The Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK is rapidly becoming a key event for electric cars, but this year was particularly momentous. An EV has broken the record for the legendary hillclimb, which had stood since 1999. Called the McMurtry Spéirling, it shows how close electric vehicles are getting to rendering fossil fuel obsolete even at the performance pinnacle of four-wheel technology.
The previous official Goodwood record was set in 1999 by a McLaren MP4/13 Formula 1 racecar driven by Nick Heidfeld. This was the car that had won the Formula 1 Championship in 1998 in the hands of Mika Häkkinen, so its performance credentials are without question. It’s also telling that an unofficial run by the all-electric Volkswagen ID.R in 2019 also beat the McLaren’s record, but rain on the official Sunday race meant that it couldn’t repeat its prowess in Qualifying during the actual race, so its speed doesn’t stand in the record books.
It may look like a miniature batmobile, but this car smashed the Goodwood hillclimb record by over … [+]
The McMurtry Spéirling is certainly a unique vehicle. When I first encountered it at the Salon Prive show in London’s Blenheim Palace in 2021, I initially thought it was a Batmobile-inspired toy car aimed at children. But a long chat with the Managing Director of the company made me realize its intentions were entirely serious. The Spéirling has been designed to overturn all the myths about electric vehicles for racing, creating a series car that can go up against the best fossil fuel-powered cars and win.
The genius of the Spéirling isn’t just that it’s electric. It also has a fan system (which was used in Formula 1 for a while before being banned) to suck the car onto the road and provide downforce even when the vehicle is at low speeds. The fans can deliver 2000kg of downforce when stationary, which counteracts the fact that the Spéirling weights under 1,000kg. So you get the traction of a heavier car without the momentum penalty. At 150mph, the downforce is 2,250kg, so corners can be taken at extremely high speed. Watching the video of the Spéirling’s Goodwood run, many viewers commented that they thought the video had been sped up, because the car’s ability to change direction and hold corners was so ridiculously rapid and precise.
Since the McMurtry has 1,000hp, its power-to-weight ratio is 1:1 and the car can hit 60mph in under 1.5 seconds. This is immense, considering that a Formula 1 or IndyCar will take more like 2.5 seconds for the same sprint. Formula 1 cars do have an even higher power-to-weight ratio, though. The minimum weight of a 2022 F1 car is 798kg, and engine power is more than 1,000hp (although he exact figure for the current season is a trade secret). So that would make a 1.25:1 power-to-weight ratio, although earlier F1 cars were even higher – as much as 1.4:1 in 2016. They can’t lay down the power at low speed, however, which is where the Spéirling’s fan system gives it a huge advantage. Still, even when F1 cars did have active fan systems, they didn’t accelerate as fast as the Spéirling due to the way fossil fuel engines can’t deliver their torque immediately, where battery-powered electric motors can.
The McMurtry Speirling on a test run at Goodwood.
The Spéirling is also meant to make competitive race distances viable for an EV. Its 60kWh battery can last 30-60 minutes of race-level driving and the car allegedly supports rapid DC charging up to 600kW, meaning it could be charged from zero to 100% in about six minutes. This might not make it competitive for a 24-hour race like Le Mans (or it might…) but it would be conceivable to have a series run of Spéirling against Spéirling with refueling stops like there used to be in Formula 1.
Recently, I wrote about a hydrogen-powered hypercar, the Viritech Apricale. In theory, this car (which is also targeting a 1,000kg weight and a higher total 1,207hp) will have an even better power-to-weight ratio, close to that of an F1 car. Also, the much-vaunted “petroleum-like” refueling would, in theory, make a car like this provide a similar race experience to a fossil fuel-powered race vehicle. It would be great to see the Apricale, when it does reach reality, go up against the Spéirling. There are some questions about whether it would win, though, despite its power-to-weight advantage.
Viritech’s Apricale hydrogen hypercar looks faster on paper, but might not be able to beat the … [+]
It obviously doesn’t have the fan system, which would give the Spéirling an unfair advantage. But there’s another problem. Two thirds of the Apricale’s power come from its 6kWh battery, and only a third from its hydrogen fuel stack. Just as F1 cars run out of KERS-enhanced acceleration very quickly, the Apricale’s battery will deplete fast too, with some estimating it only has about 30 seconds of hard acceleration in it. Then you are left with the 402bhp hydrogen power, which won’t deliver such impressive performance on its own.
The proof of this performance pudding will be in the eating, however. We will need to see how it does when it actually arrives. The Apricale isn’t a race car but a high-performance road car, although these are often used in racing. Viritech could well have the balance between battery and fuel cell right for the intended use, and we will have to wait until the car is available for testing to be sure.
Until then, though, the McMurtry Spéirling has demonstrated that all-battery-powered EVs can pose a serious challenge to fossil fuel race cars, by smashing a F1 car’s hillclimb record by over 2.5 seconds. As an advert for how electric cars aren’t boring vehicles for environmentalists, it has delivered in spades. With much more EV development on the near horizon, particularly in battery technology, this is just the beginning of great things, too.
