Things You Probably Didn't Know About McLaren F1 and More - Straight From Gordon Murray

A week ago on The Smoking Tire podcast, Gordon Murray sat almost 90 minutes with the hosts talking about his time in Formula One, financial constraints he had faced, his cars (the T50/T50S and T33), and many other interesting stuff. While this is not an advertisement for the podcast, we recommend everybody to listen to everything Gordon Murray has to say because when it comes to automotive engineering, he knows it all.

To not spoil the whole discussion, we will talk about only some topics that we believe were interesting enough, starting with the McLaren F1, a car made with a different purpose than everybody thinks. The V12 McLaren was not made to destroy top speed records. Hell, Gordon didn't even want to find out the maximum top speed of this car, but he had to calculate in order to choose the gear ratios. That is the only reason. As Murray said, he wasn't interested in any performance figures; he just wanted to offer the perfect driving experience.

Another fun thing in creating the McLaren F1 is what Murray did to understand what his future project would need. Basically, he took five of the best contemporary supercars to test them out on the street and track. He mentioned heavy names like the Ferrari F40, Bugatti EB110, Porsche 959, Jaguar XJ220, and Honda NSX.

All of them were great but had some inconveniences (like reduced visibility or pedal offsets) that diminished the driving pleasure. Also, he explained how the McLaren F1 and the Gordon T50 are using the well to known fan and the differences.

The British engineer (who was born in South Africa) is not a fan of big, heavy cars. Instead, the lightweight, agile and small supercars are his thing. As a result, he was stunned when he was contacted to design and engineer the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren because he was given minimum dimensions for the first time in his career. The reason was simple.

The Mercedes engineer said anything smaller than those dimensions wouldn't have any road presence. In a funny way, Gordon pointed out that a Formula one car is one meter shorter. As a lesser known fact, the distance between the steering wheel and the front of the hood is the same as the iconic Jaguar E-Type.

Now, you need to understand that Gordon Murray it's not just an engineering genius but also a visionary. He told some stories about his inventions, like doing a composite rear wing on a Formula One car. It was a big thing because it was the first structural composite ever seen in the motorsport premiere class. Years later, in 1976, he introduced the carbon breaks, six years before anybody thought about that.

An even more impressive thing is that Brabham (where Murray was an engineer) was the first team to have a rolling road wind tunnel. Guess who built and designed it? His name starts with G and ends with Ordon. Oh, and he made an autoclave from a modified ship boiler.

Still, Gordon Murray explained many more about his stellar projects, but we don't want to spoil everything from this podcast. Still, you should know that he talked about car designs from this day (for example, BMW), his favorite bikes, affordable sports car, and many other exciting topics. If you want to find more, check the podcast between Gordon Murray and The Smoking Tire crew here.