The Goodwood Festival of Speed is always a highlight in the low-volume exotic car calendar. It’s where the world’s most serious collectors and enthusiasts converge every July, and manufacturers plan their biggest moments around it. But even by those standards, Gordon Murray Automotive is making an unusually big splash this year with not one, not two, but four separate announcements across a single weekend.
T.50s Niki Lauda Gets Its Global Dynamic Debut
The main event is undoubtedly the first production T.50s Niki Lauda making its global dynamic debut. Years in the making, this track-only derivative of the T.50 dials up everything that makes the road car special to an extreme that road regulations simply wouldn’t permit. With just 25 examples ever to be produced, a hillclimb run at Goodwood represents a genuinely once-in-a-generation opportunity to witness one in action.
Each of the 25 cars is named after one of Gordon Murray’s 24 Formula One Grand Prix victories as a designer, with the 25th honouring a special endurance race win. Chassis 1 pays tribute to the 1974 South African Grand Prix at Kyalami fittingly represented with a South African flag livery. It was Carlos Reutemann behind the wheel of Murray’s Brabham BT44 that day, carrying race number 7, which features prominently on this first car.
T.33 Spider Makes Its Public Debut
Also heading up Goodwood’s famous 1.16-mile driveway will be the T.33 Spider validation prototype — its first ever public appearance. The open-top variant of GMA’s second road car has been quietly anticipated for some time, and the green prototype is expected to draw substantial crowds even on a weekend where breathtaking machinery is essentially wallpaper. GMA has described it as offering an even more involving and immersive experience behind the wheel than the T.33 hardtop, which is saying something.
The Le Mans GTR XP1 Returns
You’d be forgiven for losing track of the Le Mans GTR, it made its debut at Monterey last year somewhat overshadowed by the GMA S1 LM reveal. The Le Mans GTR is Murray’s distillation of the greatest sportscar racers ever built which is a tribute to the golden era of endurance racing, both from his own drawing board and beyond. XP1 previews all 24 production units, a machine that apparently strikes a balance between road-going usability and track-focused precision. Watch it howl past Molecomb Corner and you won’t forget it twice.
GMA S1 LM Makes Its European Debut
Rounding out GMA’s Goodwood weekend is the European debut of the S1 LM design model first unveiled in California last year. It won’t be running the hill but expect serious attention regardless. The S1 LM bears an unmistakable resemblance to the McLaren F1 LM, which is rather the point. It also carries the distinction of being the first example sold for £15 million (approximately R327.6 million) before construction had even begun.
100 Customer Cars Delivered in Six Years
Gordon Murray himself offered some perspective on just how much GMA has accomplished in a remarkably short time: “In just six years since we unveiled the T.50, the team has designed, developed, manufactured and delivered 100 customer cars to owners around the world. We’ve also started building T.50s, while T.33 and T.33 Spider are well through development, ahead of production. Alongside this, we have created an even more specialised range of vehicles that explore the limits of our design and engineering philosophy — it is a privilege to develop lightweight, beautifully engineered supercars for our customers and to share them with enthusiasts.”