When the McMurtry Spéirling smashed the Goodwood Hillclimb record in mid-2022, even die-hard lovers of internal combustion engines took notice. The video looked like it had been sped up, but it wasn’t. The Spéirling really can change direction like that without slowing down. Now this phenomenal race car is closing in on commercial availability, but it wouldn’t be ready for sale quite so soon without very clever battery testing technology from a company called About:Energy. I sat down with McMurtry and About:Energy to find out exactly how they brought such a fast car to market so quickly.
The McMurtry Spéirling smashed the Goodwood Hillclimb record in 2022.
McMurtry was the brainchild of Sir David McMurtry, who sadly passed away on 9th December this year. He worked on the engines for the supersonic Concorde airliner, and then helped found the hugely successful Renishaw Plc. In 2024, he had a net worth of £1.2 billion ($1.5 billion). But in 2016, he wanted to start a car company. So he enlisted Thomas Yates, who worked with the Mercedes Formula 1 team during the Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg years, and Kevin Ukoko-Rongione, who was a design engineer at Williams Advanced Engineering (now Elysia, and part of the Fortescue group).
McMurtry Spéirling Brings Accessible Excitement
“Our brief was to design the most exciting car that you can buy,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “When Tom and I developed Formula One cars, they were for professional racing drivers. You couldn’t sell a Formula One car to a track day enthusiast or a normal human being and expect them to be able to drive it. We tried to make that level of performance accessible in a car that’s easy to drive and maintain, without having a team of 14 people and years of driving experience.”
Aside from having the immediate torque of an electric drivetrain, the other element giving the Spéirling its unparalleled capabilities is its fan suction system. “The minute you turn the car on the fans give you 2000kg of downforce right there and then, so you don’t have to wait to build heat in your tires and your brakes,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “We also realized an electric powertrain really suits having a fan system and an easy-to-use track vehicle.”
McMurtry expects the Spéirling to break many more records when the production car arrives.
The Goodwood Hillclimb showed just how effective this system was. “The Spéirling that went up the hill at Goodwood and got the record was our proof of concept,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “We built it not fully knowing if it was going to help, but it surprised even us. It was just so controllable and easy to use having that 2000kg downforce and grip the whole way up the Hill. Having built a proof of concept, we realized we had something that we could develop as a customer vehicle. After the record, we started getting lots of calls from people asking when it would be available.”
McMurtry Spéirling Goes Commercial With PURE
This shifted McMurtry’s focus towards turning the Spéirling into the PURE, a series car claiming 0-60mph in 1.55 seconds, an eight-second quarter mile, 3G cornering and a top speed of 185mph, from its 1,000hp electric motors. McMurtry began working with its battery partner, Molicel, to deliver these capabilities. “Molicel was the best high-performance cell maker at the time,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “But to make full use of the cell’s performance we realized that we needed lots of equipment, and a team dedicated to cell testing. It’s quite a big investment, and that’s when we came across About:Energy. Molicel told us they had a new cell coming out, the P50 which is going to be a significant improvement on what we’ve been using.”
“The focus of About:Energy is around battery data and simulation,” says Kieran O’Regan, Co-Founder and COO of About:Energy. “Bringing new battery products to market is a very expensive process. Companies are trying to lean on new technologies and digitalization to speed that up. That’s where About:Energy comes in. You need lots of battery data. In our labs, we spend 6-12 weeks, sometimes even longer, testing each new battery, and integrate that data into a digital twin, which companies can use to design their products.”
About:Energy’s battery models help speed up the pack development process.
“The introduction to McMurtry came around 12 months ago,” continues O’Regan. “They’re switching from an older to a newer version of Molicel batteries to improve performance, with better power capability, better top speeds, better lifetime. But typically, that process can take two years.”
“About:Energy was able to characterize the cell and understand its behavior at various states of charge,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “They built us a good model. They’re also doing degradation testing, which will show us how this cell will behave over the years. We need to be able to tell customers how long they can use the car for on the track and how long it will take to recharge. This is helping us design the cooling and the battery management systems. We’re using the data from About:Energy to feed into the design. It’s early days. We haven’t finished doing the full long life degradation testing, but the cells should last ten years, looking at previous data for the Molicel P45.”
It’s very hard to estimate the usable life of a battery employed in an extreme application like racing, however. “When a cell manufacturer reports lifetime, it’s in a very lab-oriented testing regime where you’re just looking at constant current being applied to the cell and charge-discharge,” says O’Regan. “But no battery is used like that in the field, so what companies like McMurtry must do, as soon as they receive the cell, is test it to understand that lifetime and validate their warranty to their customers. It might take up to 18 months. We’re able to centralize that testing.”
