McMurtry Automotive is celebrating its tenth anniversary, marking a decade in which a tiny team of talented engineers in rural Gloucestershire, England, grew into the manufacturer of one of the highest-performing track cars ever made: the Spéirling PURE.
To celebrate the milestone, McMurtry has released a new film telling its story from the point of origin. Today, based in a brand-new production facility in the Cotswolds, the company is embarking on its second decade as it scales up to produce the Spéirling PURE for customers around the globe. An applied technology arm, McMurtry Technology, now works hand-in-hand with blue-chip automotive and motorsport OEMs to supply its proprietary battery and Downforce on Demand technologies.
McMurtry first captured global attention in 2022 when a Spéirling prototype set a new Goodwood Festival of Speed Hillclimb record, beating many established manufacturers before it. In 2025, another Spéirling prototype shattered the Top Gear Test Track record, once held by the 2004 Renault F1 car. That same year, the car broke new ground to become the first car to ever drive upside down.
“Just ten years ago, there was only a handful of us, with a blank sheet of paper and the ambition to build a car company,” comments Thomas Yates, McMurtry’s co-founder and Managing Director. Since then, the company has patented revolutionary new technologies, brought together a world-class team of nearly 100 people, and raised the bar for what a performance vehicle can do with the Spéirling.
Origin story
It was Sir David McMurtry, the late engineering pioneer, who first came to Yates with a proposition to build a car company in 2015. Sir David’s own story began in the 1970s at Rolls-Royce, where he was the youngest-ever Deputy Chief Engineer on Concorde’s Olympus engines. The tiny fuel pipes inside the engines needed to be measured to an extraordinary degree of accuracy, and no tool existed that could do the job, so he invented one: the touch-trigger probe, which precisely measures the spatial coordinates of components to hundredths of a millimetre. He patented and commercialised his invention and, with his colleague John Deer, founded Renishaw plc, now one of Britain’s leading engineering companies.
Fast-forward to 2015, and Sir David began to convince Yates to leave his position at Mercedes AMG HPP in Formula 1, together with his best friend and now McMurtry Technical Director, Kevin Ukoko-Rongione. In 2016, Sir David, Thomas and Kevin, in a team totalling six engineers, set out to create the ultimate small, lightweight driver’s car. The result was D01: a superbike on four wheels, with a tiny wheelbase, a weight of 660 kg, 400 hp, all-wheel drive, a 40 kWh battery and a bespoke carbon-fibre chassis plus bodywork.
Commercially, the project did not add up, and the team had to change direction quickly. The new challenge was a car that remained small and lightweight, yet was even more capable: enough to outperform an F1 car. Sitting in his office with Thomas one day, Sir David offered a simple suggestion: “Ah, just suck it to the ground!”
The idea had a basis in history. In 1970, the Chaparral 2J Can-Am racer used a second engine to spin two large fans at its rear, sucking the car to the track. In 1978, Brabham tried again in Formula 1. The BT46B won the Swedish Grand Prix on its debut, but was withdrawn immediately afterwards and never raced again.
Between 2018 and 2021, McMurtry took the concept of fan-based downforce and re-engineered it for the 21st century. The result was the Spéirling prototype, an electric fan car capable of generating up to 2,000 kg of downforce from a standstill, which went on to take the Goodwood Hillclimb record in 2022. The Spéirling PURE prototype followed, setting a new Top Gear Test Track lap record at Dunsfold with The Stig at the wheel and, shortly afterwards, becoming the first car ever to drive upside down with Thomas at the wheel.
Today, after thousands of kilometres of testing, McMurtry is producing the Spéirling PURE for customers around the world. Designed with ease of ownership in mind, the car is plug-and-play and can be enjoyed with the bare minimum of trackside support: just a driver and a competent friend.
Source: McMurtry Automotive press release via Newspress
Abby is Just British's site assistant. She was last seen idling at a hill climb, smelling faintly of hot oil and Earl Grey. Her sources are impeccable. Her origins are classified.
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