How to Go Faster and Influence People: The Gordon Murray F1 Story

In 1992 a new sports car appears.

The McLaren F1 is the fastest, lightest,

and most technically advanced production car to date.

For many observers, the F1 confirms designer and engineer,

Gordon Murray, as an outstanding automotive talent.

What I love, generally, in design and car terms,

is simplicity and elegance.

That is absolutely the way that Gordon thinks.

The thing that makes the great designers is the ability

to take fresh looks all the time, to approach from a different angle.

Almost, to sit down with a clean sheet of paper

and not necessarily draw in four wheels.

Murray has spent two decades in the world of Formula One.

Continually searching for a competitive edge.

Gordon really was the guy that did things on his own.

Came up with the ideals, designed the car, followed it through,

see how it was manufactured, it was him and Colin Chapman, really.

His radical designs led to one race-winning car after another.

But those years of F1 experience

are now focused on new and different goals.

If someone can make a car go 241 miles per hour,

they can probably make a car go 100 miles per gallon.

For Murray, 100 miles per gallon is just one of many challenges

in his new chosen arena, the complex business of mass produced road cars.

This is the inside story of a lifetime of innovation.

And a remarkable and ongoing design journey.

I was sitting in the traffic once, stopped.

I looked around and I thought, 80 percent of the cars around me

are huge, and 80 percent of them have one person in them.

That cannot be sustainable.

Gordon Murray's career as a designer has been

driven by a passion for motoring itself.

But that passion seems increasingly under threat.

We are motor people. We have always been motor people.

We are surrounded by these arteries which are our life.

You can't take away the road network.

You can't suddenly say, stop driving your car, there would be a revolt.

So in recent years, Murray's focus has turned from racing to the road.

It was nothing to do with environment,

nothing to do with the quality of air, greenhouse gases,

did not come into my mind.

It was purely, this is not sustainable

and this is not fun any more, so what can we do?

What would solve that?

The only way is to encourage people to go smaller and lighter.

Smaller and lighter is one of Murray's

fundamental design principles.

Repeatedly tested in Formula One competition.

It is 1973.

And Murray's career as an F1 designer

is about to start, at Brabham.

The team has been struggling but it is under new management

and incoming boss, Bernie Ecclestone, is taking a risk.

He has promoted an inexperienced young South African

to the job of chief designer.

Well, I did not know Gordon at the time, obviously.

He was just another guy in the drawing office.

So, that is as much as I knew about Gordon.

I mean, I was incredibly young and very naive.

Straight off the banana boat.

And only having produced my own engine

and my own car at very low club racing level in South Africa.

So it was a great opportunity.

If I had stopped and thought about it

I probably would have had a panic attack.

I think the feeling in the motor racing world was that it was

an awful lot being dropped on to one young man's lap.

Is he going to buckle under the load

or is he going to pick it up and carry it?

Murray's first challenge

is to improve on Brabham's abysmal performance.

For his first car, the BT 42,

he rejects the conventional layout of the time,

rectangular bodywork with a triangular engine,

and makes a radical attempt

to lower the centre of gravity for faster cornering.

Every single DFE engine Formula One car

had a kind of rectangular tub with a triangular DFE bolted onto it.

Gordon looked at it laterally, as he looked at most things,

and thought, well, if you have got a triangular shaped engine,

why not have a triangular shaped tub?

I did a triangular cross-section, like this.

The fuel was kept much broader and lower in the car.

So the centre of gravity of the fuel was much lower.

In a time before the wind tunnels and computers,

Murray's new package also gives a significant aerodynamic advantage.

The BT 42 was like an upturned saucer.

That's why it was so radical a shaped.

Very little air went underneath the car. Most of it went over the top.

Because all the air that goes under the car produces lift.

Which counteracts the downforce you are getting

from the wings on the car.

So it was radical in layout.

But it was also radical in aerodynamics.

It emerged as absolutely the tiniest and one of the best thought out,

best integrated designs that we had seen in Formula One.

I think he put himself on the map at the Spanish Grand Prix in 1973.

Because the 42 came out of the box and did the business.

That's how good he was.

I think, with all these things,

you have got to put a bit of luck into it.

I just thought he was the right guy and I got lucky, he was.

At his facility outside London, Murray's team of designers

and engineers, many of them with F1 experience,

are working on a self-imposed challenge.

To design and build an inexpensive, lightweight, city car.

It is codenamed T25, being monies Murray's 25th car programme.

With T25, I didn't start with an idea at all.