McMurtry Spéirling: Building A Better Battery
“We want to make sure that we are competitive with Formula E,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “The next generation Formula E packs will be using the same cells that we’ll be using in our car. Our core objective is developing a great car for customers but having spent so much time and effort developing a great battery pack, we’re also looking to see if we can sell these batteries to other companies. This is why having the model from About:Energy is so critical and useful to us. Customers can tell us their duty cycle, their powertrain, and what they want to do with their car. We can then run that information through the About:Energy models and immediately say how the pack will behave.”
“The modules we produce for our battery packs use the Mobicel P50, which is expensive” says Ukoko-Rongione. “If a customer likes the module but wants a cheaper cell for a higher volume application, we can now ask About:Energy to test 10 different cells and we’ll get data back really quickly to find the right one for the cost targets and be able to tell the customer how that cell will perform using our technology.”
About:Energy tests new battery cells to produce digital twin profiles.
Right now, however, McMurtry’s focus is on delivering the Spéirling PURE commercially. While this was on show at the last Goodwood Festival of Speed, and was running up the Hillclimb, the timings were not recorded. “It wouldn’t be fair on other people if we keep timing ourselves,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “The next step for us is delivering cars to customers. About:Energy is looking at the degradation, understanding how the battery life is affected by running the battery to high temperatures for extended periods. We’re trying to understand customer scenarios, and what effect these have on the battery, such as running in very cold weather conditions. We have customers in Canada who might be running the car at 5C and customers in the Emirates who might be running the car in 45C. The battery has a ten-year lifespan, which would be about 10,000km of high-performance track use.”
McMurtry Spéirling Set To Arrive In 2025
The partnership with About:Energy has enabled McMurtry to target a 2025 timeframe for a production run of 100 units for the PURE. “We’re planning the very first customer deliveries around the end of next year,” says Ukoke-Rongione. “We’re expecting to start seeing cars breaking records all over the world! Our customers will be people who have been competing at a certain hill climb and want to win it and take the record. There are other people who just have their local track where they like to go and want to know what it’s like to feel 3G in corners.”
The car won’t be cheap – around £820,000 ($1 million) – but will deliver dominance customers are willing to pay for. “The customer is someone who wants a car where they can be confident that they can go to any track and be the quickest person there. It’s easy to drive, it’s incredibly fast, and it drives in a way that they would never have experienced before.”
The PURE is a different vehicle to the Spéirling that broke the Goodwood record, better suited to end users. “With the Goodwood Hillclimb record, everyone assumed we had a really lightweight pack,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “But in fact, we had the full 60kWh battery pack. We didn’t try and reduce the weight. In theory, you could have a lighter weight pack and go much quicker than we did. Our focus for the customer vehicle is to increase the battery capacity further. We’re offering them 100kWh instead of 60 with a very small weight penalty. That’s because the technology has improved a lot between the Molicel P50 and the P26 cells. We can get more energy without incurring much of a mass penalty.”
The McMurtry Spéirling PURE will be arriving with customers in late 2025.
The amount of time the car will last on track will depend on the setting the customer chooses. “If they want to drive at a similar pace to a GT3 car, they’ll get a 20-minute stint quite comfortably,” says Ukoko-Rongione. “If they want to go closer to Formula 1 pace then the limit is not really the capacity of the battery, the limit is that everything in the car starts to get a bit too hot. You’ll get a couple of laps. There is a lower setting for people to do longer racing as well. Formula E cars will do 40-minute sessions, but they’re not very quick. I’d rather do a 20-minute session, be incredibly fast and have a really engaging drive.”
“About:Energy has allowed us to speed up the development of our vehicle and make sure it gets to customers earlier than it would have otherwise been possible,” concludes Ukoko-Rongione. “We’ve reduced the design process time by 70%, going from six months to one for concept development. If we were on this journey without About:Energy, we’d be starting at cell level testing, spending months purely on the cell, trying to read and understand its capabilities, after which we’d start to integrate it into module. Then we’d do more module level and full pack testing. What About:Energy has done is taken all the cell testing off our hands and completed it much more quickly, so we could go straight into module and battery pack development, cutting out of that whole initial phase.” Thanks to this accelerated development cycle, we can expect the McMurtry Spéirling PURE to start smashing local track records from the end of 2025.
