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Home ‘Interesting’ Gordon Murray nearly wins two more with BMW after F1
The current world’s automotive favorite is the GMA T.50. Could it ever be something else? This is Gordon Murray’s latest task and everything he does immediately becomes a legend. After all, he is the brain of the largest supercarcart ever designed, the McLaren F1. As you may already know, for the F1 V12 engine, Murray has partnered with BMW M and some other legend of Paul Rosche’s car. What you may not already know is that the two would continue to work in combination after F1.
In the most recent episode of the Collecting Cars podcast with Chris Harris, Gordon Murray teamed up to communicate above all; the new T.50, his life in Formula One, the McLaren F1 and all sorts of wonderful stories spread through the middle. It’s an episode he deserves to pay attention to. It’s long, but it’s probably fascinating.
At one point in the episode, Harris asked Murray about the Mercedes McLaren SLR, a car Murray designed but didn’t finish calling it, because it wasn’t literally the car he was looking to make. However, the origin of this story begins in BMW.
After the good media fortune of the McLaren F1, BMW is incredibly interested in working with Gordon Murray and McLaren Cars again. Considering that Murray, the 20% shareholder of McLaren Cars at the time (which was a separate entity from the McLaren F1 team) and ran the company, began designing two new sports cars with BMW engines, cars that would have been much more affordable than the F1. and sells in much higher volumes.
However, in the final second, McLaren signed an agreement with Mercedes-Benz to expand Formula One engines and, the F1 look and appearance of McLaren’s road car are separate entities, BMW no longer sought anything to do with the company after that. Thus, the two cars Murray had in a designed position and in a forward position were lost in history.
As a result of this messy deal between McLaren, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, Gordon Murray ended up designing the SLR, a monstrously fast car that was not the sports car he was looking to build. He sought to build soft and undeniable sports cars and had two in the barrel, able to go, with BMW, but the world total lost what the cars may have been due to industry deals going wrong.
Obviously, Murray tells the story in fantastic detail and intentionally passed over some pieces to pay attention to it. The whole episode deserves attention, as it’s full of desirable stories and compelling facts about Murray’s life. The component over the two BMWs that never existed starts at 50:47, but if you need to pay attention to the whole episode, look for a link below.
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