Someone Just Drove This Fan Car Upside Down And Then Spanked An F1 Car

By now, it’s already known that the McMurtry Spéirling is a monster. Laguna Seca production EV record-holder, Goodwood hillclimb record-holder, zero-to-100 mph in 2.66 seconds, capable of cornering at more than three g. It’s a trailblazer of a new age, and for all the wild stuff it’s done, it just completed what might be its craziest achievement yet.

Thanks to extensive underbody aero shaping and a series of fans, the McMurtry Spéirling can generate two tons of downforce at zero MPH. Considering the car only weighs 2,646 pounds, that means it should be able to drive upside-down from a standing start. Of course, theory will only take you so far, so McMurtry had a rig made and decided to test it out for real.

The inversion rig is fairly simple, a flat surface connecting two vertical hoops, with the whole thing spinning thanks to tracks that the hoops sit in. Nothing to hold the car to the surface except suction provided by the car itself, but also nothing to prevent the car from falling to the tarmac beyond the slightest of cushions. The driver? McMurtry Managing Director Thomas Yates. Talk about confidence in your product.

Video of the event plays out exactly as you’d expect, but that doesn’t make it any less special. The Spéirling drives onto the rig, Yates activates the fans, and then the world starts to go upside-down. Once fully inverted, Yates inches McMurtry’s magnificent machine forward, achieving one hell of a feat. This is the first time a car’s ever set off from a stop completely upside-down, and it genuinely feels like the future we were promised is finally arriving.

Of course, inverted driving isn’t the only feat achieved by McMurtry this week. The Stig had the chance to take the Spéirling Pure out on the Top Gear test track, crossing the line in just 55.9 seconds. That’s the fastest time any land vehicle has put down around Dunsfold, and by an absolutely enormous margin.

For context, the Ferrari FXX driven by Michael Schumacher managed 1:10.7, the insane Ford SuperVan 4.2 hill climb car did a 1:05.3 lap, and the fastest qualifying road car, the Aston Martin Valkyrie, completed its power lap in 1:09.6. Prior to this lap, the fastest car to go around Dunsfold was the Renault R24 F1 car driven by Formula 1 driver Heikki Kovalainen. It took Renault to third in the 2004 constructor’s championship with Fernando Alonso at the wheel of this particular example, and it laid down a power lap time of 59 seconds flat.

However, there is a little bit of an asterisk attached to this latest lap. See, the Renault R24 Formula 1 car completed its lap in damp conditions on grooved tires. In the 2002 to 2015 format of the show, it’s canon that a damp lap is roughly three seconds slower than a dry lap, but that’s for road cars. For an open-wheel race car that normally runs on slicks in dry conditions, it’s tough to ballpark how much slower it would be in wet conditions. Of course, track conditions will always vary from day-to-day. Ambient temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, enough that a direct apples-to-apples comparison roughly two decades later isn’t exactly possible.

So, kudos to McMurtry for dominating the leaderboard. The fastest car to ever go around the Top Gear test track, the first car to ever set off from a stop while completely inverted, and it’s electric. In some ways, the future is going to be way cooler than we ever imagined. What was once F1-car pace and a feat of science fiction will soon be something people can buy. Isn’t that amazing?

Top graphic credit: McMurtry Automotive

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