The first production-specification chassis for the McMurtry Spéirling Pure arrived at the company's new factory in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire last week. The building sits two miles from where McMurtry has operated for the past two decades, and it is considerably more suited to actually building cars. Nine dedicated build bays, three technicians per bay, sub-assembly rooms, an inspection suite, and a stores and parts traceability system. The team has been two years getting to this point. Co-founders Tom Yates and Kevin Gillmore walk through all of it in Part 1 of the factory tour series, with a candor about how different the new space is from everything that came before.
The Spéirling Pure is a fan-powered electric track car that generated global attention after breaking the Goodwood hill climb record in 2022. The production version carries 100 kWh of battery capacity split equally across both sides of the tub, 50 kWh per pod. For comparison, a Porsche Taycan Turbo GT carries 105 kWh and has a kerb weight of around 2,300 kg. The Spéirling is a fraction of that mass. The wheelbase on the production chassis has grown from 2.0 metres to 2.2 metres, which allowed the team to expand the cockpit significantly, improve sightlines, and make the door large enough that a customer with size 14 race boots can actually get dressed in the seat. Previous chassis required mechanics with unusually small hands to reach certain assembly points. That is no longer the case.
The inspection room is one of the more quietly significant parts of the tour. McMurtry uses a coordinate measuring machine fitted with a touch trigger probe, a technology invented by company founder Sir David McMurtry more than 60 years ago while he was working on the Olympus engine for Concorde. That same measurement principle, a ball on a stick in three-point contact acting as a precision sensing tripod, underpins the inspection of every bearing bore and upright tolerance going into customer cars today. The custom gearboxes shown in the factory are a further example of the kind of engineering density the company operates at: each unit is small enough to lift with one hand, yet designed to handle approximately 1,000 horsepower transmitted from the motors to the wheels. Durability and efficiency testing on both units has already been completed off-site.
Bottom line: This is a 20-year engineering project reaching the point where the factory actually exists, the chassis is on the floor, and the build bays have technicians in them. McMurtry is not a large company and the Spéirling Pure is not a high-volume car. But the infrastructure shown here reflects a seriousness of intent that a lot of better-funded EV startups have failed to demonstrate. Part 2 of the series covers the chassis build itself.