Among the classic cars, SUVs and supercars collectively worth tens of millions of euros driven at the petrolhead pilgrimage that is England’s Goodwood Festival of Speed recently was a 200mph carbon fibre electric car with an Irish name, developed by a start-up co-founded by Dublin-born billionaire inventor and engineer David McMurtry.

It’s not clear exactly how much input that McMurtry himself has had into the design concept of the Spéirling, the Irish word for thunderstorm. 

A brochure on the firm’s website, however, says: “The brainchild of one of Britain’s most successful businessmen and prolific inventors, Sir David McMurtry, the McMurtry Spéirling is an experimental pure electric concept vehicle from McMurtry Automotive.

“The first of its kind, the Spéirling – meaning thunderstorm in Irish, the language of Sir David’s roots – is a British-invented, engineered, and built ‘no rules’ track car.”

The name relates to a “downforce on-demand system that fuses the car to the track. The driver, in the eye of the storm, is in ultimate control, playing at the edges of the laws of physics, and far beyond the boundaries of conventional aerodynamic performance,” the brochure states.

It’s difficult to look at the Spéirling and not think about its striking resemblance to a Batmobile. 

McMurtry Automotive’s MD Thomas Yates, who previously spent about six years working in various roles with Mercedes AMG, did not respond to emails.

However, he told motoring magazine Autocar that the firm’s aim is: “to create the best electric car we can. We have used the very best of motorsport safety to design the car, but have ignored any technical rules to design a car from the ground up.

“We are not close yet [to having developed a road car]. We need to build a brand first and the timing has to be right. First we need to build credibility, then prove the car, and then the technology. And then we can look at what motorsport we could compete in.”

Yates told former BBC Top Gear presenter Rory Reid, who also mentioned the Batmobile resemblance, that the Spéirling is a “first principles track car. It’s astounding in terms of its performance, range, and looks. 

“Fundamentally, we set out to build a really, really low drag car. With electric vehicles, you pay a very large penalty in terms of efficiency when it comes to drag. And you have to carry around your battery power with you in terms of very heavy batteries, which also impacts efficiency. 

“You need a lot of downforce to glue a car like this to the road, and for this concept, we’ve used fan-based downforce, with more than 80 horsepower of fans on the back end of the car. The low pressure we generate under the car gives you the downforce to go really fast in straight lines and around corners.

“The fans give you 120 decibels of noise. We’d like to think it’s the loudest electric vehicle there is. It’s a lovely by-product of doing downforce in this way. It wasn’t really what we set out to do when we started out, but it sounds a bit like a jet fighter when the car drives past you.

“The battery is designed by us and it’s fully integrated into the chassis. So the form of it means that it wraps around the driver, and it gives you as low and central a mass as possible of all that weight. The bodywork has been sculpted to give us as low a drag as possible, with an eye to styling as well. 

“The philosophy of our company is smaller, faster, further. We believe it represents a possible future for a driver’s car, with tremendous range, in a really compact form factor, at a relatively low weight. In the long term we absolutely hope to see a road-going car in the long-term.”

The McMurtry website states: “The McMurtry Spéirling is not just a hypercar, it is so much more. A possible future of motorsport, a demonstrator for technologies that will enhance the future of mobility, and an introduction to the value we see in small. The fastest electric car in the world? We’ll let you know…”

Indications last year in recruitment ads and a planning application suggested that the firm was developing a radical small car suited to commuting rather than a hypercar. 

A quote alongside one of the firm’s Instagram photos suggests self-driving abilities may feature in a future car. 

“[The Spéirling] won’t drive itself just yet. McMurtry is focused on a future that features automation and the benefit to our planet and our lifestyles that it will bring, but also a future where the uncompromised pleasure, thrill, and spectacle of driving is very much alive and well.”

According to the McMurtry website, a compact single-seater concept vehicle was designed and built in 2017 and 2018.

The Spéirling name was thought up between 2019 and 2020, and the qualities of motorsport-rivalling performance coupled with the compact design continued to be demonstrated.

“The pandemic presented some unique complications, but the team persevered to deliver the blueprints for the new car and start manufacturing the prototype,” the firm said.

Having presented the car at Goodwood, McMurtry will embark on a programme to break a number of world records with the demonstrator vehicle and show its true motorsport potential, the firm said.

“Downforce on demand” does seem to be a unique concept, and Instagram videos about the car demonstrated that the noise of the fans means that the car perhaps has something closer to the sound of a petrol engine than the Scalextric-like electronic whine of electric racing and road-going cars.

Records seen by The Currency show that the system, and the car design, which features gullwing doors, have been patented by Yates and one of the engineers. They also previously applied to patent a car seat and a power steering system. One of the McMurtry team’s roles is as a patent manager.

A listicle on the BBC Top Gear website from December 2019 indicates that other cars have used large fans to help keep them on the road and the right way up, however.

A one-off Ariel Atom design that used a fan features on the list, as does the McLaren F1 supercar designed by British designer Gordon Murray, who placed the fans in the middle of the car’s structure. Murray visited the McMurtry stand at Goodwood.

Curiously, one of the Batmobiles is on the list as well, as is a Red Bull concept design by F1 and Aston Martin car designer Adrian Newey for the Playstation racing game Gran Turismo.

The Spéirling’s system generates 500kg of downforce to help keep it glued to the road. Without it, such car designs are prone to ‘taking off,’ or flipping up in the air. The car’s rear wheels are driven by what is called the “McMurtry e-axle.”

