My New Year’s resolution? Same as last year. And the year before that.
For the past three years, my stated personal aim has not been to finally locate a bolt of pristine Missoni fabric for an eight-valve Integrale, or even to wean myself off cru Barbaresco, but to tee up a full evaluation of the road test unicorn du jour: Gordon Murray’s T50.
We wouldn’t normally give chase for this long. Once a new car has been on the scene for more than a year, the impetus for an exhaustive road test at MIRA withers. Two years is pushing it, and three? If a road test hasn’t materialised by that point, we might as well wait for the facelift.
Three years is now where we are with the T50. Needless to say, it’s not really a facelift kinda car, but still. The most hyped supercar of the 2020s was signed off in 2023, with first deliveries early the following year.
Assuming all has gone to plan (quite an assumption, depending on who you talk to), the 100 examples are now with buyers. In new car terms, the £3 million T50 is ancient history.
So why continue to pursue it? Well, for any car that Murray himself claims irons out the creases of the McLaren F1, and whose rev gain in neutral is 50,000 per second, the timing doesn’t matter. It’s a fascinating project; potentially an engineering benchmark.
So it’s a story that needs telling, preferably via a 4000-word road test that gets the numbers, yes, but that also bottles the subjective impressions that are the raison d’être of any pure driver’s car.
Another dangling carrot is that a telemetry-aided dive into the T50 world is something nobody has yet been able to deliver. Intertwined is posterity: this publication’s 1994 test of the F1 is a classic read and even provided the official performance stats. It only feels right that we should do it once again.
So why hasn’t it yet happened? Good question. There is the sticky reality that, with all cars spoken for, the commercial justification for handing a T50 over for thorough evaluation by an objective third-party body is moot.
This wasn’t the case with the initially slow-selling F1. And neither should we pretend a stellar verdict is a foregone conclusion, no matter how spectacular the premise.
GMA therefore needs convincing to allow a process that balances this risk with cementing the car’s legacy. With prototype drives out there, not to mention a number of interviews with key personnel, a full Autocar road test remains the logical next step-and let’s be honest, the bit that really matters.
So bear with us as we continue to have the necessary conversations. I don’t want to be writing a version of this column in January 2027. In the meantime, there’s rather a lot to look forward to in 2026, though note: the following is very much a sample menu, because it’s impossible to predict exactly when any of these cars will roll up to the barrier at Gatehouse 2 at MIRA.