Murray’s corner

GORDON MURRAY IS no stranger to benchmarks. He has designed Formula 1 cars that have been driven by the greats and won multiple world championships. His McLaren F1, designed 30 years ago, was a supercar so preposterously fast it rewrote the rulebook. And his latest cars, the GMA T.50 and T.50s Niki Lauda, promise to tease the edges of the performance envelope even further, combining ultra-light weight with an ultra-responsive naturally aspirated V12 engine that screams to 12,100rpm.

Murray has spent most of his adult life thinking about making cars work better and go faster. His father, Bill, raced motorcycles and prepped racing cars, and Murray started working as a mechanical design draughtsman while studying engineering at Natal Technical College and building himself a club racing car in his spare time. He moved to the UK in 1969 and lucked into a job at the Brabham race team when he “just wandered into” the workshop the day owner Ron Tauranac was interviewing for a draughtsman.

Brabham’s glory days were behind them when the team was snapped up in 1972 by a young South London businessman named Bernie Ecclestone, who asked Murray to design an all-new F1 car for