At Monterey, the British engineer unveiled the spiritual successor to his most legendary machine, and it’s exactly as obsessive as you’d expect.
Gordon Murray doesn’t do incremental. The 76-year-old engineer who designed the McLaren F1 and spent the last decade building the T.50 supercar just pulled back the curtain on his next creation at Monterey Car Week, and the thing is unmistakably descended from automotive royalty. This is the successor to the S1 LM, that near-mythical speed machine that only existed in prototype form before funding evaporated in the 1990s. Thirty years later, Murray is finally finishing what he started.
The new car carries the weight of that unfinished business like few projects in automotive history. The S1 LM was supposed to be the ultimate analog weapon, a 7.0-liter V12 screamer with over 700 horsepower designed purely to hunt lap records. It was shelved before production. Murray’s reveal at Monterey wasn’t just a car launch, it was a reckoning, proof that the vision never actually died, it just had to wait for the right moment. The specs and styling remain largely under wraps, which is vintage Murray: let the engineering speak, not the marketing deck.
What matters is the signal. While Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren are chasing hybrid complexity and autonomous futures, Murray’s shop is still operating from first principles: weight reduction, mechanical purity, driver connection. The Monterey reveal confirms that ultra-exclusive, unapologetically analog supercars still have an audience, just not a large one, which is precisely the point. In a category where electrification and AI feel inevitable, there’s something almost defiant about a 76-year-old engineer debuting the most raw version of the car he couldn’t build three decades ago.
