McMurtry’s 1,000-hp fan car hits 60 mph in 1.55 seconds, and only 100 will be built

McMurtry Automotive says its production Spéirling PURE makes about 1,000 hp, reaches 60 mph in 1.55 seconds and generates up to 4,400 pounds of downforce while standing still. No more than 100 will be built. The single-seat electric track car starts at roughly $1.3 million before options.

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The figures arrive as the Gloucestershire company marks its tenth year. McMurtry began in 2016 with a small team of engineers in rural England, and it now employs close to 100 people and runs a production facility in the Cotswolds, where assembly of the PURE is underway ahead of customer deliveries later in 2026. Autoblog’s anniversary story, published November 1, is the basis for the company history, while the specification numbers come from McMurtry’s own pages.

The twin-fan downforce system

The car’s defining feature is what McMurtry calls Downforce on Demand, a pair of electric fans that draw air from beneath the carbon fiber chassis and press the car onto the road. Autoblog’s anniversary report traces the idea to 1970s racing designs that were later banned, and says the late co-founder Sir David McMurtry pushed the team to solve its grip problem by sucking the car to the ground. An early concept pitched as a superbike on four wheels did not find a commercial footing before the fan approach took over.

The company’s own specification sheet gives downforce of up to 2,000 kg, or 4,400 lb, from a standstill, and a 0 to 60 mph time of 1.55 seconds measured with a one-foot rollout. The same page lists 1,000 bhp, the British measure of brake horsepower that matches the 1,000 hp in American coverage, and states the production cap and the starting price.

Standing downforce changes what the acceleration figure means. Conventional wings and underbody shaping need speed before they press a car down, so a launch is limited by tire grip at low speed. Fans that pull air from beneath the chassis work from zero mph, which lets the car put 1,000 hp to the road with far less wheelspin than its weight alone would allow. McMurtry’s published downforce number is measured from a standstill for that reason, and it is the foundation of the 0 to 60 claim.

Records, a reported verdict from Travis Pastrana, and the hillclimb

The prototype set the outright hillclimb record at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2022 and later beat the long-standing Top Gear Test Track time. Autoblog reports that extreme sports driver Travis Pastrana called it the fastest car he has driven, in a separate piece on his reaction. Autoblog earlier described the powertrain as almost ready for production in an earlier report on the prototype.

The earlier records came from the development car. The 1.55 second figure now quoted belongs to the production specification, and it is timed with the one-foot rollout convention common in drag-style timing. McMurtry has not published an independent third-party timing of the production car, so the figure should be read as the company’s own specification until customers and outside testers begin driving delivered examples.

The production car made its global debut at Monterey Car Week, a program that included the 23rd edition of The Quail and the Monterey Motorsports Reunion at Laguna Seca. It was the first time the production-form PURE faced the public, after the prototype’s record runs in Britain, and it set the schedule for the first customer deliveries later in 2026.

Production run, price and who gets one

Buyers are paying for a single-seat track car with an electric drivetrain and an ultra-lightweight carbon fiber chassis, which Autoblog describes as Formula 1-level performance. It is not a road-going grand tourer, and the 100-car cap means each build slot is effectively an allocation rather than a retail purchase. Customers also receive a car developed over a decade by a company that began as a small engineering team, which gives the cap a different meaning from marketing scarcity: a business of nearly 100 employees can only build so many a year.

McMurtry’s own statement says no more than 100 examples will be built, with a starting price of 995,000 pounds, about $1.3 million or 1.15 million euros, before local taxes, shipping and options. Thomas Yates, co-founder and managing director, called the Monterey Car Week showing of the production-form PURE a wow of a debut and said the company could not have asked for a better reception. McMurtry plans to bring several customer cars to America in 2027.

The suction approach stands in contrast to a rival idea in recent coverage. Autoblog reported on October 25 that Tesla says its upcoming Roadster will use cold-gas thrusters, in a story on an engineer’s reality check of the Roadster stunts, while McMurtry took the opposite path with fans that generate grip from beneath the car.

Autoblog has covered the $1.3 million sticker and the production-ready PURE in earlier stories. The open question for the first owners is how the production cars perform once deliveries begin, since the published 1.55 seconds is a manufacturer figure rather than an independent test.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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