McMurtry Spéirling review: baby Batmobile is the fastest thing we've ever driven

Ah, the car that drives like it's on fast-forward.

Or expressed another way by our sound recordist, Andrei, as we watched the shrunken Batmobile slice through Hammerhead fans roaring, dust spiralling behind it, “that’s not a car, it’s a cheat code”.

The McMurtry Spéirling is not like other cars. Faster up the Goodwood hill than anything up to and including an F1 car, and now busy setting records at every circuit it turns up to (including, we hope, Dunsfold, when we get Stig and Spéirling to consummate their relationship), it's the ultimate ‘what if?’ car.

What was the question then?

Depends how you phrase it. For you and me it’s something basic like “what happens beyond the hypercar?”, or “what if we provide a Top Gun experience for those who don’t fly fast jets for the military?”. But an engineer’s brain would investigate further and ask something important like “what happens if you separate drag form downforce?”

Welcome to the age of the fan. I’ve never experienced anything like the Spéirling. Never driven a faster car, either in a straight line or around corners.

Photography: Mark Riccioni

How does it work then?

A quick physics lesson first. In conventional bewinged cars drag and downforce are intricately linked. The more downforce you have the more drag results, increasing fuel consumption, limiting acceleration and so on. This is the crux of all car aerodynamics, up to and including F1.

Suction fans are nothing new. Remember Gordon Murray’s Brabham BT46B? That was in danger of dominance, so was withdrawn. Fans (the spinning type, not the flag waving ones) have never been allowed back in. But physics hasn’t changed, the tech still works.

I’m not allowed to see what goes on underneath the Spéirling. 16 patents have already been granted, with more in the pipeline, but I got on my hands and knees and had a peer, and under the car there’s a skirt directly under the driver and occupying about the same floorspace, fully in contact with the ground.

From there McMurtry’s CEO, Thomas Yates (an ex-F1 engineer, like many of his colleagues), tells me that ducts run up on either side, the air drawn through filters in the flanks that stop the grit, twigs, leaves and stones being machine gunned out the neat little exhaust ports in the rear end.

The two fans that do the sucking are high up behind the driver and spin at up to 23,000rpm. Turn them on and it will easily stick itself to the ceiling. Standing still. The Spéirling is basically a giant self-contained bagless vacuum cleaner.

Is that why a cloud seems to follow it around?

Exactly that, it vacuums the surface as it passes over. And if you’ve thought a bit ahead you’ll realise that would cause issues on regular roads with drain covers and potholes full of loose stones. Just ask Carlos Sainz. Remember Vegas? Be a hell of a road sweeper though, wouldn’t it? Every road in your local borough would be done in a morning.

But it's not road legal? And not able to race?

Correct on both counts. Instead think of it as a track-only hypercar. Just one capable of lapping at F1 speeds. It’s tiny, thigh high and designed to make the smallest possible hole in the air. Shorn of the dive planes, spoilers and aero flicks everyone else uses, it’s less brawny and aggressive. Cute, almost. If it didn’t have the conventional rear wing you might almost think it was designed as an efficiency test bed, more akin to VW’s XL1.

That wing, by the way, wasn’t there originally, but helps move the centre of grip rearwards, means you’ll get friendly understeer rather than scary oversteer.

What else goes on underneath?

It’s a full carbon chassis, with the driver sitting centrally and the 60kWh battery pack split, sitting in pods either side. It’s rear-wheel drive, with a 500bhp e-motor for each fat slick. All in it weighs a little over a tonne.

However, it’s important to remember this is still a prototype. This is not the car owners will be getting. That will have a wheelbase 80mm longer to make room for a bigger 100kWh battery pack and provide some luggage/storage space behind the driver.

What's the difference between blue and silver cars?

The silver car is the original, the Goodwood hill record holder (in 39.08 seconds), the blue car is the new one, 80mm wider overall, with off the shelf slick tyres 50mm wider all round. 270s at the front, 300s at the rear. It looks like a comical dragster from behind, the wheels almost meeting in the middle.

