The Rocket is like nothing else on the road
Gordon Murray has been in the news quite a lot of late, last week receiving a thoroughly deserved CBE and this week publishing a book about all the cars and other vehicles he has designed in his long career, and even quite a few he merely thought of designing.
And I guess he’s best known for the McLaren F1, probably now the most iconic of all road-going supercars. I drove one quite recently and a quarter of a century on you can take it from me it has lost none of its ability to amaze with its performance and the genuine genius of its design and packaging. Just 64 standard road cars were made, of which the cheapest today must be well into eight figures.
But it’s another even rarer Gordon Murray road car I’m recalling today, which the memories of driving are just as strong despite it being 27 years since I last sat in one. The car is the Light Car Company Rocket. If a lighter road car with four wheels and two seats has since been designed by a recognised car company, I don’t know what it is.
For the Rocket weighed just 380kg, or less than half the weight of the lightest Lotus Elise made today. Its entire spaceframe structure weighed a mere 21kg, and I’ve bought sacks of potatoes that weigh more than that. It also carried its engine and gearbox as fully stressed members off which the rear suspension was hung, and I know of no other road car that does that, save the Ferrari F50.
The engine and gearbox came from a motorcycle with a five-speed gearbox attached, but with a high and low range transfer box providing effectively 20 gears, because each gear could also be engaged while in reverse, which is why a Rocket once held the world record for reversing, its driver spinning out at over 100mph.
I spent a memorable few days in one when it was new though none, I am glad to say, sitting behind the driver in the tandem two seat layout. It was comfortable enough once you were in I was told by my passenger, and I was happy to take his word for it.
To drive? Difficult at first. It required an element of mental recalibration, not for its outright performance which existed just about within the envelope of known road car capability at that time, but for the way it was delivered. The sequential gear shift was a delight but the 143bhp, 1.0-litre Yamaha engine had no power at all below 6,000rpm and only really came alive between 8,500rpm and 11,500rpm. So unless you were driving as if possessed, there was really very little point in driving it at all.
I remember we took a Caterham along with a 2.0-litre, 175bhp road car engine and while on paper it shouldn’t have been able to see which way the Rocket went, because it had so much torque at all points in its rev range, in reality it could keep up in all normal circumstances while being incomparably easier to drive.
But in abnormal circumstances, such as a moorland road with no traffic or junctions, the Rocket became another car. The engine was no longer the core focus, but the chassis. Quite softly sprung but incredibly deftly damped I reckon few street machines made today could keep up with it over a difficult, twisting road like that. Certainly I never found a corner it wouldn’t take and if you needed to slow down it would shed all its speed in a virtual snap of your fingers.
I don’t know what a Rocket is worth today because so far as I can see there are none on sale, but given that it’s as legitimate a Gordon Murray design as the F1, but both lighter and rarer, it would certainly be out of my price range. But there aren’t many places to which I would not travel to have another drive in one.