Chris Harris has spent the better part of a year getting to know McMurtry, the small British firm behind the Spéirling, a single-seat electric track car that does not behave like anything else on a circuit. In his film for Chris Harris on Cars, he drives the latest prototype and comes away visibly rattled, struggling on camera to describe what he just felt. The numbers hint at why. McMurtry quotes roughly 1,000 horsepower in a car that weighs under 1,000kg, paired with a set of underbody fans that the company says produce about 2,000kg of downforce at any speed, including a standstill. Harris describes cornering and braking loads closer to a fighter jet than a road car, and a level of grip that keeps resetting his sense of what is physically possible.
The Spéirling is already in the record books. At the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed, Max Chilton drove one up the 1.16-mile hillclimb in 39.08 seconds, beating the Volkswagen ID.R's 2019 time and making the Spéirling the first fan car to win sanctioned competition since the Brabham BT46B took the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix. In April 2025, McMurtry says one of its cars set an outright lap record at the Top Gear test track, which is the blue prototype Harris keeps coming back to in the film. The reason the fan layout matters is simple: it generates downforce that does not depend on speed, so the car is devastating through slow corners where a conventional wing does little. There is a real catch for anyone tempted. This is a track-only machine, not a road car, which keeps the buyer pool to collectors and committed track-day drivers rather than commuters.
Across the film, Harris drives the prototype at several circuits and rides shotgun with McMurtry's own drivers. He describes steering that goes heavy at maximum downforce, a seating position where your feet sit higher than your hips, and a noise from the straight-cut gears and spinning fans that he compares to a jet. According to the video, power and downforce can be dialed up or down through numbered settings, and Harris notes the car stays genuinely enjoyable even at half power, which he found unusual for something this fast. Managing director Thomas Yates tells him the production car has been almost completely redesigned, with the team reworking the large majority of parts to make it easier to own and run day to day. Yates frames the redesign as a clean-sheet effort built around reliability and comfort rather than a chase for more outright pace. Harris is also shown the company's first prototype, a tiny four-wheel-drive electric car, and an ambulance the team once converted into a downforce test rig.
Bottom line: The Spéirling is not built to win a spec-sheet argument, and it is not for most people. It is a track-only object that costs supercar money and asks a lot of your neck. But Harris, who drives fast cars for a living, plainly could not stop thinking about it, and that reaction is the entire pitch. If you have the budget and a circuit habit, nothing else delivers this specific experience. For everyone else, it is simply the most interesting thing happening at the lunatic end of the EV world right now, and worth watching even if you will never sit in one.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.