Gordon Murray, designer of the McLaren F1, is hard at work on a successor to the iconic supercar. Called the T.50, this concept revives the F1's signature delta-formation three-seater layout, with power from a new 3.9-liter naturally aspirated Cosworth V-12 producing 650 hp and revving to an outrageous 12,100 rpm. And for his next ultimate road car, Murray is revisiting one of his most extraordinary aerodynamic concepts.

In 1978, Murray designed the Brabham BT46B Formula 1 car. You know it as the "Fan Car," for the huge fan coming off the rear of the car, driven by the gearbox, which evacuated air from under the car to create a vacuum, sucking the car to the track surface. It only competed in a single race; after a dominant showing at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, Brabham pulled the car so as not to create a political firestorm with other teams.

"The Brabham fan car that everybody sort of knows... is quite a blunt instrument really," Murray told Road & Track over the phone. "Very effective when it's raced, but not really practical on a road car, and to be really blunt, too crude."

As you can see in the images here—the first renderings officially released by Gordon Murray Automotive—the T.50 has a rear-mounted fan like the BT46B. But it's a much more refined item. The T.50's fan is electric, which allows for infinitely variable speed, something the Brabham was not capable of.

Gordon Murray Automotive

Murray said that the fan on the T.50 is used for boundary layer control, managing the airflow above and beneath the car. "As designers and aerodynamicists, we'd all love to have very steep, aggressive diffusers at the back of the car to expand the air, and therefore, accelerate the air underneath and get more ground effect," he explained. "Unfortunately, air has a mind of its own, and it'll only follow a certain profile before it stalls and breaks away from the surface and causes a vortex, or a series of vortices."

"We've done the ideal, very steep, aggressive, diffuser... We have strategically-placed slots in that surface," he said. "What we do when the fan fires up, and we want more downforce at lower speeds, is we open the slots and spool the fan up to maximum, and we remove all the dirty air and the boundary layer, and that means that the air has to follow the surface. It's forced to follow the surface to fill the vacuum that was left there."

The T.50 will have six aerodynamic modes. Automatic mode adjusts fan speed and the two flaps on either side of the fan in real time; Braking mode deploys the aerofoils and uses the fan to increase downforce. Murray claims that stopping distances from 150 mph are 33 feet shorter in this mode.

The remaining four modes are driver selected. High-downforce mode increases downforce by 30 percent. Streamline mode reduces drag by 10 percent, by closing the underbody ducts and spinning the fan up to high speed, creating what Murray calls a virtual long-tail—"you know the McLaren Speedtail? We do that with a slug of air out the back filling the trailing weight," Murray said. V-max mode combines Streamline aero mode with a 30-hp boost from the engine's mild-hybrid system that can last for three minutes. And finally, there's a Test mode that demonstrates the capabilities of the system at a standstill to make sure everything is working—or to show off to your friends.

While the BT46B was Murray's first "fan car," it wasn't his last. The designer experimented with fan systems on the McLaren F1, but he says he ran out of time to develop the idea. He never let go of the concept, though, and with the T.50, he was able to finally develop a comprehensive and capable fan system.

Why go to all the trouble? "There's a problem with any ground effect car," Murray told R&T. "The downforce goes up at a square of the speed, and you really want the downforce at 70, 80, 90, maybe 100 mph. Then when you get to 130, 140, you're bombing across Germany perhaps, and the downforce just keeps going up and up and up.... You've got multiples of the downforce you had at 70, and you're on the bump stops of the car, and the car is very uncomfortable and very unstable."

Murray explained that there are two ways around the problem. The simple solution: "You don't start with much downforce in the first place, which is what I did with the McLaren F1—which is essentially one of the reasons why it did 243 mph." Or, you can alter the suspension to hold the car off the ground when it's making maximum downforce, either with extremely stiff springs or "very complex hydraulic suspension that keeps jacking the car up, which of course is heavy and complicated."

Murray didn't like these compromises. The fan provided the ideal solution—downforce and drag reduction, real-time, from the same system.

The system also has aesthetic payoffs. The T.50 is pitched as the successor to the F1, and Murray wanted to recapture that car's clean styling—in other words, no big wings or other unsightly aero devices. "I wanted to get back to a nicely balanced and styled car again, not with these big swoops and ducts and holes," he said. "It seems to me every time a new supercar comes out, there's a competition to see how complicated the aero can be on the top surface. I don't like that really."

This system is also very lightweight, which helps with Murray's aim to make the T.50 even lighter than the roughly 2500-pound F1. The T.50 is expected to come in at just 2160 pounds, a mere 2.2 pounds of which is contributed by the fan system.

Murray and his team are using the Racing Point Formula 1 team's wind tunnel to test a quarter-scale T.50 to develop the fan system. We'll see that system, along with the rest of the car, next May, and if all this is appealing, Murray says a few build slots are still open for interested customers.

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