The madlads did it: world’s fastest EV drives upside-down & beat an F1 car, too

The McMurtry Speirling, a tiny 1,000hp electric racecar known for smashing records, has now broken two new records in the same day, smashing a 20-year record at Top Gear’s test track and becoming the first(*) car to drive upside down.

The McMurtry Speirling is an interesting concept. Rather than working like the vast majority of other cars do, which simply send power to the wheels to drive the car forward, the Speirling sends some of its power to giant fans that suck air out from under the car, creating a vacuum effect.

At first glance this seems like a strange idea – why would you want to devote effort to pushing your car down, rather than forward?

What this does is increase the car’s apparent weight without increasing its mass. This means that the tires push down to the ground, sticking better, and giving you more contact patch to turn, accelerate or brake the vehicle. But since the car’s actual mass hasn’t increased, it isn’t any harder to accelerate in any direction – so you can just go faster.

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Most cars approach this concept by adding wings and other aerodynamic elements to the car to increase “aerodynamic grip,” channeling air upwards as the car increases in speed.

Some cars approach this more aggressively than others – Formula One vehicles, for example, have obscenely large aerodynamic elements all around the vehicles, giving them incredible grip at high speed. Engineers have long bragged that F1 cars could drive upside down, at top speed, where they produce more than 1G worth of downforce… the only problem would be getting there, because they produce less downforce at lower speeds due to their use of traditional aerodynamic elements.

But these traditional aerodynamic features vary in their “aerodynamic efficiency,” because if you’re pushing air upwards, that means you’re applying force to something other than making the car go forward, which adds drag and slows you down (overall, you still go faster – but not as much faster as you could without drag).

There’s only so much aerodynamically efficient work you can do with traditional aerodynamic elements, generally via lowering ride heights and adding diffusers or other underbody elements that help to keep air moving smoothly under the vehicle, thus lowering air pressure and turbulence underneath.

So, the goal is to try to find as much downforce as you can in the most aerodynamically efficient way, and to have as much of that downforce working at lower speeds as you can. And there’s one idea that can do this, which has gotten a little bit of play in the past, and that the McMurtry Speirling uses to great effect today: a “fan car.”

The fan car concept has existed in motorsport since the 1970s, first appearing with the Chaparral 2J, a boxy monstrosity which competed in 1970 but was outlawed from competition due to its obscene aerodynamic advantages. Later, Brabham brought a fan car to F1 in 1978 and won its first race by a huge margin, but the concept was also immediately banned from competition there.

By sucking air out from under the vehicle, it creates a low-pressure area underneath the car, which is then pushed downwards by higher-pressure air from above. To make this effect work, the Speirling has incredibly low ride height and side skirts around the vehicle, letting little air in to spoil the vacuum pressure it’s creating underneath the car.

The net effect is that McMurtry says the Speirling can create 2,000kg of downforce on a 1,000kg car – adding double the car’s apparent weight without a change in mass. So not only can it stick to the ground better, it could even theoretically do it upside down ( or maybe not so theoretically – more on that in a minute).

Besides making a lot of noise (100dB) and spewing a lot of dust out the back and making an electric car look like it has an exhaust – what this does is it lets the Speirling completely annihilate every car ever on several tracks it has appeared on. See our previous reporting on how it smashed the record at Goodwood in 2022 (including a bonkers video of it looking like a slot car as it does so). It’s also capable of going 0-60 in 1.4 seconds, which is much quicker than what traction limits normal cars to.

McMurtry added another track to its list today, setting a 0:55.9 second lap around Top Gear’s test track, a repurposed airport runway which has been used by the show to compare the laptimes of many vehicles over the year. The previous 59-second record was owned by Renault’s F1 car from 2004, the only car to ever drive a sub-minute lap around the track, and the Speirling’s time is 13 seconds quicker than the fastest road-legal car to take the track, the Aston Martin Valkyrie.

This also beats the fastest electric car around the track, the Ford SuperVan, a heavily modified Ford eTransit which we’ve covered winning performances of before. The SuperVan did the track in 1:05.3, so the Speirling is almost a full ten seconds faster. (We’d love to see what Top Gear could do with a Lotus Evija, though)

But that’s not the only record the Speirling set today. For some reason, the company decided to announce two records on the same day, with the latter being one that makes the dream of “a car that can drive upside down” a reality for the first time ever.

There’s a bit of an asterisk on that, because a similar stunt has been done before when Hot Wheels created a real-life loop-de-loop and two rally drivers drove their cars around it, thus driving upside down for a moment. But those cars didn’t actually sustain upside-down driving for any period of time, merely used momentum to get there (not to say it isn’t an awesome stunt).

The Speirling, instead, managed to rotate upside down and stay there for a full ten seconds, during which it accelerated and then stopped, showing that control of the vehicle is possible even while upside down. In contrast, the rally cars in the Hot Wheels stunt would have had zero control over the vehicle at the zenith of the loop since there are no upward forces acting on the car at that moment.

The stunt is unfortunately less impressive than we’d like to see – imagine how cool it would be to see the car driving at high speed while upside down – but given it was a world-first attempt, that building an actual upside down road and a method to get the car onto it would be quite difficult and expensive, and that there’s an actual driver inside whose safety needs to be taken into account, we understand the need for caution here.

Nevertheless, it’s bonkers to see a car, that thing that you see every day planted firmly onto the ground where it belongs, doing exactly 180º opposite of what it’s always been doing every other time you’ve seen it.

So now, that old idea about whether a high-downforce car can drive upside down is no longer theory, it’s reality. It may not have gone far or fast, but it did go, completely under its own power, completely upside down.

McMurtry says that it would like to go further from here – the company called this a “proof of concept” and “perhaps just the beginning of what’s possible.” “With a longer inverted track or a suitable tunnel, we may be able to drive even further,” said co-founder Thomas Yates today.

So… stay tuned for more?

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Watch the world’s quickest electric car drive upside-down in a world first

Watch the world’s quickest EV beat an F1 car and then drive upside-down