McMurtry Speirling revealed: £1.2m fan car is the ultimate track toy

Asked what sort of buyer the Spéirling Pure attracts, given its performance figures and list price are in another realm compared to most track cars, Yates explained that “it’s a real mind-over-matter car” that gives owners “a wonderful opportunity to push their own limits”.

"Some of the guys who are buying them have lived an absolute life of racing; they've been absolute racing legends, and this is a great opportunity to have fun. Some have Formula 1 cars, and this is another way to enjoy that kind of performance but in a much-lower-running-cost way, one that's way easier to share.”

A key component of the Spéirling ownership experience is the social element. McMurtry has already hosted owners events – including a “hilarious” ice driving day – and has equipped customer cars with an intercom system that allows drivers to communicate with each other out on track, which Yates said ramps up the communal and competitive aspects.

“It seems like it would just be a small thing, because the car itself is super-performant, but you add this layer of social while you're driving, and it's almost like you're in the craziest go-karts ever made,” he said. “We've got a single-seater, but we've found a really fun way to make those experiences shared."

Yates also touted the longevity of the battery as a boon for owners; after 10,000km (6200 miles) of hardcore track tests, it lost just 4.5% capacity and no resistance.

"This is much more running than most customers are ever going to do with the car," he said.

The battery itself – boosted to 100kWh in capacity – is a proprietary McMurtry design, engineered entirely at the firm's Cotswolds HQ, which has been designed so that new cell technologies can be easily integrated as time goes by and the Spéirling remains technologically up to date.

"We want people to be excited about using this car in 20-30 years' time," explained Yates.

"We had to in-house it", he said of the decision to develop a bespoke battery for the Spéirling, one which has as much capacity as the Polestar 4 in a space roughly half the size. "It's been a huge focus - a tremendous amount of iteration with motorsport engineers that just care about the last marginal gain."

"In a small shed in Gloucestershire, there is an awesome battery factory where we make some of the most power- and energy-dense battery packs in existence.

"If you control the design of the battery and you control the entire design of the chassis and all the packaging, you can iterate hundreds of times to try and get that last bit of packaging benefit, that last bit of central gravity. It's about taking it all in house and caring relentlessly about the last few per cent."

Now that the Spéirling is on its way to customers, thoughts have turned to what comes next for McMurtry. As well as confirming plans for three separate new model lines, Yates said the company is working to share its proprietary innovations with other companies, which could push the hypercar’s game-changing technology out to wildly different applications.

"We are working with one very high-profile motorsport team, one absolutely massive automotive OEM and another hypercar manufacturer," revealed Yates, without giving any names.

He said the talks revolve around both McMurtry's fan technology and its self-developed battery packs and that "most of" the supply deals it makes will go public in the future. 

He admitted that he "had to do quite a lot of soul-searching" before agreeing to let other companies use McMurtry's tech but ultimately decided that "while it's really important that the Spéirling is always this amazingly different car, it's even cooler that one day the use of fan technology becomes far more ubiquitous and the Spéirling becomes the car that managed to change the game."

The parallels between Yates' company and that of revered Croatian tech entrepreneur Mate Rimac are evident - in so far as both started their businesses just a few years ago with a headline-baiting electric hypercar and are now evolving them into highly influential and prolific technology developers and suppliers. 

But Yates has no plans for McMurtry to deprioritise its car-building programme in favour of expanding the component supply element of its business.

"I would say that our ambition as a company would be to have some component of applied technology in the future but maybe not to have the balance the way that Rimac has done, where maybe 2000 staff are on applied technology and relatively the car side of the business is about a tenth of that. 

"My dream would be that maybe one day we are about 50:50; that we have a good applied technology division and we have a real strong drive still to build the world's most ridiculous cars."

McMurtry previously hinted at plans to make the Spéirling road-legal, sticking a numberplate on the back for its runs up the hill at the 2023 Festival of Speed, but Yates said it will now be built exclusively as "an utterly outrageous track car".

However, the company hasn't abandoned its plans to eventually put cars on public roads; Yates said McMurtry was "absolutely interested in what we can do in that space" and had "some cool ideas" for its next cars after the Spéirling.

The company is working on plans for three new models, "and it's quite possible that some of those have numberplates on", he revealed, without giving any firm details of what form they would take.

He did hint at potentially offering the Spéirling with a second seat in the future but said that the future models under consideration "are in a completely different direction altogether". 

Q&A with Thomas Yates, MD, McMurtry Automotive

Can you imagine a motorsport series?

"I think of the pre-war era, where there was this spirit of endeavour, where you had people that were so enthusiastic about their cars and what they could build and what they could run, that people would just come together and they would race, and motorsport grew organically out of this burning desire to go quickly. I would love it if we had a customer base that turned to us and said 'we want to go racing'. To me that's that's the best ever justification for why you would go racing with these cars. But what we're not interested in at this point is curating an artificial environment to take these things racing."

Do you look to firms like Ariel and BAC for inspiration?

"One hundred per cent. We have a lovely meeting where it's me, [Ariel's] Simon Saunders, the [BAC] Briggs brothers, Morgan and Caterham, and we all get together and laugh about how insane it is to try and run a car company in the UK. But it's so uplifting, because even though we're offering different levels of cars, there's so much endeavour between the group, and it's wonderful. So I'm hugely inspired by those guys; they've done an incredible job, and the proof in the pudding is that I would so gladly have a garage filled with one each of their cars."

You could theoretically break every lap record under the sun. Will you?

"There's definitely some cool stuff in the pipeline that we want to do, and I'm sure we'll announce it formally soon. The extra huge effort that's been put through the car to increase the range opens up some interesting and new possibilities that maybe would have been more difficult with the original prototype, so that's exciting. Mostly what we want to achieve, though, is to support our wonderful owners to let them go and break records and go and live their aspirations. Our dream is that headlines will be made by our customers."