Gordon Murray is a bit of a legend. As a young man he left his native South Africa for the UK, intent on designing and building Formula 1 cars. He did this in an era unrecognizable to the F1 fan of today. Budgets were tiny—the entire sport could have survived on the annual budget for even the least-well funded team in 2015. Despite, or perhaps because of, these limited resources, his ingenuity shone through, and many revolutionary designs issued forth from his pen. Post-F1 Murray has been using that ingenuity to rethink the way road cars are designed, something that a very lucky few have experienced behind the wheel of a Light Car Company Rocket or McLaren F1. That may be about to change thanks to the resurrection of sports car company TVR.

Founded in 1947, TVR—an abbreviation of founder Trevor Wilkinson's first name—was a low-volume manufacturer of hairy-chested sports cars built in Blackpool, England. The company went through a number of different owners, building up a cult following thanks to its adherence to a formula of lightweight sports cars with rather wild styling, plenty of horsepower, and a charming lack of modern safety features like ABS, airbags, traction control, and so on.

Sadly for TVRistas, the firm was sold in 2004 to 24-year-old Russian Nikolay Smolensky, who sold off all the assets and then let it die slowly over a few years. In 2013, things started to look up. Smolensky finally parted with the company in 2013, selling it to a group of investors led by Les Edgar, a passionate TVR fan who may be better known to readers of Ars Technica as one of the founders of games studio Bullfrog Productions.

Edgar and his partners were forthcoming about their inexperience with car manufacturing but sincere in their desire to resurrect the marque and return it to the glory days it experienced in the 1990s under Peter Wheeler. Speaking to Autocar in 2013, Edgar told the magazine, "None of us has ever built a car, but we have a fair bit of business knowhow. We're clear about the kind of car we want to build, and we think we can bring fresh thinking to the whole thing." Enter Gordon Murray.

Murray is well known for his obsession (shared with Lotus founder Colin Chapman) with reducing weight from his designs. In recent years, his attention has been on changing the way we build cars, applying that same "think light" philosophy. The result is a process called iStream, which aims to revolutionize the way cars are built. An iStream car factory, according to Murray's design company, will be a quarter the size of a traditional car factory and will use 60 percent less energy.

Gone are the massive, noisy metal stamping presses; instead, laser-cut metal tubes are bent and welded to create the car's frame. Composite panels (fiberglass with a honeycomb core) are then bonded to the frame using the same philosophy as an F1 car (a very stiff, lightweight body) without anything like the expense or labor-intensive nature of carbon fiber.

iStream is intriguing, but its revolutionary nature has found it few friends among major car makers, who have so much invested in the status quo. In TVR, it may have found the perfect client: an established brand without the trappings (or assets) that normally come with it. And for TVR, the cachet that comes with the name Gordon Murray imbues the venture with a level of credibility that would otherwise be hard to find.

The new TVRs will stick closely to the old format. A lightweight chassis, rear-wheel drive, a powerful engine up front—in this case a V8 developed by Cosworth—and a manual transmission. Production is slated to begin in 2017, and according to Edgar, cars should cost about the same as a secondhand Aston Martin. Here at Cars Technica we're keeping our fingers crossed that the new TVRs find their way across the Atlantic.