Gordon Murray teases new supercar, and it looks like a tribute to the original F1
Gordon Murray Automotive will lift the covers off a new limited-run supercar from its Special Vehicles division this Friday at The Quail during Monterey Car Week. A single teaser image suggests it pays tribute to the road-going McLaren F1 rather than the track-focused F1 GTR that inspired its two predecessors
Gordon Murray himself has said only that the new car will be “something very special,” which is not much to go on, but the teaser image GMA released does most of the talking. It shares the S1 LM's rear haunches, distinctive door-mounted air ducts and roof scoop, yet it noticeably lacks that car's large rear spoiler and aerodynamic addenda, the visual shorthand for a road-biased car rather than a track one.
Two tributes to two different F1s
The Le Mans GTR and S1 LM, GMA's previous Special Vehicles releases, both drew on the McLaren F1 GTR, the Le Mans-winning race car Murray was responsible for in the mid-1990s, the same car Pink Floyd's Nick Mason is currently selling in its striking factory pop-art livery. A more reserved car, stripped of the S1 LM's aero addenda, points somewhere else: toward the road-going McLaren F1 itself, a car still widely regarded as the greatest supercar ever built. Honouring the racer and honouring the road car are two different jobs, and the teaser reads like GMA has decided it is time to do the second one.
The S1 LM just proved what this lineage is worth
Context matters here. Just five examples of the S1 LM are being built, and one of them recently sold at auction for $20.6 million, roughly €17.8 million (£15.2 million), a new record for the most expensive new car ever to go under the hammer. Whatever GMA reveals on Friday inherits that same rarefied territory before a single spec sheet exists.
Where and when to actually see it
Murray will reveal the car in person on Friday as part of a Special Vehicles display at The Quail, alongside the Le Mans GTR and several customer examples of the T.50, GMA's debut supercar powered by a naturally aspirated V12 producing 664 bhp, or roughly 673 hp. It is close to the same four-car format GMA already ran at Goodwood in June, when it took the T.50s Niki Lauda, S1 LM and Le Mans GTR prototype up the hillclimb, and Murray clearly likes the formula enough to repeat it on a different continent. Monterey Car Week has become GMA's preferred stage for exactly this kind of reveal, and the setting alone confirms the new car is being treated as a genuine event rather than a minor addition to the range.
AutoNext Take
Everything here still rests on one deliberately incomplete photo, so treat the road-going F1 theory as informed reading rather than confirmed fact until Friday. But GMA has earned the benefit of the doubt: the S1 LM and Le Mans GTR both delivered on what their teasers promised, and a company that just watched one of its own five-off specials sell for $20.6 million has every incentive to make the follow-up count.
A car from Gordon Murray is always something worth getting excited about, and what makes this one genuinely interesting is the restraint visible in the teaser itself. Most supercar makers tease more wing, not less. GMA doing the opposite, on the car most likely to reference the original F1 rather than its race-bred sibling, suggests Murray understands exactly which version of his own legend still needs telling.