Which one did you drive?

For the purposes of full research, I drove both. I drag raced the original Spéirling against a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, then did full laps in the new car. Sometimes got the Porsche involved for that as well – keep an eye open for the full YouTube film.

Let’s deal with the straight line stuff first. The launch sequence is straightforward enough, but the final instruction wasn’t.

“Don’t forget to rest your head back before you release the brake.”

On the first run I didn’t and received a one-inch punch as the Spéirling launched at 2G and my helmet smacked back.

A 2G launch?! That's ridiculous.

Most cars brake at about 1G in a full emergency stop and take around 2.8secs to slow from 60mph. Go and find a nice clear road and you can get a sense of how uncomfortable that is. This hit 60mph in half that time – 1.38secs, and was at 100mph (2.61secs) well before the Porsche hit 60mph. Limited to 148mph (the production version will top 190mph), it was sat on the speed limiter for 2.5secs before it crossed the ¼ mile mark at 8.18secs.

Let’s put that speed in a little more context. The next fastest car I’ve tested was VW’s ID.R Pikes Peak. That hit 60mph in 2.25secs and yet despite being 4WD, smoked all four slicks off the line. In the McMurtry there was no wheelspin, just phenomenal traction. The joy of downforce that operates at any speed.

What's it like accelerating that hard?

Well, you’re not busy inside because it’s a single gear transmission, and you don’t hear any motor whine because everything is dominated by the roar of the fans. It’s the slap off the line that gets you, forces the air from your lungs. And it’s utterly unrelenting. I hit the limiter after less than five seconds and gasped with relief. Nothing this side of a top fueler sprints as well as this.

In fact it’s so fast it feels entirely different to anything else car-shaped. Skydived from an aeroplane or jumped off a high diving board? That’ll give you a better idea of the Spéirling acceleration. Or rather half of it, as you accelerate with one force of gravity, rather than two.

How's the cockpit?

It’s an odd thing to climb aboard. The door aperture is small, and I needed someone to help with the harnesses because there isn’t a great deal of wriggle room and I wanted those belts done up tightly. The doors contain LMP1 crash structure plinths, and when they’re closed they pincer your neck on either side. The windscreen wraps tightly. There’s barely room for a GoPro.

It should be claustrophobic, certainly feels it to start with, yet the view out, although hemmed by the close set wheels, is decent. It’s super-simple to drive: two pedals, a steering wheel and two key knobs, one for the motor power, the other for fan speed. The idea is that you ramp up through GT3-comparable speeds, to LMP1 and finally F1. Making the Spéirling a three-in-one destroyer of motorsport reputations.

If I have a criticism it’s that it does feel very much like a racing car inside, and that might make it a tough sell to hypercar owners as keen to show off in it as track it. It’s intimidating initially, and currently needs a team of people to operate. In time that will change. McMurtry expects owners to find a workaround to road legalise their cars.

But it's as easy to drive as any other electric car?

Well, kinda. It’s more intimidating obviously, because it’s not been designed with refinement and shopping runs in mind, but the actual action of driving? No worries there at all, just a steering wheel and two pedals. The brake is heavy, the throttle super accurate. Steering weight depends on how much suction is engaged. 

You can run it without the fans, leave the ride height up and it’ll pull away effortlessly, drive easily. I started by slaloming up and down the runway, just getting a feel for the mechanical grip, noticing how light the steering was, that there was a little bit of roll.

That changed when the fans went on – initially to 10,000rpm. You expect the constant jet-like whistle to vary with speed, but of course it doesn’t. But you feel what it does instantly. Sucked to the surface, body roll lessens, the steering weights up, the Spéirling becomes firmer, sharper and yet also more stable and planted. A few minutes of this and I’m driving it like a hot hatch, it’s playful and engaging, the grip already immense.

And what about when you max it out?

