March 19, 2024

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Building Cars, People First

Gordon Murray reveals GMA T.50s race car homage to Niki Lauda

Components One legend Niki Lauda would have been seventy two several years outdated if he have been alive nowadays. Nevertheless he died in 2019, we think he would have heartily accredited of the new Gordon Murray T.50s, which will also be identified as the Niki Lauda as an homage.

Which is for the reason that Lauda drove the Brabham BT46B “enthusiast vehicle,”  the Components One vehicle that motivated the T.50’s technological centerpiece, to its only victory. The downforce-generating enthusiast assisted Lauda get the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix to the dismay of rival groups. Murray also built that vehicle, and required to pay out tribute to his buddy and three-time F1 champ.

Like the Brabham, the T.50s is not road lawful. It really is billed as a monitor model of the GMA T.fifty, the supercar Murray built as a pure driver’s antidote to the status barges that contemporary supercars have turn into. The Lauda leans tougher into Murray’s philosophy of lightness. In excess of two hundred kilos have been stripped from the street-going T.fifty, thanks to one particular fewer passenger seat in the 1+2 layout, a stripped-out interior, and thinner glass. Total pounds, 1,878 kilos.

On the other hand, diminished mass is just not the only general performance improvement. The Cosworth-designed 3.nine-liter V12 now will make 725 horsepower, or sixty six more ponies than the normal product. Component of that get will come from a central roof-mounted ingestion drawing air into the motor, as properly as the removing of any seem restriction hardware from the exhaust.

For the monitor product, one particular of the road T.50’s dearest options, an outdated-faculty handbook transmission, has been changed with a 6-velocity paddle-shift Xtrac. According to GMA, the equipment ratios are more intently spaced on the race vehicle, so a stick shift didn’t make sense the driver would drop treasured milliseconds switching gears and using fingers off the wheel.

The Lauda provides numerous aerodynamic aids that visually differentiate it from the T.fifty, commencing with a broad reduced air dam. A trio of NACA ducts funnel fresh air into the cabin and toward the front brakes. A extensive dorsal fin like the types discovered on Le Mans prototypes extends from the cabin roof to the rear, wherever a GT-fashion rear wing spans the tail. According to GMA, it generates as a lot as 3,300 kilos of downforce at 175 mph.

Within, the central instrument pod has been changed with a digital monitor, and the normal steering wheel with a yoke-form deal with. Getting the house on the correct, wherever the handbook shifter and console would have been, is a board of toggle switches.

There will only be twenty five Niki Laudas created. Every will feature a plaque celebrating a victory by one particular of Murray’s a lot of F1 vehicle patterns, commencing with the 1974 South African Grand Prix at Kyalami Circuit. Output begins January 2022, and despite a $4.3 million price tag, GMA says 15 automobiles are already spoken for.