A ballistic electric car designed and built in Britain has just set a new record in the famous Goodwood Hillclimb event.
The innovative ‘McMurtry Speirling’ proves that tasty cheese isn’t the only good thing to come out of Gloucestershire.
Founded in 2016 by Irish inventor and businessman Sir David McMurtry, McMurtry Automotive is headquartered in the sleepy town of Wotton-under-Edge.
But there’s nothing sedate about the McMurtry Speirling - a car spawned as part of McMurtry’s mission to ‘create a vehicle like nothing the world has ever seen’.
There’s just the one seat, it weighs a paltry 1,000kg, and there’s a colossal 1,000 bhp to play with. That power comes from a relatively small 60 kWh battery, which is on a par with the unit used in the Nissan Leaf e+.
Yet McMurtry has wrung-out every bit of performance from it to create an absolute track missile.
The Speirling - named after the Irish word for a thunderstorm - can accelerate from 0-60mph in just 1.5 seconds. It’s got a potential range between charges of more than 300 miles.
And it also employs a cutting-edge fan on its underside to create tons of downforce, helping it to stay glued to the Tarmac. In fact, it can generate 2,000kg of downforce even when it’s at a standstill.
Astonishingly, it’s road legal as well - being described by McMurtry as the ‘wildest electric car ever to wear number plates’.
It certainly devoured the Goodwood Hillclimb, finishing the 1.16 mile track - which has 305ft of ascent - in a time of 39.08 seconds.
That’s just a shade quicker than the previous record of 39.9 second, which was set by the 689 PS electric Volkswagen ID. R back in 2019.
Behind the wheel of the Speirling was British Indycar Driver Max Chilton. You can watch a video of the record-breaking lap via the Goodwood Festival of Speed Twitter page.
Make sure you do - because the Speirling really does have to be seen, and heard, to be believed.
The Goodwood Hillclimb has been a fixture of the UK racing calendar since 1993.
Here’s a list of the so-called ‘Sunday Shootout’ times going back more than a decade:
| 2010 |
Roger Wills | Williams Cosworth FW05 | 0:47.15 |
| 2011 | Dan Collins | Lotus Cosworth 88 | 0:48.52 |
| 2012 | Anthony Reid | Chevron GR8 GT3 | 0:46.46 |
| 2013 | Justin Law | Jaguar XJR8/9 | 0:45.95 |
| 2014 | Sébastien Loeb | Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak | 0:44.60 |
| 2015 | Olly Clark | Subaru Impreza "Gobstopper II" | 0:44.91 |
| 2016 | Olly Clark | Subaru Impreza "Gobstopper II" | 0:46.23 |
| 2017 | Justin Law | Jaguar XJR-12D | 0:46.13 |
| 2018 | Romain Dumas | Volkswagen I.D R Pikes Peak | 0:44:32 |
| 2019 | Romain Dumas | Volkswagen I.D R 689 PS | 0:39:90 |
| 2021 | Rob Bell | McLaren 720S GT3X | 0:45.01 |
| 2022 | Max Chilton | McMurtry Speirling | 0:39:08 |
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