Floored in Surrey with Gordon Murray: Welcome to the T50 factory

Next to the assembly hall is a busy service centre that already contains a sample of the 50 or so T50s already in service. Murray is proud that a decent number of owners seem to be using the cars on the road, rather than keeping them as ornaments.

We walk through it all, admiring the simplicity, logic, quality and modernity with which he attacks all things.

Soon this building will be joined by a nearby design studio and R&D centre, flanking a short shakedown test track. It’s not for speed, Murray assures us; the (so far very co-operative) local council wouldn’t like that.

There will always be space also for his own eclectic car collection, a fascinating array of cars he built himself early on and cars that he loves unconditionally and feels have influenced him in his career.

A 60-year commemorative event is just around the corner, and once Highams Park is finished (Murray is a stickler for completing what he starts), there’s a plan to open it to visitors.

The final flourish, typical of someone who has brought so much science and innovation to the car business, will be the opening of an educational institute on the site, aiming to bring capable young talent to the car business.

This is a few years away and specifics of the qualifications to be offered are still being decided, but Murray won’t care if his 30-odd proteges at a time go to other car companies.

The only aim is to attract talented people to a business he knows, better than most, can provide lifelong fulfilment.

The motorsport hero helping to modernise Murray’s McLaren F1

It is by no means a given that a racing driver will be into road cars. Some aren’t interested, because driving incredibly fast around circuits gives them a thrill that they can never replicate on the road in something slower and more boring. Going fast for them is everything.

Dario Franchitti, four-time Indycar Series champion and three-time Indianapolis 500 winner, is not that kind of racing driver. “I love my road cars,” says the Scot as we walk towards a GMA T50 supercar, in which he will be driving me around some of Surrey’s most pockmarked and flooded roads. “Some would say I’m obsessed with road cars. I love everything about the automobile. I’ve been that way since I was five years old.”

As a bloke who knocks about in a Lancia Delta Integrale, has owned a Ferrari F40 for 25 years (and drives it as often as possible) and runs a Porsche Carrera GT, a Ferrari 355 and a 1984 Aston Martin V8 Vantage, it’s fair to say that Franchitti is one of us.

This is what has made him the ideal fit for GMA, where according to the business card he is director of brand, performance and product. Less formally, he’s a conduit between the development engineers and Murray in making GMA’s cars feel as the boss would like them.

This isn’t a casual dalliance, either: Franchitti is not merely an ambassador, rolled out to glad-hand customers. A day after this interview, he will fly to Spain for a week of proving ground testing. This is now his career. (His younger brother Marino performs a similar role for Singer, the Porsche 911 restomodder.)

Not all drivers could make the leap from a career in which success is delivered via minute levels of data into one that involves almost a wilful abandonment of numbers. Murray says he “doesn’t care” about measurables like performance figures.

The T50, despite its doubtless prodigious speed, has been designed, like the McLaren F1 was, to engage, not simply to go fast. Franchitti’s interview is peppered with words like ‘feel’ and ‘response’. Although one number of which the GMA team is proud is the kerb weight, which starts with a nine.

This is my first time inside a T50, as Franchitti pulls out of a junction from walking pace in third gear to demonstrate the flexibility of the engine, plus the fact that the Cosworth-developed, naturally aspirated V12 has precious few kilograms to accelerate.

“You will feel it when you get to drive it,” he says. “You will feel the lack of weight and quickness of response.”

I won’t be driving today, but there are things you can tell from one of the side seats. One is the compliance of the ride, plus what seems like a generous ground clearance by the standards of supercars.

“It’s unbelievably useful,” says Franchitti. “Any speed bumps it just goes over. It’s nuts. I’ve tried really hard, but I’ve never bottomed out this car, going through car parks, crazy California inclines, even at [the test track] Nardò.”

The compliance aids traction, too, although on a road like this and with 664bhp, such things are relative. But “it’s got really good traction”, Franchitti tells me. “Gordon hates rear anti-roll bars, so there’s no rear bar.”

The tyres are very much road-focused, Michelin Pilot 4Ss. “And they’re off the shelf,” says Franchitti, which makes them easier for customers to source down the line. For a car of this performance, they’re relatively modestly sized, too: only 295-section at the rear.

“One of our biggest challenges was to get them to talk to your hands,” says Franchitti. “When we nailed it, it was a eureka moment. 

The more grip a tyre produces, the quicker the moment when it lets go.” The T50 has power-assisted steering only below 6mph to ease manoeuvring; beyond that, it’s au naturel.

