The 2022 edition of the Goodwood Festival of Speed concluded this weekend with both classic retros and futuristic hypercars being on display at the same venue. But amidst all the fanfare, a new hill climbing record was broken by a small British carmaker by the name of McMurtry. 

Driven by ex-F1 driver Max Chilton, the McMurtry Spierling fan car set a record lap time of 39.08 seconds, beating the previous record of 39.9 seconds set by Romain Dumas in 2019, aboard VW’s ID.R electric racecar. Which in turn had beaten a 20-year-old record set by F1 driver Nick Heidfeld in a V10 McLaren F1 car from the 1998 season. 

Coming back to 2022, the barely one-minute-long video shows the electric car being launched like it was released from a slingshot, reaching a speed of 100kmph in mere 1.5 seconds! This is slowly followed up by it flying cartoonishly through the corners, with Chilton pushing it to its limits.

So how did it manage to achieve this? And will we see it being adapted to the road? Maybe not. As mentioned earlier, the McMurtry Spierling is a ‘fan’ car, as in it actually consists of a fan underneath the car, which draws air up and pushes it out of the rear. This creates a vacuum underneath the car, resulting in an incredible amount of downforce. 

As a result, the McMurtry Speirling produces more than 2,000kg of downforce on the go and has more downforce at standstill than an F1 car even at 241kmph! 

Wondering what it’s like to break a seemingly impossible record? Here’s what Chilton said after his record-breaking climb, “I never thought that was going to happen. If someone had said, ‘One day you’re going to beat every single person that’s ever gone up that hill,’ I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s a real honour. I didn’t sleep last night. I got one hour’s sleep because I was so stressed. Pressure makes diamonds, as they say!”

Image credits: McMurtry, Motorsport Images