5 Ways Gordon Murray's T.50 Embarrasses Today's Supercars

Hello everyone and welcome. In this video we will look at five unique aspects of the Gordon Marae T50 that set it apart from any other supercar on the market, jumping straight to number one and perhaps the most important being Gordon Marie's design philosophy. I wanted to build the best driver's car, period, the formula is pretty simple, lightweight, center driving position, naturally aspirated v12 manual transmission and rear wheel drive, the formula sounds great, but it's actually a pretty difficult thing to market, right? What are you going to brag about v12? Small and not all that powerful, the manual transmission seems pathetically slow compared to

today

's stupidly fast dual-clutch transmissions.

People don't care enough about weight, but they do care about horsepower, and

today

654 horsepower can be found in family sedans, when other companies are making new

supercars

, they choose what they want it to be. good at the best track car, the fastest acceleration, the highest top speed, but these praises only last so long and don't even mean the car is fun to drive, but they have bragging rights when it comes to buying super cars , there's a lot of ego involved, the marketing teams obviously know this, so the cars are flashy, exotic and record-breaking to generate talking points and, while I certainly admire the engineering that goes into it, a lot of these exotics.

They're not that special to drive, so why is this T-50 good, simply put, because it's fun. I have had the privilege of being able to drive hundreds of different cars and in my experience the amount of money you spend on a car does not determine how much fun you will have driving it and while the T50 is stupidly expensive it says forget the records we are Building something rewarding to drive, it's not about ego, it's about having fun and that's the advantage you have over everyone else. Today's super cars, number two is aerodynamics. Something super special about this car that you've probably heard countless times is that it can actually flap its wings very quickly and fly, okay that's a lie but what's true is that it's just like the mclaren f1 above.

It's a car with a fan, but this time the fan is much more prominent and this is what is fully functional and completely cool, but arguably a very insignificant part of what makes this car great to me. The big fan is the This car's marketing gimmick is eye-catching and again functional, but you'll notice that it doesn't really talk about the actual downforce figures. I did a little calculation and the results are disappointing, so it's disappointing, but it's also great, so of course Gordon. Murray is famous for designing the fan car used in F1 and the design is quite rudimentary, you basically have a motor driven fan at the back of the car, you have very low side skirts so it essentially turns the car into a vacuum cleaner. sucking into the ground, creating really low pressure underneath, high pressure on top, so you have a lot of downforce, you can go around the track very quickly.

This is a slightly more different idea, it doesn't seek to suck the car into the ground. rather, it is altering the way the boundary layer adheres to this diffuser, so there is a diffuser at the back of the car and there are some slots and valves in that diffuser and it uses the fan to control the boundary layer, so What this diffuser does is rake. upward and therefore forces the air to rise and expands back to atmospheric pressure and in doing so accelerates the flow under the car, lowering the pressure and creating downward force. Now the problem with the rake on the diffuser used on the t50 is that it is extremely steep and therefore the boundary layer does not stay attached, it simply creates turbulence within that diffuser, so what the fan does is there is these valves and the fan sucks that turbulent air out of that diffuser so that boundary layer is controlled and you have the air moving along the very steep slope of the diffuser and therefore increasing the actual payload downforce. .

There are now six different modes for this electric fan and the one that creates the most downforce is the braking mode, so in braking mode it tilts the spoiler up to 45 degrees. The angle actually hits that air, accelerates the fan to a high speed and opens the diffuser valves to draw out that turbulent air and make that boundary layer connect with that highly inclined differential and what this does is double the downforce that sounds . extraordinary, twice the downforce, but we don't know how much downforce that is, so let's do a little math to get a rough idea of ​​what that might be, because they do provide that from 150 miles per hour using this braking mode , this high downforce braking mode can reduce the braking distance from 150 miles per hour to zero by 10 meters, and 10 meters is certainly a lot, but 150 miles per hour is also a very high speed.

