The Cars Hacker
Can Gordon Murray — one of the most innovate formula one engineers in history — create an exciting city car?
In Durban, the largest port in South Africa, a teenager skinny as a flagpole walks through its streets waiting for the weekend. Those are the years of apartheid: even the beaches are divided by skin color, yet that discussion about race doesn’t interest him. The only thing worthwhile in that place happened on Saturdays. An event worthy of his attention. A challenge of speed. A car race.
His father was a Peugeot mechanic that helped to transform streetcars into beasts of persecution. Every weekend his son accompanies him to saw the drama that occurs when a group of cars steps on the accelerator at the same time. Isn’t the mechanics of the vehicles what make his heart pound. In a country where buying a car was a luxury — and even more, a racing car — the teenager Ian Gordon Murray didn’t just want a vehicle to impress girls. He wanted to become a racing driver.
In the course of his life, he will face similar hardships. Impossible-to-solve problems that for others are more than a reason to quit, for Murray was the fuel he needs it to start working. At seventeen, the mechanic’s son decided that the most reasonable thing to do was building a car made with spare parts. Well, scrap pieces. Before he turns twenty-one, Murray’s car will make him the South African champion of the category.
Fifty years after his first car, Gordon Murray has retired himself for professional car driving and has become the most celebrated car designer of the past century. A mechanic engineer behind each of the nuts and bolts of the race cars that made Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna champions of Formula One. The craftsman who designed the best streetcar ever put into production: the Mclaren F1 (and even wrote the manual by himself). The son of a mechanic, for his project number 25, decided to be inspired for another impossible problem. While most manufacturers try to sell us the cars of the future, Gordon Murray would create the first one with a future. That difference between both types of vehicles is so abysmal that if Murray’s T25 get mass-produced, he would be placed at a similar height of Henry Ford. Like the T model from the beginning of the last century, the T25 has the potential to change city transportation.
The T25 prototype doesn’t have an engine that runs on hydrogen, nor is it so smart that it drives alone or works on electric batteries. It is the smallest, comfortable, light, crisp, and cheap gasoline model ever designed. Murray calculates that if the planet’s automotive fleet became only 10% lighter, the impact in the next decade would be higher than all the alternative solutions presented so far. It is not the wild claim of someone who promotes their product as salvation against the greenhouse effect. It is a simple logic of Formula 1, something lighter saves more and pollutes less.
Gordon Murray and his team (many of whom work with him since McLaren’s 1 ) took 18 months to create the perfect commuter car: cheap and a cool enough to don’t look like a miser. They disarmed several vehicles on the market and weighed each of their pieces to find some way to make it lighter part by part. Its result was so original that at the moment it was revealed to the public caused a massive wave of people scratching their heads. What is this? Smaller than the smallest cars in the market yet it is for three seats. Thin enough to park three in one single spot, has also ended the debate between having three or five doors: it only has one, and it opens forwards. The T25 can ready to sell on both sides of the Atlantic without modifications: the wheel installed in the middle. James May, the presenter of the Grand Tour, test it and reviewed as a weird comfort. The frame was solid, and it was nothing but fun. In the speed testings results, the T25 leave behind their Nissan adversaries. It’s a car… it doesn’t look like a car.
While motor shows offer increasingly clean, smarter and fully equipped versions of cars every year, they continue to be built with heavy steel panels. The only thing that has changed the assembly lines since Ford is its gigantic size and the location of its workforce. Often, city cars look like summaries of bigger models, because it is the only way to make as profitable as an SUV. The factory does not distinguish between a city car that one prepared to discover the unexpected in a dune. Murray thinks that the problem of pollution not only is also a manufacturing issue. How do we build small, tremendous, and profitable cars for crowed and polluted cities?
Being in need is fertile territory for the imagination. Where common sense saw a shattered Ford Anglia, half a century ago Gordon Murray selected the front of his first car. He also learned to weld while shaping the bird-shaped chassis of English brand Lotus that also inspired the vehicle of the anime “Speed Racing.” Murray imagined and built his pistons, his gearbox, his exhaust pipe. He created a device which allowed a flow of air to enter to the engine granting him more horsepower. Those were innovations born of necessity. We only deserve the things we can dream of. His car would be fast, or it wouldn’t be. It took a couple of years to finish it. He called IGM by its acronym. That car was the first chapter in Murray’s design philosophy: if you run into something that doesn’t exist yet, you should get in a good mood. Suddenly you are Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
The offices of Gordon Murray Design in Surrey, England, are a mix between a mechanics garage and a design studio. A place where engineers, mechanics, and designers coexist to build four wheels masterpieces. Across the office, pinned on walls and boards, are plans of the car printed in real size. Rather than see them in screens, he prefers this analog solution that focuses on real-life experience rather than a look created by computers. This method allows the team to see the future car with the eyes of someone who stops in the parking lot and take a closer look at the neighbor’s new car.
Murray’s office has a scientific process to pinpoint the key issues and a hands-on approach to solving them. Before getting to the drawing board, his team had dismantled the bests city cars in the market while evaluating design, weight, performance, building process. After that, they build a prototype that suffers change after change after a few test laps. Then Murray enters the kingdom of details. Big car markers are often designed in one country to be built in another. Although robot arms can be precise, they don’t take an afternoon discussing the best way to build a door. That’s what makes all the difference. While designing a car, it may be reasonable to discuss the right placement of a window or the correct height of the driver’s seat. Murray’s goes further convinced that even the tiniest modification would change the experience of the car. “A window twenty millimeters taller can make you sit in a more spacious cabin” explains Murray as if it was the more obvious in the world.