I started with a problem.

Today, with all the promises of hydrogen, hybrids, and electric cars,

if you could take ten percent of the weight of every car

the effect in the next ten years, just ten percent,

the effect in the next ten years

would be more than all the hybrids and electric cars on the planet.

The first step is to evaluate other small cars.

When you are trying to achieve something in a design arena

that has not been achieved before,

you need to start off with the benchmark.

You need to know what it is you're trying to improve on.

Two small city cars have been chosen.

The Mitsubishi iCar, and the Smart.

They are dismantled, part by part,

with each component being weighed and evaluated.

The process of benchmarking for cost and weight is microscopic.

You go through every single component, sub component,

and assembly on the car,

and set yourself targets for reducing weight, reducing cost.

Those parts that can be used are reassembled, system by system,

within the dimensions of the T25 package.

But there are many gaps to fill.

A lot of the elements of T25 we have had to do ourselves

because we just could not find anything small or light enough.

So we have actually had to engineer a lot of the components from scratch.

We even had to make our own wheels

because we could not find wheels light or small enough.

Unlike most car manufacturers,

Murray's team are still using

old-fashioned full-scale schematic drawings.

The advantage for us

is we can talk about the overall package of the vehicle

rather than working on a small screen

in a local environment, per designer.

Being able to scribble on the full-size layout

moves the design process forward much quicker than you could on CAD.

-Good afternoon, gents.

-How are you doing, all right?

I am just doing the drive shaft plunge and depth measurements.

Making sure there is enough angle on the drive shaft.

The drawings are used to construct a so-called lab car.

'Normally when you build a lab car the reason you do that is to sort out

'all the application work on the electronics, the electrics,

'and test the systems on the car, like fuel systems, water systems.

'And generally you have a long, long list'

of problems that you have to work through and fix.

I would say that building a card to sell for £6,000

and designing that for high-volume production,

where you have all the quality control issues under control,

is 100 times more difficult

than designing a McLaren F1, or even a racing car.

It is certainly the biggest challenge

I have ever had from a design point of view.

CAR ENGINE ROARS

The tendency is all too often to think of Formula 1

as just the business of the gladiators driving the cars.

Actually, so much of Formula 1 history is about the designers

designing things that give an advantage to the guy driving the car.

Innovation is essential to the driver. You want an unfair advantage all the time.

You know that, for example, in Formula 1,

you know that designers read the regulations once,

see what they say, and then they read them again

to see how they can get around them or take an advantage.

And that's the brilliance of it. That's the excitement.

That's what drives it forward, that's why it's so hi-tech.

There are periods of motorsport where you can see it really, really clearly.

That clever interpretation of a rule gives an extraordinary advantage.

In 1978, Murray's search for a competitive edge

is taken to new extremes with his extraordinary Fan Car.

The Fan Car was borne out of necessity, really,

because Lotus had invented ground effect.

Colin Chapman's Lotus team have worked on their aerodynamics

to achieve so-called "ground effects" -

sucking the car to the track, and thus allowing more grip and higher cornering speeds.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Lotus's success is a challenge to all the teams.

Murray urgently needs inspiration,

and he finds it in the rulebook with a loophole in the wording.

The regulations state that a movable device,

primarily used to give an aerodynamic advantage, is not allowed.

Murray therefore designs a large fan, which, he can argue,

is primarily to cool the engine,

but with the crucial side effect of sucking the car to the road.

And I did the sums, and I had to do them several times,

because I couldn't believe the downforce multiplied by the number of square inches under the car.

You know, it was just an astronomical figure.

I stuck a bloody great big fan on the back of the car,

driven off the gearbox,

and sealed the entire motorcar to the ground.

So you had this whole area under suction.

The difficult bit, in three months, we had to redesign the whole car

and come up with a fan that would survive nearly 8,000 revs.

That was 18 inches diameter, without falling to pieces.

And all the early ones exploded.

The Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp,

and Murray's secret weapon is unveiled for the first time.

I think for the majority of the teams, it was a novelty.

When they first saw it on the Thursday, word went around that,

obviously, we had this car and it had a fan on the back of it.

'I remember Colin Chapman immediately saying it was illegal.

'And every time the car came in, and in fact, even when we raced,

'we had a dustbin lid that we used to actually put over the fan.'

'The Fan Car could get as much downforce standing still as it could going at 180mph,

'which meant you could get a 2G standing start

'and you to go around hairpin bends just as quick as you could round a 150mph bend,

'so it had a MASSIVE advantage.'

