McMurtry Automotive wants you to know one thing before you fork out upward of £1 million ($1.34 million) to buy its new car: it really, really sucks.
Customer deliveries will commence this year for the Spéirling PURE, an electric single-seater hypercar capable of generating so much downforce that it has, quite literally, flipped the world of motorsport upside down.
Founded by Irish billionaire and inventor Sir David McMurtry in 2016, the eponymous manufacturer has developed a patented fan system — dubbed Downforce-on-Demand — that sees two high-speed fans generate enormous suction beneath the car to effectively “suck” it onto the road, giving extra grip, similar to a vacuum cleaner.
Rotating at up to 23,000 rpm (revolutions per minute), the fans draw air from a sealed region beneath the chassis via filters to generate downforce of up to 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds), far eclipsing the car’s roughly 1,300 kilograms (2,866 pounds) weight.
Alongside a 100-kwh lithium-ion battery, the fan is the foundation for rocketing the car’s meter-high carbon frame, which is roughly the length and width of a standard MINI Cooper hatchback, from 0 to 60 mph in 1.55 seconds, with a top speed of 190 mph.
“We really wanted it to be this tiny little creation that resembled something that was insane in a small package,” McMurtry Automotive managing director and co-founder Thomas Yates told CNN.
Crucially, and unlike conventional aerodynamic systems seen in other hypercars and even Formula One, the Spéirling (Irish for thunderstorm) can engineer its massive downforce from a stationary start.
Last April, that principle allowed McMurtry to successfully test its hypothesis that the Spéirling could defy gravity entirely and drive upside down. Yates steered onto a custom-built rig which then rotated 180 degrees, leaving the fully inverted car to drive forward a few feet across the platform.
As he began to rotate, Yates was “utterly terrified” — not for his own wellbeing or due to any lack of faith in the science, but at the prospect of a million-dollar product crunching onto the tarmac below.
“I kept having these reoccurring dreams that the rig would fail and I’d be stuck upside down,” Yates said.
“Eventually the battery would go flat, the car would fall off, and then you just have this horrible, slow destruction of this incredibly valuable property,” he added, laughing.
It was a world first that caught the eye of the planet’s biggest YouTube star, MrBeast, who both drove and hung suspended in the car as part of a video released on his channel last month. It has already been viewed more than 116 million times.
In 2022, the car made history when — piloted by former F1 driver Max Chilton — it made an appearance at the UK’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, completing its famous 1.16-mile hillclimb route in just 39.08 seconds, besting the previous record set at the annual motorsport event by 0.82 seconds.
An even longer-standing record came tumbling down last year when the car shattered the fastest lap ever set on the test track used in BBC motoring show “Top Gear.”
Driven by The Stig, the show’s anonymous racing driver, the Spéirling completed the iconic Dunsfold Aerodrome circuit in 55.9 seconds, 3.1 seconds faster than the lap record set in a Renault Formula One car in 2004.
It is a glimpse into a myriad of exciting possibilities that McMurtry’s downforce technology could create for the future of F1 and wider elite motorsport, potentially offering safer wheel-to-wheel racing.
“We have the ability to pull almost full downforce when you’re bumper-to-bumper with the car in front … so you can still be really close going through corners,” Yates explained.
“But we [also] generate full downforce even if we’re going backwards … which means that the drivers, in the most part, are still in control of the car, even if they’ve lost it. They can decide whether they’re going to brake really hard and stay on the track, or, if there’s a load of oncoming traffic, they can let go of the brake and still go into the wall like they would have done. It’s a really, really amazing thing in that respect.”
While McMurtry’s long-term aspirations are to make road legal models, for now, the Spéirling PURE is designed solely for track-days and high-performance driving events.
Only 100 PURE vehicles are set to be produced, with each one taking roughly three months to construct. Prices start from £995,000 ($1.3 million) before tax, shipping costs and customization options.
With 24 build slots already allocated to customers, around half from the US, the first deliveries will roll out this summer from McMurtry’s new factory in the Southwest English county of Gloucestershire.
Unveiled last month, the 2,700-square-meter (29,000-square-feet) manufacturing facility has nine build bays, with the company aiming for an output of two builds per month.
“To have 24 orders at the best part of a million quid (pounds) has been mega really,” said Yates.
“It’s been so overwhelmingly pleasing to know that there are other lunatics out there in the world who believe in your crazy endeavors to make stupid stuff.”