Murray's city car takes shape

Newly formed Gordon Murray Design Limited, based in Surrey, has released a puritanical manifesto that will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Murray’s column in evo magazine. Weight is the new venture’s sworn enemy, as are bulk and thirst.

Gordon Murray Design might only be three months old but it is already busy creating a small, lightweight and environmentally responsible urban vehicle – known internally as Type 25 City Car – that Murray has been working on privately for some time. The great news for performance car fans is that a radical, lightweight supercar and a race car programme are also in the company’s plans.

It’s claimed that the Type 25 (so codenamed because it’s the 25th car Gordon Murray has designed, the Type 1 being his 1966 IGM Ford sports car, Type 24 the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren) will weigh just 500kg and boast running costs of a quarter of those of an entry-level Golf. But it’s not just the running costs that will be spectacularly low – the energy used during the construction process is planned to be considerably less than that needed to build a conventional supermini.

Firm details are scant, but the car is described as being even smaller than a Smart, MPV-like in shape and layout but with a very flexible platform allowing up to 14 body style variants.

An efficient, small-capacity petrol engine will power the T25 to begin with as GMD believes oft-vaunted green technology like fuel cells are too early in their development to represent a true alternative.

Amongst all the Murray-designed cars at the launch of GMD was a solitary bright yellow Fiat 500. Belonging to Gordon himself, it’s the car he most wants the T25 to be like: innovative, beautifully packaged and very successful in the marketplace.

Unlike most car design offices these days, CAD will play only a minor roll at GMD as all cars will be drawn by hand on a full-size drawing board. Murray insists this is the only way to design and that CAD never delivers a good-looking car. (The F1 was one of the last cars to be produced where every component was drawn by hand and not designed on computer.)

Prototypes of the T25 are expected to be running within two years; the plan then is to sell or license the design to a major manufacturer with a view to volume production with a target price of around £5000.

Then, Murray has tantalisingly hinted, GMD will look at designing a supercar, possibly for a 2010 release, plus a race programme. With fourteen employees, many of them ex-McLaren, the new company has the expertise and the capacity for both.

‘Some four years of work have already gone into a new breed of supercar,’ reads the firm’s introductory statement, ‘a car that absolutely reverses the trend towards larger, heavier and more powerful supercars. This car will give the driver all the driving feedback and pleasure that a good power-to-weight ratio and vehicle dynamics can deliver, but from light weight and modest power. The result will be a more affordable and more environmentally friendly supercar. The company is also gearing up during the next twelve months to undertake a race programme.’Of course, Murray’s sports and race car credentials are exemplary. His Brabham and McLaren F1 cars won five drivers’ world championships between them, while the legacy of his 1994 McLaren F1 still looms over the supercar landscape like a colossus. Its race derivitive, the F1 GTR, finished 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 13th in its first Le Mans in 1995. If all goes according to plan, Gordon Murray should be back at Le Mans within the next few years with a new race car, this time bearing his own name. It will have a lot to live up to…