It takes a special kind of road car to make a professional driver like four-time IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti giggle maniacally, but the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50, or rather “George”, the first development car fitted with an engine that can rev up to 12,100, rpm, is such a car.
The 3.9-liter Cosworth V12 was initially supposed to produce 650 hp (659 PS/485 kW), but tests have proven it can reach up to 672 hp (681 PS/501 kW). Although we’ve seen other development cars and we’ve heard the engine run at full revs on the dyno, none of the test cars have been allowed a full measure of revs to this point.
The full 12,100 rpm is such a highlight that for his last lap of the test seen here, at the Millbrook Test Center, Franchitti and his co-driver take their headphones off in order to be able to hear the engine and the overhead induction noise in the cabin.
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“We were just laughing,” Franchitti says, in an effort to express the excitement he felt hearing the engine. “We were like two 17-year-olds who’d been given the keys. We were just giggling.”
When he gets out of the car, he hardly has a word to say. He just hugs Gordon Murray. Franchitti then asks if Murray is sure he doesn’t want to cut his legs off to drive the test car since, it seems, the company founder is too tall to fit in.
“It is the best engine I’ve ever driven,” says Franchitti. “Or, even in its very basic state, it’s the best. It’s just. We were just laughing. There’s nothing else to say.”
The high-revving engine does come with at least one peculiarity, though. On downshifts, Franchitti reports, it’s easy to over-rev the engine, which Murray seems to indicate is an issue the engineers are working on.
GMA plans to build just 100 examples of the T.50 along with another 25 T.50S Niki Lauda track variants with customer deliveries set to start in 2022.