So for example, let's say you have a car that can decelerate on average from 150 miles per hour to zero at a speed of 1.35 gs and this is very good, so if you are able to decelerate at that speed you will be able to stop. from 150 miles per hour to zero in 557 feet. Now, using this braking mode, you can shave 10 meters off that distance, so we subtract 33 feet and we're at 524 feet, so you can see the braking. The distance overall isn't that dramatic of a difference because we're stopping from such a high speed, so our deceleration rate here to get back to units we can all agree on will be 1.43 g, so we're just increasing the maximum deceleration by .08 g, in other words, maybe we're adding, I mean, the car weighs about 2200 pounds, maybe we're adding 200 pounds of downforce by engaging, you know, this braking mode, so which is significant, yes, but probably not that significant. like the marketing statement that this fan has had, you know, it's a fan card and it's such a prominent feature on the back of the vehicle, now one of the really cool things is a mode called streamline and so it will tip this spoiler down negative 10 degrees, it will increase the fan speed and partially close these diffuser valves right here, so you're mostly stopping that diffuser and by doing so, you're basically extending the length of this vehicle using like an air. pocket behind it and accelerates that air from the top of the car to the rear so by doing so they can decrease drag by 12.5 percent which of course is great for reaching high top speeds or getting excellent fuel economy , probably the fuel economy that they are They are not the correct top speeds, so it is a bit of a marketing gimmick, but at the same time this has some usefulness and also high downforce cars tend to have terrible ride quality because Aerodynamic force increases with the square of speed.

And what that means is that if you have a car with really high downforce at high speeds, its downforce is going to be so high that it's going to have to have a really high spring rate to support the vehicle, and in doing so, you still have to use that really high spring rate at low speeds, that's why you know there are some clever inventions like the Ford GT that has two separate springs that you can switch between essentially so you know when you want that track mode, it has a stiff spring with a great downward force. and when you want to drive on the street, it has a soft spring, so what this car does is increase downforce at low speeds, decrease downforce at high speeds, which gives you a more linear response, it's not a big increase in downforce and as a result I can use softer springs and the ride is better number three is weight and this is really where the t50 just blows everything else out of the water so you know look at some cars popular here porsche 918 3602 pounds mclaren p1 3400 pounds laferrari uh you know, 3500 pounds, the t50 weighs less than a thousand kilograms, less than 2200 pounds, I mean, it's absurd how light this thing is and the thing is, there's a quote which Gordon Murray said he really enjoyed.

He said if the car is light, you don't do it. I need a big engine, so you're probably looking at these cars and saying, yeah, Jason, all these cars have like 900 horsepower, so you know, that's why they're heavy, they have so much power and it's like, well, part of it is. , but they don't need to have as much power if they were lighter and you can prove that point by looking at the power to weight ratio, so for the porsche 918 there is 4.1 pounds per horsepower for the mclaren p1 3.8 for the laferrari 3.7 and for

gordon

morris T-50 3.3, although only 650 horsepower, has a significantly better power-to-weight ratio than the holy trinity there.

It is quite surprising from a weight point of view, the engine only weighs 178 kilograms, the carbon tub and all the body panels combined only 150 kilograms less than the engine, quite absurd, the transmission 80.5 kilograms, for which they have done an incredibly good job of keeping the weight of this vehicle down. Now, here's the tough question: do cars need to be lightweight and from an engineering standpoint? From a marketing standpoint, I think the real answer is no and that's the unfortunate answer, but it's kind of the reality, tires today are just as good and cars like the Shelby GT500 prove that you can have a incredible amount of weight and still have incredible curves. incredible acceleration, incredible braking, so today's tires are very good and heavy cars, uh, don't you really know how bulky they are because of such incredible suspension and tire tuning that are used on these vehicles?

Which really can't be done. show about the weight is that it's more fun and if you're going to ride a kart, you know, you realize that by not having weight you say, wait a minute, this is super fun, everything is super responsive, it's very quick to act and you can feel that, but it's a little harder to quantify, eh, and there's a joy that comes with light cars that makes them really fun to drive, but that's a hard thing to market. Moving up to number four is the very special engine used in this car. So it's a 4 liter 65 degree naturally aspirated v12.

Now you may hear it referred to as 3.9 liters if you look at the actual displacement, it's 3,994, so this is absolutely a four-liter engine. um, you know, I'm not, I'm not cool. in a lot of engineering things and I would say Gord Murray is better than me probably in all of them except rounding, I definitely beat him here in rounding because 3,994 is a four liter, it's a four liter engine, regardless of 654 horsepower force at 11,500 rpm, the highest power. per liter in a naturally aspirated road car today, 344 pound-feet of torque at 9,000 rpm and 71 of that torque is available at just 2,500 rpm, so even though you rev ​​to 12,100 rpm you still have torque at 2,500 rpm. , which is pretty impressive around 244 pound-feet piston speed 25.7 meters per second very fast not the fastest out there but very fast so why is it naturally aspirated?