'Well, nobody took a lot of notice of it until it started.'

I think people thought it was going to be quick, and they were right.

'But we tired to make sure that it didn't look quick.'

'Bernie made the drivers qualify on full tanks,'

because he didn't want to be too fast.

The other teams, led by Colin Chapman and Lotus,

are outraged by Brabham's huge advantage,

which they consider to be illegal.

ENGINE ROARS

One thing that stuck in my mind about that car was all the other drivers

who had to follow it complaining that they just had a face full of dust and rubbish and anything else

that this thing swept off the racetrack.

Mario would come in and say, "Hell, man, that car, it's chucking rocks.

"It's like I have to duck! It's going to kill."

I know we were getting blasted tremendously.

The obvious thing is if something you think is working better,

you try to use whatever excuse, you know, to say it's not good.

Niki Lauda wins the race by 34 seconds,

but the Fan Car is doomed.

The other constructors, particularly Lotus and Tyrrell,

leant on Bernie heavily to withdraw the car.

We were inside the regulations for sure, but Colin said,

"If we don't mind, EVERYONE will be doing this, and it's a bit crazy,

"because there may be no limit in the end."

Bernie came to see me and said, "Look, this is my position.

"We can run the car till the end of the year,

"we'll almost certainly win the championship,

"but I think the Constructors Association is more important."

So... I was very, very pissed off, I have to say.

But I did withdraw the car.

30 years on, Murray's new city car concept faces one fundamental problem.

I discovered why people didn't make what they call sub A-segment cars - small city cars.

That's because you don't make any money on them.

There was an issue about how we break...

'Because the tooling and the developing costs for a small car

'is almost the same as a bigger car, so people would rather build

'larger cars with more content and make more profit.

'That's when I started thinking, "Well, if this is going to work,

'"there needs to be a new way of making cars that is cost-effective."'

MACHINERY WHIRRS

This is how cars are made.

More than 50 million of them every year.

Mile-long factories filled with thousands of huge presses,

punching out 400 steel panels per car.

The factories are often located to take advantage of cheap labour.

When you think that the cheapest places in the world to manufacture these large components

are obviously China, Asia and South America,

and the biggest importers of these products in the automotive industry

are North America and Northern Europe, it kind of paints a picture

of the environmental damage that is being done through transportation.

Murray's team has decided that the big manufacturers processes,

with all their associated environmental costs,

cannot be used for the new car.

They have found a simple alternative.

Steel tubing is lightweight and available all over the world.

It's not only widely available, but it's also very cheap to produce.

Tube mills are relatively cheap to set up.

They don't take a lot of floor area, they don't need a lot of equipment.

For many years, tubes were used in racing cars to make expensive and complex space-frame chassis.

But today, laser-cutting techniques enable mass production

at this type of chassis for the first time.

The team is using this concept for T25,

but the tubular chassis isn't strong enough on its own.

So they have adopted another innovation from the world of motorsport.

We developed a very low-cost, low-energy, composite panel,

like a Formula 1 monocoque.

'And that gets bonded into the frame permanently,

'and that then makes the frame very stiff in torsion and bending,

'and manages all the crash loads.'

It's one of these situations where the sum of the parts

is better than the individual components themselves.

At this early stage, it's a basic combination of tubes and panels.

But, in Murray's view, the simple design of the chassis

offers a significant competitive edge when it comes to cheaper and cleaner ways of mass production.

Wasn't the idea that that would be fragile,

so that if it had a big high-speed accident, that would have...?

THUNDEROUS BANG

In the early 1980s, Formula 1 sees an ongoing battle between Murray and his design rivals,

as they search for aerodynamic downforce, and faster cornering speeds.

The downforce was getting quite ridiculous.

You know, we were producing nearly 5G laterally, and the drivers

were getting pretty close to sort of needing G-suits in those days.

The sport's governing body, the FIA, announces a new rule.

To lessen the downforce and reduce speed,

all cars must have a 6cm gap between the bodywork and the road.

The British teams, lead most ingeniously by Gordon, decided that,

"Well, at what point is this 6cm gap going to be checked?"

It can only be checked by a scrutineer when the car is stationary,

cos not that many scrutineers are fit enough to run at 180mph

beside a Formula 1 car with a measuring tape.

Driver-operated mechanisms are also banned,

so Murray needs to find a way of keeping the car close to the ground when it's at speed.

We came up with the system where we put...

