Gordon Murray letter in Evo to Koenigsegg?

[Gustav]

Anyone read it and see the reply? I havent. It is issue 53.

[tvrfreak]

Yes, Mr. Murray was quite arrogant, if not rude. Christian Koenigsegg wrote back a very nice and polite reply that gently chided him and pointed out a few of his misconceptions. A very classy response.

[MalkaJB]

Would there be any way for you to post it on the forum?

[tvrfreak]

I am not into collecting stuff, generally...I did not keep the magazines.

[Gustav]

Im sure Koenigsegg have it saved. Worst case Ill ask them.

Here is what he wrote regarding the fact that the Dauer 962 is faster:

"Firstly, our records are only valid for a true production car which has passed full EEC type approval and emmisions testing. There have been several other low volume specials (such as the Porsche 962) that have acheived a higher top speed)."

Gordon Murray, technical director McLaren Cars Ltd


Here is a streetregistred Dauer in Sweden:

http://www.m5board.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41342

Factory visit:

http://www.bmwm5.com/articles/german...trip2001-3.htm

[Thorst13]

Does anyone have a scan of this letter!?


Please post it as I would love to see this letter!

[Gustav]

Anyone?

[Peloton25]

Well I almost had a copy of the issue that sparked the comments:



http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...e=STRK:MEDW:IT

...but someone outbid me in the end.

Apparently this particular issue includes: "Interview - Gordon Murray"

There are a couple of copies of #53 up on Ebay right now. I shall try my best to pick one up.

>8^)
ER

[Gustav]

[Kirium]

Originally Posted by Peloton25

Well I almost had a copy of the issue that sparked the comments:



http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...e=STRK:MEDW:IT

...but someone outbid me in the end.

Apparently this particular issue includes: "Interview - Gordon Murray"

There are a couple of copies of #53 up on Ebay right now. I shall try my best to pick one up.

>8^)
ER

I've got that issue....

I can retype the interview if anyone wants to read it... (I don't have a scanner, but I can type quickly. Just give me 24 hours. it's a 3 page interview)

[Cockrocket]

i must have missed something. Why did Gordon Murray write a letter to koenigsegg?..what does it say etc?...im curiouse!

[Kirium]

Gordon Murray, designer of the world's fastest production car, the McLaren F1, is not happy. He's passionate, he's a purist, and he's a bit narked. Not because the Bugatti might finally overtake the F1's top speed, but because, if it does, the general perception will be that the F1 has finally been bettered. Here he talks to John Barker.


JB: The F1’s long reign as the world’s fastest car is under threat from a couple of supercars, but chiefly, the Bugatti Veyron, which it’s claimed will get to 252mph

GM: The most pointless exercise on the planet has got to be this four-wheel-drive 1000 horsepower Bugatti. I think it’s incredibly childish this thing people have about just one element – top speed or standing kilometre or 0-60. It’s about as narrow minded as you can get as a car designer to pick on one element. It’s like saying we’re going to beat the original Mini because we’re going to make a car 10mph faster on its top speed – but its two foot longer and 200 kilos heavier. That’s not car designing – that just reeks of a company who are paranoid. It’s time we stopped saying ‘let’s try and beat this or that’. It just happens to be the McLaren in a lot of cases because it’s still considered to be the quickest, the best, the lightest, the stiffest, the whatever. If somebody came along, including Ferrari, but particularly, Bugatti, and said, ‘We’ve driven the McLaren, we’ve seen what makes a good car and we’re going to take all those elements and move it on a step – the technology, the weight, the safety, the size, that packaging, the luggage space, the torque, the way it delivers power,’ I would be going, ‘good for you. We’ve had our 10 year reign, take the crown.’ I know it’s going to cost millions to develop the Veyron, a monster thing that you can never see out of, can’t park anywhere, four-week drive, four turbos, 1000 horsepower. It may go faster but it won’t touch the F1 in any of the other important areas/ that’s what’s pathetic about it. I think it’s about time companies stopped doing that. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t belittle myself to do that.

JB: what if they’d gone after all those other criteria and given it 1000 horsepower and 4wd?

