What a way to make your continental public road debut...
with intense interest. This decade is almost certain to produce a slew of supercars - so many, in fact, that it’ll be easy to shrug off many as also-rans. But the three-seat, V12-powered T.50 is not that. For one thing, it is the work of an unarguable genius in the shape of Gordon Murray. For another, it’s the opening salvo of a new Surrey-based British carmaker - one that we’re expecting many more great things from before too long.
Finally there are the constituent parts of what Murray himself has described as the ‘end point’ of the analogue, combustion-powered supercar. It will be super-lightweight, comparatively small in scale, seat its driver in the middle and be fired up the road by a high-revving, manually-geared twelve-cylinder engine.
Hence the appearance of both the GMA T.50, and its designer, at last week’s McLaren F1 30th anniversary tour. Because what better backdrop for the car than 13 glossy examples of Murray’s former masterwork - fully six of them in road-going GTR format? We’re told the guv’nor only dropped in for a fleeting visit to the Grand Hotel a Villa Feltrinelli on the shores of Lake Garda, but the pre-production T.
And doesn’t it look the part away from studio lights or the cloudy skies of a British proving ground? Obviously there’s plenty of work still to do before the T.50 makes it to the manufacturing phase, but our man on the ground said the Cosworth-built V12 already makes itself heard from miles away in an Italian valley - and when that valley includes the competing crescendo of 13 BMW M S70/2 engines, you know it’s going to be special. The tour was supported, which supplied a 720S as support car .