, but it’s fair to say that I probably floundered rather conspicuously.
The thing is, while I can’t help thinking that Prof Murray has spent a great deal more time pondering and analysing the kinetic and dynamic virtues of the Lotus Elan than Colin
Chapman and Ron Hickman ever did, I am just about bright enough to recognise that it is only such extreme levels of obsession that could have given the world the wondrous McLaren F1, a car so good it was detuned and still trounced the mammoth marques in their most public theatre of war.
In an interview many years ago, Prof Murray told me that he felt the F1 would be the last time a car designer would ever be given a clean piece of paper and a blank chequebook to work with. Let’s face it, he certainly didn’t squander the opportunity because ‘uncompromised’ has become the watchword of the F1. But now he has come up with ‘son of F1’, the T.50. Maybe the piece of paper wasn’t quite as clean nor the chequebook quite as blank this time around but, if its creator is calling it the last great analogue supercar, we are in for a treat.