Gordon Murray
In DECEMBER 1969 A 23-YEAR-OLD SOUTH African engineer came to England to look for a job, boarding a coach to Norfolk in the hope of work with Lotus. They were laying people off however and now he was living in a bedsit with no money. So he went to the Brabham factory where Ron Tauranac thought he’d come for an interview for a vacancy in the drawing office and gave him the job. After 16 years at Brabham, winning two World Championships, he moved to McLaren where his cars won a further three titles with Prost and Senna.
By 1991 Murray was ready for a new challenge, having brought refuelling, air jacks, revolutionary suspension and aerodynamics, and new materials to the sport before leaving the pitlane to design the McLaren F1 road car. Keen to satisfy his hunger for ever more innovative and disruptive engineering Professor Gordon Murray CBE (for services to motoring) established his own company in 2007 and revealed the T.50, his 50th car, in 2019. Today Planet Murray has its headquarters at Shalford, Surrey and a new manufacturing campus at nearby Dunsfold Park – from where he looks back on his extraordinary career.
Motor Sport: As a teenager in Durban you had designed, built and raced your own car, the T.1, so why did you pack your bags and come to England in the depths of winter?
GM: “Music and motor racing, the loves of my life, that’s what brought me here in a freezing cold winter, ice on the pavements, and I hadn’t brought a proper coat. In the late 1960s there was so much great music and of course it was the place to be for racing. I was first and foremost an engine designer but what I really wanted to be was a racing driver. I’d won some races in South Africa, been national Champion in a car I designed and built, but my height and weight were against me and I never had enough money. So I’d written to Colin Chapman and got an appointment to see Brian Luff at Lotus before I arrived in England.
“I couldn’t believe it, Formula 1, and I was 23 years old”
“I went to Norfolk by coach because at home