My biggest fear was that I’d find the Spéirling impossible to get to grips with. Because the truism for amateurs like me is that you never quite know where you are with regular downforce. The faster you go the more of it there is, but where are you on that sliding scale? Should I go looking for more of it? Or is that a bad idea? What happens as it bleeds off under braking? Will the wheels lock? What’s going to come unstuck first? And what if you lose it and start to spin? Then all hell breaks loose because wings only work in one direction. It’s all rather complex and you find yourself doing a lot of mental gymnastics while driving.

But here it’s simple: 3G at any speed, through any corner. So the Spéirling is the last thing I expected: a proper hoot. It doesn’t even take me long to get used to the forces before I’m hurling it into Chicago – usually a 50mph entry – at well over 70mph, roaring with laughter.

And because the entry speeds are so high, you’re doing very little braking. About a second, just attacking the brake, letting go of it as soon as you dare and then whip-cracking into the corner. The direction change at Hammerhead is done as fast as I can turn my hands, the apex speed at this, the slowest point of the circuit, maybe 25mph faster than anything else I’ve driven. Riding it out through Hammerhead it’s all happening too fast for me to think about what line I’m on. The track is suddenly narrow, my vision tunnels, processing struggles. As long as I’m on the grey, I know I’m OK.

The run-up from Hammerhead to Follow Through is one of Dunsfold’s natural pauses. You have time to think and prepare. Not in the Spéirling. The GT3 RS peaked at 1.77G here, about 115mph. In the Spéirling it was… well that’s where I found my limit. Instead, to give myself space, I just kept turning more tightly rather than running out to the far side. I remember the same from driving the ID.R, this feeling of simultaneous compression and weightlessness as your body is prevented from being forced outwards. It’s other-worldly, a zone only the fastest LMP1 and F1 drivers get to experience.

Does it feel alien to drive in that case?

My internal gyroscope actually got up to speed pretty quickly. You know how grippy a go-kart is, and yet how soon you acclimatise? Well, it’s the same here – all you’ve got to worry about is processing the rate everything is coming at you.

At one point I chased the GT3 RS around, toying with it. It was flat out, yet barely moving and I’m thinking, “ha! Puny weakling, I will now destroy you as easily as squashing an ant”. And I did, screaming off into the distance, leaving it choking on the dusty memories of my wake. And I realised two things: 1) never has speed and approachability been better blended and 2) given ultimate power, I’d handle it badly.

There’s an immense sense of connection here, of integrity and an awareness of how small you are, and how quickly you can stop should it go wrong. Well, provided the fan had something to suck against. Imagine being a superhero, where you have complete dominance and mastery of everything around you. That’s the sensation the Spéirling gave me.

Yet I’m glad I don’t have Max Chilton’s lap time responsibilities. In other very fast track cars, I’ve occasionally found it frustrating that I couldn’t get close to their capabilities, but not here. I got loads out of it because its performance is so unusual, so unique.

Are you persuaded by the technology?

We’re talking ultimate track performance, right? Then this is very convincing indeed. We can’t just keep giving cars more power, more weight and more wings. This is radical engineering that started to be proven out in motorsport but has now, finally, found an outlet into the real world.

I don’t know if other marques will use it – but I bet they’re all looking hard at it. It could well light a spark.

If you owned one what would you do with it? 

Track days, I suppose. I mean, it’s gonna be like OutRun out there as everyone spools towards you. The likelihood is that many of the 100 being built will be converted to road use in some capacity.

But even if it doesn’t have much of a real world use case, it should attract buyers for its sheer speed and revolutionary design. There’s a purity of mind to the design and execution of McMurtry’s first car that should ensure its future reputation and values. This is emphatically not just a very fast, very expensive electric car.

I’ve driven so many dizzyingly rapid cars, but nothing has ever smashed the limits so far into the distance as this. And yet it’s connected and engaging. It’s a happy little car, this rocketing rollerskate, never tries to show you how fearsome its performance is, just accelerates like a flicked pea and takes you along for the ride. It’s captivating.