Why is it naturally aspirated? the best. Well I think there are three reasons, firstly, response they don't have lag things like turbos that cause lag and when you step on the pedal and when you really get power, naturally aspirated has incredibly good response, it has incredibly good control, so where your foot is on the accelerator pedal determines how much power you're generating. how much torque you're making and it's not that weird sponginess that turbocharged and even supercharged cars have where you have bypass valves and you have to wait a little bit for that torque to kick in and then finally kick in, and this is subjective, but are you?

I'm really going to argue that the naturally aspirated V12 doesn't sound good. I don't think you are. I mean, they just sound great and you don't have any turbochargers blocking that beautiful sound. Finally, number five, we come to the manual transmission, yes, three. million dollar car that comes with a manual transmission, that's a beautiful thing, so I looked up because I was curious. What semi-exotic cars in the US could you get with a manual transmission? Only three appeared: Aston Martin Vantage, Lotus aboard GT. and a porsche 911 that's as exotic as it gets and still has a manual transmission, so it's sad that it all went to making a clutch and actually this wasn't going to have a manual transmission, but customers told Gordon Murray, hey we want a manual transmission and so he did it and I think it's a beautiful thing so I'm not sure what the inside of the transmission looks like.

I just made it up here, but essentially you have your engine, I'm saying the entry. The bezel comes first, then you go through the gearsone through six, which is number two here and then you have to go through a final drive before you get to the rear wheels, so the gearing of this, if you do the math based on tire size and Look, the First gear is accelerating up to about 64 miles per hour, assuming my layout is correct and you actually go through the gear the way I think you do, but at 64 miles per hour in first gear, which would normally say, "hey ".

That's silly, why do we have such a high gear? And I'll explain why I'm pretty okay with this. It will also help them with their 0-60 and 0-100 kilometers per hour, so I don't think so. They don't realize the fact that people care about 0-60, therefore first gear will adapt to second gear up to 86, third to 115 and so on, the final top speed, he says, will probably be about 227 miles per hour now. Why is it okay for first gear to accelerate up to 64 miles per hour? Because I think first, second and third gear have limited traction.

So what do I mean by that if you have 344 pound-feet of torque at 9000 rpm and you multiply that by 1.688 and then you multiply that by the second gear, which is 2.095 and then you multiply that by the final drive ratio and then you divide that by the radius of your tire, which is about 1,125 feet, you get 3,434 pounds of force that you're pushing this vehicle forward with now at maximum force. That this thing can really accelerate assuming you can put all the weight on those rear tires. A load transfer under acceleration will be a multiplier of its weight, so you know, maybe 2,400 pounds or something, versus this has 3,400 pounds of force. available in second gear, so it's capable of doing wild burnouts, uh, in second gear, starting in second gear from a stop and I think it could even do that in third, it'll depend on where you are in the rpm band, but essentially if you're traction limited in first, second and third, uh, it's like they're fun gears at that point, it doesn't really matter which one you're in, but you can start in first and it won't be as ridiculous as As for high gear, first , second and third can probably make the tires spin very easily, that's amazing and as a result I agree with the high gear.

How wild is this car, it's extremely cool and the design philosophy behind it. It's amazing, I love how clean it looks, I love the simplicity of it, low weight, rear wheel drive, naturally aspirated v12 manual transmission, I think the fan is a little fancy just because the effect it has is not that extreme and you can see the overall clean look of the car and then you know they throw in this huge fan at the end, which I think looks cool, I think it looks cool, but you know because of the design philosophy of let's keep everything simple and then all of a sudden, this giant appears. fan on the back, well that's not exactly simple, it's a conversation piece that you're going to show your friends and they admit you know it has a trial mode where you can flaunt your stuff and show off to your friends , it's a piece of marketing as much as it is a piece of engineering.

The good news is that it is actually functional. The fan works to help decrease drag or increase downforce depending on what you are looking for. Thank you very much to all. To watch, if you have any questions or comments, of course, feel free to leave them below.