It seems like every other week there’s a new or reborn hypercar company, but few live long enough to bring cars to market and fewer still live beyond that first model. That’s because building cars is hard. Building the cars people want and are willing to pay and wait for is harder still, and navigating continually changing economic and political landscapes is even harder than that. And it’s why the hypercar manufacturers that are the most forward-thinking don’t just build cars – they develop technology that furthers the automotive landscape.
The likes of Rimac and Czinger have proven to be two such manufacturers, using the Nevera and Czinger 21C as performance halos while developing incredible technology that is now used by the likes of Bugatti, BMW, McLaren and more. But there’s another hypercar builder we need to start thinking of in the same breath: McMurtry.
At this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, CarBuzz caught up with McMurtry Managing Director Thomas Yates to find out why an upside-down, record-shattering hypercar is just one facet of building a sustainable future for the wild technology behind the Spéirling PURE.
From Record-Setting Fan Car Concept To Production
McMurtry Spéirling PUREMcMurtry
The McMurtry Spéirling blasted onto the scene a few years ago with a wild concept of downforce-on-demand. A massive fan system generates immense suction under the car — so much that it can literally drive upside down from a standstill. And for anyone who thought it was merely a gimmick, Max Chilton proved them wrong, piloting the Spéirling to a new Goodwood Hill Climb record in 2022 of 39.08 seconds. ‘Insane’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. But four years later, that prototype has now reached production in the Spéirling PURE, and according to Yates, it’s almost an entirely new car.
Almost Entirely A New Car
When asked how significantly the PURE has changed from the original prototype, Yates smiles. “It’s still got the same brakes,” he says. “If we’re talking about the original record car, I’m trying to think of what else is common. I think almost everything else is new. Even with the brakes, we’ve been able to keep the same brake package, but we do a much better job of keeping it cool compared to the silver car that broke the record here.”
2023 Goodwood Festival of Speed. McMurtry Automotive Speirling PURE Electric Fan Car. Motion. On-track. HillclimbMcMurtry Automotive
The official number is 95 – 95% of components on the production car are all new, which means the car that stole everyone’s hearts in 2022 is quite literally a different car from the one customers can buy. 2023 saw the first PURE prototypes showcased, and in 2024, it completed test runs up the Goodwood Hill. According to Yates, McMurtry put “thousands and thousands of track kilometers on that car, with customers and staff.” And almost all of those have been, as he puts it, “in anger.”
“We’re at this lovely point in our history where almost every member of staff has driven the car in anger on the racetrack, which is just phenomenal. If you’re gonna get this lovely bunch of excitable people to design the car in its best possible form, to make sure they understand it by driving is such a key part of that.”
– Thomas Yates, McMurtry Managing Director
Other Automakers Lining Up To Use McMurtry Technology
McMurtry Spierling PURE Upside DownMichal Okonski/CarBuzz/Valnet
But now that customer cars will finally be delivered soon — the first will be displayed at Monterey Car Week in August — there’s a question of where the tech goes next. As it turns out, the answer isn’t necessarily “into another McMurtry.” Instead, McMurtry is evolving and supplying other automakers.
When asked if the brand might, in the future, consider developing and selling tech like the Spéirling PURE’s downforce-on-demand systems to other automakers, like Rimac has with its pioneering battery and motor technology, Yates’ response catches us off guard. “We already do,” he says.
“There is already a secondary component to our business, which has been hugely helpful for giving us this really stable platform to build a car company from, so we’re already working with three other car companies.”
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The car companies he refers to are spread across a pretty broad range. One is “a high-profile motorsports team,” which makes sense if you consider how downforce is so important in series like WEC and Formula 1, but the other two are making real road cars. Those two are a “large-scale OEM and one hypercar manufacturer, and we support them with things like downforce technology and battery components.”
That sounds awfully similar to how Rimac Technology was launched, and that’s now a business supplying the likes of BMW and Porsche and gave Mate Rimac enough sway to eventually become CEO of Bugatti and buy it out entirely from Porsche.
McMurtry Spierling PURE Upside DownMichal Okonski/CarBuzz/Valnet
Giving McMurtry The Freedom To Push The Limits
Yates tells us how deals like that are vital to the success and future of McMurtry. “That’s been a really, really important opportunity to be able to give us justification to keep pushing the technology. We’ve definitely learned that the automotive market is a hugely seasonal thing, so if you want to have the freedom as a business and the stability as a business to be able to keep innovating and build the cars that you actually want, having the secondary component to a business that really supports that is really helpful.”
Simply put, by becoming more than just a niche automaker, by becoming a technology innovator and a supplier to others, McMurtry now has “the freedom to keep pushing and to build the cars that we want to build and not to focus too much on making something that’s really commercially focused.”
CarBuzz Insight — Why It Matters
McMurtry Spéirling PUREMcMurtry
We’ve seen too many automakers come along with incredible ideas that went nowhere. Many of those made a fuss about how their technology was the future, but by refusing to collaborate with others, they shot themselves in the foot and inevitably met their demise before the world could see whether the technology was truly special.
But in much the same way as Rimac and Czinger have used incredible hypercars to show off their technology, and then turned that technology into a marketable asset used by major, established automakers, McMurtry is doing the same. It guarantees the brand a future, lifts the burden off of a car needing to break even to secure its future, and ensures that incredible technology will be seen in more cars. For a small automaker that arrived out of nowhere to develop a sustainable model like this is refreshing, but more importantly, it ensures new technology reaches the mainstream rather than dying behind closed doors.
