Alas we are not about to unveil it: that’s coming later. But what Gordon Murray Automotive – the F1 and road car design legend’s new car-making company – is announcing today are a few stats to get the juices flowing. Along with confirmation that the first Gordon Murray Automotive-badged car will be “an everyday-usable coupe with not only exceptional performance capabilities, but also class-leading ergonomics, visibility, and cargo capacity.”
Add the sportscar holy trinity of lightweight, torsional stiffness and durability that Gordon’s latest iStream chassis construction brings with it, and you can see that the antidote to hybrid hypercars is shaping up nicely.
There’s a lot we don’t know; the wheelbase is 2,500mm (an inch longer than the Porsche 718 Cayman’s) but the other measurements (3,640mm long, 1,750mm wide, 1,240mm high) are for the rolling chassis only, sans body. And we don’t know yet what that will look like, though you can guess at thin pillars, lots of glass and a practical boot. The design sketch issued last year gives a McLaren F1-esque hint.
The mid-mounted 1.5 three-cylinder engine develops 220bhp and runs to a six-speed manual gearbox. How fast? Without knowing its aero there’s no way of guessing its top speed. But from what Gordon Murray has told us in the past this car will not be about breaking speed records, more the way it delivers its speed.