Hearing Gordon Murray’s T.50 Rev to Its 12,100 RPM Redline Made My Hair Stand Up
Strong old-school F1 car vibes.
It's been almost a year since Gordon Murray Automotive pulled the covers off its T.50 supercar, and even before then, we'd endured many short clips of the engine, chassis, and even a test mule undergoing some testing. We've seen footage of the engine firing up and idling, and we've even heard it climbing to about 8,000 rpm. For this very reason, I wasn't in a hurry to open GMA's press release this morning, thinking it was just another vlog featuring Indy 500 champ Dario Franchitti chatting with Gordon Murray for 19 minutes. Luckily, I was wrong. Very wrong.
What GMA released today is, at last, a video of the naturally aspirated, 3.9-liter Cosworth V12 engine revving up to its redline of 12,100 rpm. Yes, finally, the whole enchilada!
In typical fashion for this blog series, the video starts with a slight tease of what you're about to see later on, before diving into some of the technology that makes the engine tick and the machinery/manpower needed to develop it. About six minutes in (video below cued for your convenience), however, Franchitti finally asks the engineer behind the control panel if he's comfortable "making some noise."
The well-groomed man answers by saying there's a full Le Mans simulation programmed into the dyno, and proceeds to show us what the mighty V12 is capable of.
The next 90 seconds or so are simply incredible, with the engine going through a series of different power loads, acceleration and deceleration cycles, and most notably, a wide-open throttle run that lasts several seconds.
After having waited what seemed like forever to hear (or see) the full potential of Gordon Murray's T.50, this incredible audible experience certainly makes up for it. But then again, did I really expect any less from the father of the McLaren F1?
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