Gordon Murray

Gordon Murray was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1946, and built and raced his own car there before moving to England in 1969 with the idea of working for Lotus. He ended up at Brabham, and by 1973 was its chief designer.

His Brabhams were some of the most inventive cars of their era. The BT46B of 1978 had a large fan at the back which, officially, cooled the engine and, in practice, sucked the car onto the road. Niki Lauda won the Swedish Grand Prix with it and the team withdrew it straight afterwards. His cars won Nelson Piquet the world title in 1981 and 1983. At McLaren he was technical director when the team’s cars won fifteen of the sixteen races in 1988.

Then he designed a road car. The McLaren F1 of 1992 put the driver in the middle, with a passenger seat either side, and lined its engine bay with gold foil to reflect heat. In 1998 it reached 386 km/h, a record for a production car, and a racing version won Le Mans in 1995. It is in this catalogue.

Decades later he did it again with his own company. The T.50, revealed in 2020, is a lightweight V12 with a fan at the back — the idea from 1978 made road-legal — and he followed it with the smaller T.33. The track version of the T.50 is named after Niki Lauda.

He is known in the paddock as much for his long hair and rock-band T-shirts as for his cars. No freely licensed recent portrait of him exists; his card shows him at Le Mans in 1996, in one of those T-shirts.

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