..a hydro-pneumatic cylinder in the rod.

Half of it was air, and the other half was hydraulic fluid.

And then, from the air side...

..that ran off to a really small...

tiny little microvalve,

and a filter to stop the microvalve getting blocked.

When the car is lapping at speed, the wings push it down,

well below six centimetres,

and the slow-release micro valve prevents it from rising up again.

And then on slowing down, the driver did a slow lap,

and all the fluid pushed back past the valve and came back to six centimetres.

The other teams are convinced that the system is illegal,

and try to find out how it works.

But Murray comes up with a distraction to throw them off the scent.

Inside of the car, when you took the bodywork off,

we made a big, empty aluminium box with a few wires coming out of it.

And, of course, whenever the car came into the pits,

everybody looked at the aluminium box, and nobody looked at the hydraulics.

So, for the first three or four races, nobody knew what we were doing,

and we just continued to nail everybody, which really miffed the rest of the teams.

The regs are saying that the car should be six centimetres high in any circumstance.

No, they don't. No, they don't.

The regulations say all measurements shall be taken with the car stationary

on a flat metal surface with a driver on board and the engine running.

So, in your opinion there is no doubt

that everybody will have the same system in a few races?

You can do the same things with normal springs.

Williams do it at the moment with bump rubbers and normal springs,

and they run a little bit higher than us.

And they go a little bit slower. They're bad losers, basically.

Every team tried to get it to work,

but we'd had the benefit of doing it all winter, and nobody could get it to work.

They all sussed out what it was and spent three or four races

going together to work, and eventually the FI give up

and said you could just have a lever that operated the car,

cos they realised every single car went below six centimetres anyway when it got on the circuit,

so it was an unenforceable rule, really.

Murray's innovative designs for Brabham

take Nelson Piquet to two Formula 1 world championships.

He was very, very good. He sort of motivated the drivers,

and they all respected him and realised he was the number one,

and they were lucky to be driving a car that he'd designed.

CHEERING

The T25 programme has reached a technical milestone.

It's a long-awaited moment as the lab car is ready for its first-ever test drive

alongside the Mitsubishi and Smart benchmarks.

The car is powered by a tiny petrol engine,

perhaps a surprising choice given the widespread debate

about hybrids, electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells.

Well, to start with, with T25, for the first prototype we decided to use petrol.

I was quite interested to see how good petrol could be in a very lightweight, efficient vehicle.

Just how low you could get the CO2 emissions and how good you could get the fuel consumption.

This is a petrol driven vehicle which seems to be at the moment

out of fashion with all this interest in electricity.

It was hydrogen,

that's now been replaced in the public mind by the future

being electricity, and now we've got somebody coming along

with a very fuel-efficient engine and a car that is designed to work around that.

I think it extremely important that we remain agnostic about

what form of propulsion we use in our cars in the future,

and that we try to design cars that will accept

any form of propulsion,

be that a petrol engine or a fuel cell or electric drive.

Because the type of propulsion that we choose for our cars is going to vary.

There just won't be one solution. And it'll vary according to how you drive your car,

where you drive your car, and how far you drive your car.

Murray and his team have all but discarded the emissions discussion

to focus on what they see as the elephant in the room - the manufacturing process.

Most car companies will tell you that the manufacturing process

is insignificant compared with the running tailpipe emissions of a car.

But actually, when you do all the true numbers, it is very significant.

I think if you're going to radically alter a car's environmental footprint,

you've got to absolutely start from scratch.

You've got to look not just at the way the car is designed,

but also at the way that it's built,

you got to look at the kind of factories in which it is built,

you've got to look at the ways in which the parts are shipped to those factories.

And that requires a completely fresh approach.

A fresh approach to a process that has remained essentially unchanged for 100 years.

It's a complete rethink on how we make motorcars.

And it's really the first step change since the Model T Ford

when Henry Ford first stamped steel panels and welded them together.

Station 18, install drive shafts, assembly to transmission...

We're actually starting from scratch with a new equation,

which is an open heart look at a complete carbon footprint

of a car from, literally, cradle to grave.

Murray's idea is that cars can and should be manufactured in a new way.

The concept is called iStream

and it aims to take Formula 1 technology, such as composite materials,

and transfer it into vehicles for the everyday motorist.

By simplifying every stage of the manufacturing process,

the iStream factory is much smaller than a standard car plant.

The end result is a low-energy factory

producing lightweight, low-cost cars.

Our iStream technology is completely disruptive

relative to normal stamped steel cars.