The origin of many of his design decisions comes from intuition. Is this felt good? Was it horrible? Every detail is an opportunity to improve the experience of the car. In the end, the accumulation of those minimal, almost imperceptible details, creates the experience of a supercar. However, Murray never forgets that the primary purpose of a car is to be on the road. Often, many of those design details also improve the performance of a vehicle. This duality is something he learned in the efficiency school of the old Formula One: looks may get attention but is performance what motorheads remember. For many fans of his work, the Mclaren F1 is the most elegant expression of this car design principle. An illustration of quality and originality, without any previous model to base the designer got a carte blanche. Murray designed the car along with only seven people. Small teams are easier to handle, yet it also reveals that this man who wears flowery shirts is a perfectionist who does not delegate easily. For many, it is the best streetcar ever built. The McLaren F1 goes at 241 miles per hour, 627 horsepower, and it’s so light that eight people could lift it. It is a car that in its race version, occupied the first five places of the 24 hours of Lemans, the most famous resistance championship in the world. Jay Leno, one of its owners, teases to say that driving a Mclaren F1 is like having sex with an aerobics instructor. You go one hundred an hour, and she will ask you if you’re done. It will always be better than one. Can he replicate that kind of success in a car for the city?
The T25 is an invitation to think from the side of a problem that arises every time we stop at a traffic light. There are too many cars in this world. It is ridiculous to think that in the short term we will stop using them. Ninety-five vehicles are produced every minute around the world, 50 million in a year. But the most painful thing is not the bottleneck that causes that production. It is 80% that is made up of large models — the majority occupied by loners trying to get somewhere.
“This has stopped being fun,” declared in a documentary dedicated to his years at the top of Formula One and the development of T25. He meant that if things went on like this, a motorized world would not be sustainable. However, his idea should excite car fans and manufacturers. Because Murray does not plan to build the T25, but the license of a lighter car factory.
It’s called iStream, and it will be the only car factory that doesn’t use steel plates to create the chassis. The cars will be constructed from steel tubes, which are cut and folded with relatively cheap machinery. New parts will be working with recycled carbon fiber, a material that has passed the European safety tests. Painting and assembly do not require robotic monsters that take up space and consume energy. According to Murray’s calculations, the factory would have an extension of 14,500 square meters, just a fraction of an automotive city and produce about thirty cars per hour.
Reduces the carbon footprint of each car, but at the same time makes the manufacture of this type of vehicles profitable. By having moving parts, it also makes spare parts cheaper by increasing their resale value. It also generates more work, with a low impact on the environment. Cities will have cars that pollute less, Murray imagines a range of models that fulfill functions of cargo, public transport, and even sports. However, the best idea does not always come true.
Gordon Murray is a challenge hunter. Tired of winning in South African competitions, he wrote a letter to his hero Colin Chapman. The founder of Lotus, who dominated the first years of Formula 1, not only answered the message but also offered him a place. Chapman was one of the first people to take advantage of the union of design with engineering. Perhaps he saw in Murray a unique prospect. Someone who naturally turned efficient mechanical solutions into pieces that looked attractive.
A December 1969 the fairy tale became a horror. When Murray arrived in Norwich where Lotus was left only to discover that he would not work for Chapman. Lotus was firing staff. For many months I lived in a cold and unemployed apartment. He had no money to live, less to drive. One day he decided to go through the Brabham headquarters, which was still run by its founders. One of them Ron Tauranac confused him with a drawing applicant and hired him. But the team was more focused on selling cars for smaller categories than conquering Formula 1. In the early 1970s, it was bought by Bernie Ecclestone, one of the few suggestions he received from Tauranac was to fire Murray. Ecclestone dismissed the entire team and left Murray with twenty-five years as head of the Formula 1 team. After a decade of work, the result was two world championships in 1982 and 1983.
But also a period of innovation. He was the first to use a brake system with carbon shoes. The first to use carbon fiber panels. The first to use the wind tunnel (and the first to complain about the obsession with him). He devised the hydropneumatic suspension that allowed the car to duck more at high speed and generate a more significant ground effect. He was also the first to add a useless valve to the body, to prevent the competition from discovering the trick. In 1982 he changed the way the gas tank was filled, which allowed him to take advantage at the beginning of the races taking advantage of a lighter car. It also improved the change of tires by adding vertigo to pit stops.
In an interview for the book ‘Motor Sports Greats: In Conversation,’ the author took a peek of Murray’s notes while working on the McLaren F1. The writer describes them as too perfect to be on the fly, but they were. We are used to seeing the creativity associated with chaotic personality and not with neatness. Murray has kept all those old notebooks since he was a student. One day, Murray has told, he attended a one-day mechanical engineering course, and by the end, he had to design a three-horsepower stationary engine. The son of a mechanic drew an engine that only had three moving parts that were not used for car racing but would be perfect for third world countries. He would like to make his prototype someday. Perhaps his next challenge is to create an engine that changes the lives of millions of people.
