Gordon Murray has spent more than three decades trying to answer the same question: how do you make the perfect driver’s car? It started with the McLaren F1, a car that rewrote the supercar rulebook in the 1990s, evolved into the T.50, and now comes the GMA S1 — a 681 bhp, 12400 rpm V12 supercar that takes Murray’s original recipe and turns the dial up again. And if the S1 looks familiar, that’s because it is closely related to the outrageous track focussed S1 LM that we saw last year, but this time, all the madness from that car has been made more road-friendly.
The S1 comes from Gordon Murray Special Vehicles, GMA’s ultra-low-volume division responsible for creating bespoke cars for very wealthy customers. It shares its carbonfibre monocoque and Cosworth-developed V12 with the S1 LM, but almost everything else has been reworked. Where the LM is essentially a road-going race car, the S1 is intended to be something you can actually use on the road without feeling like you’re taking a Le Mans car shopping.
That starts with the bodywork. The enormous rear wing, aggressive front splitter and other visual fireworks of the S1 LM have been omitted, giving the S1 a cleaner and more elegant shape. It has sleeker and sharper headlights, and their design is inspired by an early wheel sketch Murray made for the original McLaren F1 back in 1992, giving the S1 a neat link to the car that started this whole story. In profile and at the rear this car very much resembles the F1, with similar visual cues that have been cleaned and modernised like the larger, round, LED tail lights.
Underneath that body sits the real star though. The S1 gets the same naturally aspirated 4.2-litre Cosworth V12 as the S1 LM, producing 681 bhp and revving all the way to 12400 rpm. Power goes to the rear wheels through a six-speed manual gearbox. Yum.
The engine has been retuned here. Rather than chasing the sharpest possible response at the top end, GMA has broadened the torque delivery to make it more usable on the road. The idea is to retain the incredible character of a high-revving naturally aspirated V12 without making the car exhausting to drive outside a racetrack.
The S1 sits 10 mm higher than the S1 LM and gets softer, more road-friendly settings. GMA has also added more sound insulation, and the windows actually roll down on this one. The cabin retains one of Murray’s most famous ideas: a central driving position. The driver sits in the middle, with two passenger seats positioned slightly behind on either side.
Only 64 examples will be built, and unsurprisingly, all of them have already been spoken for. That’s considerably more than the five S1 LMs GMA plans to make, but this is still an exceptionally rare machine. GMA hasn’t revealed the final price, although the S1 LM provides some idea of the sort of territory we’re talking about. One of the five S1 LMs sold at auction for $20.63 million, which is around Rs 180 crore before taxes. So expect the S1 to demand anywhere in the Rs 25 to 30 crore realm. Phew.