It doesn't use any major stamped components in the car.

It doesn't need a stamping plant in the factory,

it doesn't need a spot welding plant,

it doesn't need a e-coating plant, and it doesn't need a paint plant.

We're talking about an 80% reduction in size and investment

of the plant and the factory. It's just a complete rethink.

It bears no resemblance to the way cars are made at the moment whatsoever.

In short, Murray's vision is for a new way to mass produce cars,

and an end to what he regards as the wasteful, outdated processes

used by automotive manufacturers across the world.

Until recently, mid-race refuelling has been a distinguishing feature of modern Formula 1.

But in the early 1980s, things are different.

The rules specify a maximum fuel tank size, but no minimum.

Murray senses an opportunity, and redesigns the Brabham.

And we just turned up at the first race with a car with only

a half fuel tank size, which meant, of course,

the design of the car could be much more flexible

because the tank size was only half the length of a conventional tank.

We were putting new tyres on halfway through the race,

fuelling halfway through the race.

Just run away with the races, basically.

CHEERING

During his 16 years at Brabham, Murray is one of the first

to experiment with carbon fibre components.

He is credited as the inventor of the now standard carbon brakes for F1 cars.

By the late 80s, his talent for finding new ways of doing things

is in demand, and he is repeatedly approached by other teams

wanting to lure him away from Brabham.

This is always done in secret.

Nobody dared talk to you if you worked for Bernie,

because they were frightened of what was going to happen to them I think.

So you were pretty unapproachable.

The McLaren team has made several offers,

and at the end of the 1986 season, Murray accepts.

I think when Gordon was invited to join the McLaren team

there were two motives for Ron to do that.

One was to acquire the services

of probably the most innovative and,

by that time, celebrity designer within the racing car world.

And also, perhaps even more so,

to deny his services to McLaren's rivals.

I think everybody was looking for something new after

John Barnard left, and, of course, Gordon came with a big reputation.

I think we were looking for Gordon to bring new ideas.

He's always been very original in his thinking of developing things.

According to Murray, his first car for McLaren

is a direct evolution from his final design layout for Brabham.

The radical but unworkable BT55.

When I left Brabham at the end of that year and went to McLaren,

all I did was, I just took exactly this layout and reinstated it in the MP44.

We got something like a 7% reduction in frontal area,

and an 11% aerodynamic improvement.

And these days if a Formula 1 team gets a .02 aerodynamic improvement, you know, they have a public holiday.

The resulting car sets the scene for an epic battle.

In Prost and Senna, we had two really good engineering drivers.

Both of them understood what made cars handle and what made them go quicker.

And both of them worked very well with the engineering staff.

Alain Prost in particular had this reputation before I started working with him

as being, like, you know, the really good guy.

And Senna was very clever, too.

Particularly on strategic stuff.

I remember Senna would move his wings by millimetres and could feel a difference.

So it's very important to have that calibre drivers

to interact with somebody like Gordon.

To build a supercar adequately,

you needed a jolly good idea of what was available already...

..and what is that indefinable thing that makes a car super.

By the late '80s, there was a motley collection of supercars available,

from Ferrari's savage F40...

..to the urbane Honda NSX.

I had driven a lot of supercars and big sports cars,

and I hated certain elements about them.

Just a long string of pet hates,

much more than, sort of, pet loves, if you like.

And I was determined to exorcise everything I hated about sports cars.

You know, the fantastic thing that Gordon had with the F1, really,

was that he had a genuinely clean sheet of paper,

which anyone designing a modern Ferrari, for example,

does not have, because if you're designing a Ferrari,

you have to end up with something that looks and sounds

what people think a Ferrari should look and sound like.

These sketches were made by Murray when he was 22,

an early iteration of the F1's radical

arrow-shaped seating position,

the driver flanked by two set-back passengers.

The McLaren F1 was never going to be a car full of compromises.

There was always a lot of encouragement from Gordon

to think outside of the box

in the way that we solved problems,

and he was very encouraging with designers

to be a little bit braver in some of their solutions.

Normally, you'd have hundreds of designers

working on a programme like that, and we had seven,

and I think that's why it was so special.

It was very hard work to do it in the time, obviously,

but very satisfying and a hell of a lot of fun.

The F1's engine is a specially designed V12 unit

from BMW's Motorsport division.

I wanted the engine to have great 1960s sports car character,

with noise and high revving and stuff.

Worked with genius Paul Rosche in BMW,

and built an engine with no flywheel and a carbon fibre clutch.

