For the last few years, plenty of headlines at the Goodwood Festival of Speed have been stolen by a funny little electric car that looks to be built in ¾ scale, throwing out a roostertail of dust as it whooshes up the hillclimb at speeds that make you feel like someone’s managed to fast-forward time. That car is the McMurtry Spéirling, and the man behind it has died, aged 84.
Born in Dublin in 1940, David McMurtry was already well into his 70s when he established McMurtry Automotive. The car that would eventually become the Spéirling began life as a vision for something small but sporty that he could use to nip around the narrow lanes of Gloucestershire, where he lived and founded the company.
McMurtry Spéirling – side
The finished product, though, is radically different from anything that’s come before: a diminutive, 1000bhp electric track car built around a gigantic fan that sucks it to the ground and allows it to achieve cornering speeds unlike anything else we’ve ever witnessed.
The car now holds the outright record up the Goodwood hill and also set an ‘accidental’ EV record around Laguna Seca earlier this year while on a demo run.
McMurtry Spéirling – front
The Spéirling, though, isn’t the only game-changing machine to carry McMurtry’s legacy. Having started his career as an apprentice aerospace engineer, he went on to work on the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines that powered Concorde, still the only supersonic passenger jet to ever see sustained, regular service, and undoubtedly one of the coolest planes ever.
It was while struggling to get precise measurements on a component of Concorde’s engines that McMurtry developed the touch-trigger probe, a device that would eventually make him his considerable personal fortune through Renishaw, the company he founded to manufacture them.
McMurtry Spéirling after breaking the Goodwood FoS record
Arguably, then, the Spéirling was something of a passion project for a man who’d already achieved a great deal, but in terms of automotive engineering, it moves the game on more than nearly anything else that’s come along in recent years. It’s fitting that it should be the creation to bear McMurtry’s name.