GM: Four-wheel drive will never give you the experience that the McLaren gives you. It’s probably much safer when it’s wet and slippery, and more people could drive the car near its limits, but that wasn’t the aim with the F1. It’s absolutely true that 90 percent of the people, 90 percent of the time won’t drive the car at 90 percent of it’s capability. So why start with 4wd and carry all that weight and inefficiency? Ultimately for making the car easier to drive and getting a bit more grip, you’re losing out on the ultimate driving experience. Just 4wd is enough to say they’re never going to get an F1/ If you’re trying to build a car that more people can drive, more people can handle the power, 4wd is probably one of the easiest ways, but with the F1 we didn’t set out saying ‘we’re going to make the quickest car and we’re going to make it really easy to drive, so that 90 percent of the population can drive it’. No way. It was almost the opposite, it was, like this is probably going to be the last real car, without ABS, power steering or power brakes, and you’re going to have to push a bit harder on the brakes and to park it’s not going to be that easy but it’s not going to have anything getting in the way of the driving. It will probably be the last one like it. It’s a shame. I’d so much rather see that money and effort – sorry no, not the money, they can probably afford it – all those engineers and all that effort go into some new direction of sports car, maybe ultra lightweight or ultra nimble or ultra safe or something else rather than just trying to build the fastest car in the world.

JB: If you were making the F1 today, what power output do you think it could make?

GM: The same, because I still think – and the experts seem to agree – that the F1’s V12 is still the best road going, production, lasts-for-100,000-miles-type of engine ever made.

JB: Would you give the F1 any more power if you could?

GM: No. To put that into perspective, we did all the sums and my target was 450lb ft of torque with 550bhp, which we thought was about enough for 200mph – enough for a road car. But what we wanted was 1000 kilos, 450lb ft and a really square torque band, not a peaky engine and that what Paul Rosche (BMW Motorsport engine designer) delivered – with 627bhp for free – and although we missed the weight target by about 100 kilos, that the combination that gives you the instant buzz when you bang the throttle open. All horsepower gives you is top speed. Horsepower on its own is absolutely nothing.

JB: Presumably working on the SLR you’ve come to embrace the supercharger as a different way of gaining performance?

GM: No. Given a totally open choice I’d always go for normal aspiration, for everything: weight, complexity, efficiency, drivability. Supercharging is much better than turbocharging for all the obvious reasons but also has its drawbacks. If you want 500 horsepower, net, you’ve got to make 700 because 200 goes to driving the supercharger, and then you’ve got to cool that power. The small throttle response problem you can get over with bypass valves and things. It’ll never be normally aspirated, but it’s certainly a hell of a lot better than turbocharging.

JB: Do you think the Enzo moves things on?

GM: I think the brakes, probably, although I do hear that those aren’t working yet. Carbon brakes were something I desperately wanted on the F1, but we just couldn’t make them work. We’ve got them on the SLR

JB: What’s the problem?

GM: Temperature. In the early days with carbon/carbon, the problems were trying to get them to work when they were wet and cold. They were great when you got them warm. What we’ve managed to do is take the Mercedes-Benz carbon/ceramic programme, combined with electronic hydraulic braking, brake by wire and then the problem just becomes high temperature, because all carbon has exactly the same problem. Keep them cool enough and they’ll last the life of the car, but when you get over the oxidation temperature they disappear incredibly quickly. We used carbon brakes in F1 six or seven years before anyone else and for a long time had the piss taken out of us when they caught fire, but then when we got them to work we had a long period before anyone caught up. It was amazing when we were doing the tests – you could brake and brake and brake, then you’d get over I think it was 850 degC and they’d disappear in two laps, and the same is true now, to a lesser extent.

JB: How do you stop the user from overhearing them, what sort of constraints can you put on them?

GM: None. You just develop the car so that under any circumstance you can not generate that temperature, and that’s been the hard work and that’s what Porsche and Ferrari, I don’t think, can have done yet.

JB: The SLR must be quite a different project for you, being the first car you’ve done that isn’t mid-engined or mid-seated.