“It doesn’t have to have a quick steering rack in it to trick people into thinking it’s responsive,” says Franchitti, “which I hate in some modern cars. You know which ones I’m talking about.” I think I do.

Some of them, though, have very nice engines. As does the T50. It would be remiss of me not to mention the bespoke 4.0-litre V12, because it sounds so very, very good.

“The carbonfibre airbox is basically tuned to give a resonance based on throttle angle, and the noise that we experience is all linked to throttle angle,” says Franchitti.

“That’s one of the things Gordon learned from the McLaren F1, whose induction noise is second to none. It’s more difficult with a smaller displacement engine [the F1’s BMW-sourced V12 displaced 6.1 litres], but we all knew when we had got it.”

Other than the compliance, sound and low inertia, what strikes me about the T50 is how Franchitti can pick a line, even on these roads, owing to the car’s relatively modest width of 1850mm. The F1’s footprint is similar, and I wonder aloud if a driver teleported from one to the other, knowing nothing of the lineage, would notice that the two had come from the same hand.

“I think in seating position and in ethos, yes, but it drives completely differently. It’s not a subtle difference,” answers Franchitti. “One of the memories I think I will keep for the rest of my life is that Gordon was in this very car and I was in an F1, and I was chasing him down a mountainside. I was going as hard as I could in an F1 to keep up with him, and I was relieved to get out of it at the end. You realise how things have moved on in 30 years.”

That drive was part of what sealed it for Franchitti as a serial special car owner and driver: he had to have a T50. Except that, by that time, they were all spoken for.“I’ve had to persuade the big man to sell me a prototype,” he says.

Delaying the order is not a mistake he has repeated with the upcoming T33.

A car fan looking beyond the fan car

GMG CEO Phillip Lee belongs to an extremely rare group of people in the car creation chain: he’s a bean-counter who loves cars. Lee trained as an accountant and joined a global accountancy group early on but soon transferred to cars and worked at restructuring and improving businesses in China, Europe, the US and South America.

About a decade ago, he returned to the UK to join Chinese giant Geely, first at taxi maker LEVC and then Lotus, before landing happily at GMG about five years ago, following an introduction by company director Carl-Peter Forster.

“I was also very keen to do whatever I could to progress the true British sports car, and it seemed to me that Gordon and his operation were the embodiment of that,” says Lee.

He first joined the management, then became CEO of the whole operation three years ago, when Murray became chairman. Right now, Lee is extremely busy getting cars built, but he’s also in the enviable position of being “sold out” until 2028.

GMA has four distinct supercar models to build, and there’s already a buyer’s name against every car. The company is currently about halfway through building its 100 T50 three-seat ‘fan cars’, expecting to finish with 40-odd US customer cars by mid-2025.

Then there will be 25 special track-only T50S Niki Lauda cars to make later in the year, before attention turns to the two-seat T33 for delivery in 2026. After that there’s a T33 Spider and beyond that, potentially, an extra-performance T33.

Starting T33 production next year will be a deceptively big job, says Lee, even though this supercar is simpler in specification than the T50.

It’s because the T33 carries global type approval, whereas the T50 – very much a halo car, with exotic features like the fan system and legislative challenges resulting from the three-seat layout – carries only small-series approvals in the markets where it’s sold.

When everything you make sells instantly, I ask Lee, why not just make bigger batches? Surely you could save a bundle on development costs?

With his brand-image hat in place, he firmly bats this away. “We’re building a business here,” replies Lee, “and as well as our endemic values, like driving perfection, we offer exclusivity. If you say you will build 100 cars, that’s what you have to do. We’re not a one-hit wonder; we’re a business. We do what we say.”

About 50 cars were built during 2024 and the aim for 2025 is 120, heading for an ideal output of 150.

By then, GMG will have added 50 people to its present 350-strong workforce. In time past, Murray suggested that there were new V12-engined cars coming beyond the T33 line-up, but Lee is mysterious about the form they might take – except to say that they will be “something Gordon has always wanted to build” and “something you might not expect”.

Further details will come soon, he adds. In the meantime, there is a model cycle plan to 2040, with the platforms and powerplants already decided.

But how many will be V12s? Lee is evasive, insisting that the company is already engaged in hybrid and hydrogen powertrain research – and pointing out that even the existing V12 has an integrated starter-generator on the end of its crankshaft.

“It’s all a moving target,” he says. “Big cities are framing regulations of their own, and the situation is even more fragmented in the US. But we’re ready for the future.

“What helps is that every one of our cars is an individual. We don’t just design a system and put a car around it. That’s also the principle we will use in the future. We’re ready.”