It has a 1hp:1kg power-to-weight ratio, and the battery is 60kWh, with a track driving range of 30-60 minutes, and a road equivalent range of about 350 miles. 

In keeping with the lightweight theme, its windscreen is made from iridium-coated polycarbonate, to save weight over a glass one. 

The car can go from 0-186mph in about 9 seconds, with a claimed top speed of over 200mph.

Five-time Le Mans winner Derek Bell was one of two drivers of the car at Goodwood, and he was photographed chatting to former F1 and current Indycar racing driver Max Chilton about the car, who sat in it for a photo, but didn’t drive it. 

A car designed in the grounds of the Sherlock house

Based in the grounds of precision engineering firm Renishaw co-founder McMurtry’s €34m Swinhay house that featured in an episode of the BBC’s Sherlock, McMurtry Automotive was founded in June 2016.

Today, it employs about 17 engineers, technicians and designers. A glance at the Linkedin update by the hitherto media-shy company about the car suggests that quite a few of Renishaw’s employees noted the announcement on there, as did engineers working for the likes of Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin’s Formula One team.

Many of the McMurtry team are in their 20s, and have worked for the likes of Dyson, Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes, Toyota, car maker Ariel, Rolls-Royce, and the Red Bull, Williams and McLaren F1 teams.

Working at Swinhay, where a two-storey office is located adjacent to a workshop and assembly area, they are free to enjoy squash facilities – McMurtry himself enjoys squash and tennis – as well as a swimming pool that are part of the house’s complex, and they are also free to bring their pets to work.

Accounts for McMurtry Automotive filed in February reveal that up to June 2020, McMurtry had invested up to £4.8m in the fledgling business.

When I last spoke to McMurtry about the project in May 2019 at the Renishaw HQ, he said that the car startup was “trying to do something no one else has thought of.”

In a statement the previous year, he said: “McMurtry Automotive is a company I started to investigate technology outside the Renishaw environment.”

He added that he had driven a few Tesla models. “They’re very good, and they’ve woken up the rest of the industry and now the fight is on.

“There’s nothing protecting the existing [car making] giants. It’s going to be a battle. But without patents, that battle means the margins for everybody will be less.”

He added that he had bought a very small electric Renault Twizy, as he was fascinated by the motor control technology. “I’m still kind of playing around with it, and I haven’t used it properly yet,” he said.

His taste in cars is very modest for someone who could afford any one that he wanted, let alone a vast collection of them.

Those who know McMurtry well tend to remark how modest he is. The aspect of his work that he enjoys the most is inventing and R&D, especially working with and nurturing apprentice and graduate staff.

He previously owned a Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 that he enjoyed driving on track days. In 2018, his everyday car was the fastest production version of the Mini that is now made by BMW. 

Many CEOs and SME founders who aren’t billionaires have more expensive cars than those, with Range Rover, Mercedes and BMW models among the most popular.

Looking at the Spéirling’s dimensions, at 3.2m x 1.5m, and just over a metre in height, it is smaller than the 3.8m x 1.7m, and 1.4m height of a modern Mini. 

The Mini is renowned for being fun to drive, and for handling well, and that thinking has undoubtedly gone into the McMurtry car.

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McMurtry himself does not like wasting money however, and something of a lean start-up model is evident in what has been achieved by McMurtry Automotive so far.

At FTSE-listed €4.3bn-valued Renishaw, he’s averse to debt, and likes to keep a healthy balance in the tens of millions in the bank in case of unforeseen eventualities.

The firm invited bids from prospective buyers in March this year, but the process concluded last week. The prospective buyers – Siemens reportedly ran the rule over it – didn’t meet the stipulations set out by McMurtry and his co-founder John Deer about respecting its culture, heritage, and the number of staff it employs in Britain and Ireland. 

The latter could be reduced significantly by a foreign buyer, and it remains to be seen what future direction McMurtry and Deer will take regarding their 53 per cent stake.

One shareholder in the firm who asked not to be named told The Currency they would like to see the board strengthened, and a heavyweight chairman to help give better guidance to the future of the business on behalf of the shareholders of the 47 per cent.

At the moment, McMurtry is executive chairman and his co-founder, while Deer is non-executive deputy chairman, and until something changes, their 53 per cent shareholding obviously determines what happens next.

Coming back to automotive matters meanwhile, in Wiltshire, the county next door to McMurtry’s Gloucestershire home, fellow inventor James Dyson sunk a staggering £500 million into an electric car startup that was wound up in May last year. 

However, it ended up with very little to show for it, besides perhaps some demonstrator SUV type vehicles of about the same size as a Range Rover, and a handful of overall design patents for something that will never go into commercial production.

A cynic might respond to that by saying that McMurtry will have spent somewhere north of £5m to date, and he and his group of young engineers have come up with a mini batmobile.

But the patent details indicate that its team is thinking about individual components as well as the overall vehicle. Again, earlier indications of what the McMurtry were working on suggested the firm might in future hope to sell or licence components to other electric car manufacturers.

 And if it’s a vehicle that goes on to break some records and showcase further innovative design concepts that will one day be used in road cars, then that authenticity will speak for itself to a certain extent.

Any McMurtry vehicles that do go the distance and perhaps appear on the roads one day will have their brand heritage in motorsport, invention, and engineering – authentic roots that underpin many of the most successful car manufacturers still in existence today.

And anyway, when was the last time you saw a car model with an Irish name?