So the thing revs like a 600cc motorbike,

which no other supercar does.

The F1 instantly becomes the world's fastest production car -

241 miles per hour,

627 horsepower,

and weighing about the same as a Ford Fiesta.

I suppose what got my notice, inevitably,

was the prospective stratospheric performance envelope of the car

looked as though it was going to be a quick one.

I mean, that's what got your attention,

but that's not in itself a good reason for buying a car.

In fact, you know, normally, certainly the price

or the prospective price that was being advertised

was as good a reason as any not to buy the car.

I remember thinking,

"There's a car coming out that costs a million dollars.

"Well, that's ridiculous! What a stupid I..."

This was in the '90s,

so obviously a million dollars was even more money than it is now.

But the price is forgotten once the F1 is on the road.

I remember the first time he ever took me for a ride in it.

I sat next door to him. He's in the middle, of course.

I'm sitting there...he said, "Are you holding tight?"

I said, "Yeah, yeah. Come on, get on with it."

He said, "Listen. Just brace yourself."

I said, "Yeah, come on...Whoa!"

All I could say was, "Fuck me."

The thing was unbelievable.

The car is so much better than...you are.

It's like I say,

it's a bit like having sex with an aerobics instructor.

You know, you're going 100 miles per hour, she's like,

"You done? Yeah, great."

Despite the company's insistence that the F1 is purely a road car,

it is perhaps inevitable

that McLaren is coaxed into making a racing version.

At Le Mans in 1995,

and after 24 hours of racing,

McLaren F1s finish first,

third, fourth and fifth.

In my opinion, winning Le Mans once is much more difficult than winning

enough races in a Grand Prix season to win a Grand Prix championship.

Much more difficult.

We were the first team to win it at first try,

obviously apart from the first Le Mans,

so that shows you how difficult it is,

even with all the money that people like Audi have got.

And they don't win it first time.

To this day, the McLaren F1 is often cited as Murray's masterpiece.

It set new standards in terms of lightweight power-to-weight,

certainly outright speed...

all as part of that ethic

of aiming for that preposterously low target weight.

Every now and again, there is a designer

who absolutely has a real single-minded vision

where every detail is an opportunity

to make something special,

and the F1 is absolutely coated with this sort of approach.

Every part of is looked at and thought about and designed.

It's summer in the south of France,

and the Gordon Murray design team is relaxing as only it can.

It's the annual soapbox derby.

All vehicles designed in-house

for maximum speed and minimum weight.

It's always been part of the programme, my programme,

that the job should be fun.

And when you're doing something that you absolutely adore

and love like cars and speed and racing,

that's not very difficult to achieve.

Back in the real world, the T25 is beginning to cause a stir.

3...2...1...go!

It's getting an awful lot of attention.

It's kind of the star of the show, but understandably,

because it looks visually

much different to anything else on the road.

And interestingly, hearing people's discussion,

they're very aware of it.

They know what this car is and they know what its significance is,

and they also know the pedigree of the guy who designed it,

so people seem very well informed about it.

I think they're just very keen to drive it.

I think we're feeling, I suppose,

like this is the end of the first part of the era,

now that we've done what we set out to do,

which was to build a running prototype

and to industrialise the manufacturing process.

But it's actually really just the beginning of the venture,

because now we're trying to sell this idea in the real world,

and that's actually even more exciting, I think.

Try and get as many cars like this, efficient cars like this,

on the road all around the world in the shortest possible time.

Gordon Murray's design journey

is a colourful and sometimes controversial quest

that continues to evolve.

As T25 goes through its final developments,

plans for T26, 27 and 28 are already well under way.

And licences for the iStream manufacturing process

are quietly being negotiated in different parts of the world.

You know, in an era where everything kind of gets homogenised,

and it's focus groups,

and all cars wind up looking like Toyota Corollas,

I like individual thinkers.

You come up with a design. People will love it or hate it.

The people who hate it won't buy it anyway,

but the people that love it will really bond with it.

I like people who take the wheel and say,

"Well, it's all very well, the wheel,

"but what about this other way of doing it," you know?

To reinvent it in this other way.

And there aren't many people who have the courage to do that.

Courageous means innovation, really.

Looking at things in a completely different way or a lateral way,

take a chance, let's get ahead with the unfair advantage,

and I'm definitely in that camp.

I've been really lucky in my life,

because I've been paid to do my hobby, basically,

all my life, and you can't get much better than that.

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