McMurtry Spéirling: The Fastest-Ever Top Gear Lap? | Stig Laps

Welcome to the Top Gear test track. This is Stig Laps. And that's the McMurtry Spearling. In this series, we're running the latest and greatest performance cars and placing them on the all-time leaderboard. But the challenge remains the same. Give Stig the keys to your car if you think you're faster. And this is Stig's toy for today. It's called the McMurtry Spearling, and it is a shoe-sized, 1,000 horsepower, 1,000 kilogram electric car with a unique superpower. Whereas most supercars and track cars produce their downforce from air rushing over the rear wing or underneath the diffuser, this thing has two fans underneath that spin up to 23,000 RPM and produce 2,000 kilograms of downforce at a standstill. As a result, the grip that this produces, the speed that it can carry through corners, is frankly unreal. And the way that it scoots off the line, 0-60 in a casual 1.5 seconds, has to be seen to be believed. If you're unaware of what it's capable of, please head to YouTube and watch the full video of it smashing the Goodwood hill climb record in 39 seconds at the Festival of Speed in 2022. Incredibly, the car we have here should be even faster. It's called the Pure and the prototype are the one that customers can buy for £1 million. It has wider slick tyres and wider bodywork. Top speed is up from 150 to 190 miles an hour, and there's an upgraded 60-kilowatt-hour battery, so you can theoretically do 10 laps of Silverstone at record pace before needing to charge it back up. That's if your neck muscles can handle it. So here's a potential issue that could be unique to the Spearling. With all that suction going on underneath, surely it's just going to hoover up all these drain covers. Well, no, because we thought that and welded them shut. You may have noticed this isn't exactly an F1-grade track. There are bumps out there, especially on the exit of Hammerhead, and fairly extreme surface changes like this one at second to last. And how is the skirting under the car going to cope? Is it going to lose suction and throw Stig into the next county, or is it going to cling on like a limpid? There's only one way to find out. Right, given that this isn't your run-of-the-mill supercar and one with some quite unique handling traits, we decided that even the Stig needed a warm-up lap. Think of it as a chance for all of us to get our eyes and brains up to Spearling speeds. Three, two, one, go. 23,000 rpm and off he goes. It's like a jet fighter taking off and the rooster tail of dust. I wasn't expecting that. I didn't see any dust on the track, but it's finding some and kicking it up. It's probably the loudest electric car on the planet, I think. 100 decibels at the fan exits, apparently, but the sound doesn't travel in the same way. So now it's on the opposite side of the track. I can hear a bit of whooshing, but I don't think we're going to be breaching any noise limits today. I'm still getting over the way of that big accelerator. That was astonishing. I've just seen it go through Hammerhead. And that's the quickest I've ever seen a car change direction. Coming up to follow through now. Can this really beat 59 seconds set by an F1 car? A 600-kilogramme F1 car, and this is 1,000 kilograms. Here it comes, second to last. It's stuck. Whoa! And across the line. Whoever said electric cars are boring, you need to think again. Stig sufficiently warmed through, it was the moment we'd all been waiting for. Can the McMurtry dethrone the Renault R24 F1 car as the fastest thing to ever go around the Top Gear track? The time to beat? 59 seconds, set 21 years ago. Deep breath, let's join the Stig in the cockpit and run the clock. Three, two, one, go. Yeah, told you it wasn't exactly a smooth surface. Nice catch from Stig, though. The good thing about the McMurtry, though, is you still have 2,000 kilograms of downforce sticking you to the track, even if you do spin. Right, should we try that again? Three, two, one, go. Can it beat the F1 car? It's absolutely battered it, over three seconds faster. And at the serious end of the leaderboard, that's a lifetime. The way that thing clung on through Chicago and Hammerhead in particular is unlike anything we've ever seen. It apexed follow-through at 135 miles an hour. This isn't just raising the bar, it's a quantum leap in performance. 13.7 seconds quicker than the Aston Martin Valkyrie, the fastest road-legal car we've ever lapped, and almost 20 seconds quicker than the new GT3 RS. Some will call its trick aero doping, but unless anyone fancies building something that uses the same fan-assisted downforce tech, that's a number that will sit atop the board for a long, long time. Or perhaps Renault, now Alpine of course, fancies taking back its crown with some more modern F1 machinery. Either way, the gauntlet has officially been thrown down. Right, let's watch that again from as many different angles as possible. So that's it then for this batch of Stig laps, but we'll be back soon with more. Not entirely sure how we're going to top the McMurtry's heroics, but hey, we'll try. Let us know in the comments below what you'd most like to see Stig tearing up the Top Gear test track.