The Gordon Murray Automotive T50 hypercar is closer to production than ever before. However, before customer cars can be delivered safety concerns must be addressed and the way that gets done is wild. This T50 gets jumped, bumped, and broken in the process.
Dario Franchitti takes us through the testing that, in this case, is focused on calibrating the airbag systems in the car. Many will remember how sensitive some sports cars’ airbags have been in the past. One infamous video shows a Camaro’s side airbags deployed when the driver goes over a rumble strip, a common occurrence, on a racetrack.
That’s one reason that this sort of testing is so important and it demonstrates why so many of the tests shown in this video focus on impacts on the suspension and underbody of the car. The T50 jets over potholes, washboard roads, and more during the data gathering. There’s even one test where the supercar is driven into a hard metal plate and a broken tie rod is the result.
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Still, almost nothing in this video is as dramatic as the moment when the T50 XP1 development vehicle is driven directly into and up a tall gravel hill. This results in the test car sitting on top of the hill with its front wheels and tires floating in the air and its nose pointed at the sky.
The image shown on our lead photo shows the T50 flying off of an obstacle that Franchitti relates to the “wooden ramps for your BMX”. Thankfully, no major damage takes place at any point to the car and it has a glorious future ahead of it.
Once testing is complete, the XP1 vehicle used here will end up as a training tool for the service team and after that, it’ll end up in the Gordon Murray Automotive museum.