GM: It’s certainly mid-engined, very mid-engined, much more so that the Ferrari 575 or Aston Martin Vanquish. In a funny way it’s a bigger challenge than the F1 because the F1 wasn’t aimed at a market. I’m not saying it was easy but it was easier because when you’re aiming for a market you’ve got definitive things to aim for, and in our case it’s the 575 Maranello. Ferrari takes more than two-thirds of that world market and in that price sector, it’s a pretty good motorcar. We’ve driven it a lot, along with the Vanquish. It’s a nice challenge, a better challenge in a way to actually aim for something. To bring it right back to the Bugatti story, what we’re doing is we’re taking, with the Mercedes marketing requirements, a much more overall, rounded look at everything – quality, weight, safety, stiffness, luggage capacity, air-conditioning performance. We really did try to aim much higher in all areas. I have to say, I’ve driven the car a few times now and… well, the proof will be in the pudding, we’ll see what people will thing, but I think we’ve moved the game forward for front-engined supercars. We are aiming to build something that is world-beating, not just in performance but in all the other areas, and with a Mercedes-Benz star on it a lot of them are prerequisites – quality, serviceability, all that stuff.

JB: with around 550bhp and rear drive, traction and stability control are surely must-haves. Has it been interesting?

GM: It’s been interesting from a vehicle dynamics point of view to see how unobtrusive we can make it. The car has to be a Mercedes-Benz; above all it has to be able to be driven by anyone who is going to buy a Mercedes-Benz, so it’s got to have that stuff, but we’ve worked really hard with Mercedes-Benz people to make it as unobtrusive as possible so that it doesn’t wreck the car.

JB: Since the F1, have there been any supercars that have impressed or interested you?

GM: The only one in recent years which has tried to stick to the F1 formula is the Zonda. That’s come close. I saw that bloke [Horacio Pagani] when he first showed it. He saw me going by, dragged me onto the stand and said ‘I was really inspired by the F1. Look – it hasn’t got power this, it hasn’t got electronic that, it’s got a carbon central bit’. He was so enthusiastic and I thought at the time ‘God, I hope he makes it, because he deserves to’. Styling’s very subjective. I probably wouldn’t have styled it like that, but in recent years it’s the only supercar that is closest to what I would call the pure formula, without having aids and 4wd and therefore getting too heavy with all that stuff on. OK, it’s not superlight, but it’s pretty light. And it’s normally aspirated. As soon as you say 4wd or turbocharging you’re not even on the starting blocks. The old supercars, the EB110 and the Jag 220, on the track, when you can keep the turbos flying, you think ‘ah, it’s OK’, but on the road it’s a disaster. The Bugatti, if you were in a queue of four cars and waiting for the gap, you had to leave it in first gear at 6000 revs, in case you wanted to pass, which is crazy.

JB: What about the Edonis and Koenigsegg?

GM: You almost can’t count cars like the Edonis and Koenigsegg. With the Zonda you have to take the car seriously – the quality’s not bad, he’s selling the cars, people are driving them and using them and liking them. When there are 50 Edonises driving around and people are saying ‘This is good’, I’ll consider it a proper motorcar.

JB: The Koenigsegg is aiming for 250mph, too.

GM: People never learn lesson one, which is ‘don’t shout your mouth off before you’ve built the car’. Before the 1989 world crash there was an article in Road & Track, ’24 supercars you can buy’ and I think the only ones that actually arrived were us, the Jag and the Bugatti – three out of 24. With the Koenigsegg they’re talking about a horsepower figure and top speed for which you need a Cd of about 0.17 or something. It doesn’t add up. You shouldn’t do that. We didn’t say anything about our motorcar – nobody knew it was going to be middle seat until the launch – we just shut up and built it and then let people drive it.

[Kirium]

Originally Posted by Cockrocket

i must have missed something. Why did Gordon Murray write a letter to koenigsegg?..what does it say etc?...im curiouse!

He didn't write a letter to Koenigsegg. He gave an interview to EVO (look up there ^^^^ ) which was pretty scathing of a few companies (and quite arrogant) and Christian Keonigsegg wrote a reply letter to EVO rebutting some of the points Gordon made...

....As is my understanding...

Incidentaly, the EVO Power issue is #052

[theflinger]

I very much appreciate your typing that out, Kirium. Thanks from everybody.

I am still waiting for the F2, Mr. Murray....show us how it's done. $2,000,000, whatever it takes. Shut the other companies up.

[Stratoraptor]

Thanks, Kirium. I think I've learned a couple things after reading that of which I can't remember right now.