How Max Chilton and the McMurtry Speirling conquered Goodwood

Did you have to learn how to drive the Spéirling, specifically?

“A racing driver always has an ability to push a car straight away, but they are not always going to be exactly 100%. This car was a little bit different, and it took me a while to get used to it. It handles very differently if the fans are on or off. If you’ve got no fan system on, the car weighs nearly a tonne and has very little mechanical grip and very little drag - virtually none. They’ve tried to make a very drag-resistant car, because they want it to be efficient. The suck-down is drag-free but bodywork downforce is very draggy. 

“When you turn the fan system off, it’s quite a challenge to drive, but once you turn the fan on, it is unbelievable. It’s so backwards, because normally when a car goes quicker, there’s more airflow and more downforce, but with this car it doesn’t matter: 1mph to 200mph, the car’s got the same downforce. 

“In a normal racing car, you brake as hard as you physically can on the first application, and then you feed off the brake pedal as the downforce reduces, otherwise you’ll lock up a wheel. With this car, the downforce doesn’t change when you slow down. Instead of hitting the brake pedal and feeding off, you just hit the brake pedal and keep that pressure as hard as you can – until you don’t want to brake any more – and then come straight off it and get back on the power.”

Did you look to any other drivers for advice on the hill?

“I did watch some of their videos and thought: ‘Jeez, I don’t see how we’ll go that quick.’ When you watch the ID R record, you think he was absolutely on it and there’s nothing left, but once I got in the zone and learned how much downforce our car creates, it just came to us. My first run of the week was a 49.0sec, the next was a 45.0sec and on the Friday afternoon I did a 41.0sec, so I thought: ‘We’re not a million miles off now.’

“That’s not even the ultimate. I had a big lift on the last corner in my Sunday afternoon shootout because I turned in a bit early and clipped the hay bale so had to back out. It probably would have been a 38.something… And with the way the times came down over the four days, if we’d been there another day, we would probably have taken another second off it. Plus, we’ve got updates, which could make it a couple of seconds quicker, so the potential is just huge.”

The hillclimb is so narrow and tight. Can you just go full throttle all the way up?

“You can go full throttle because it’s basically got a Range Rover Evoque sat on its roof. The wheels will find it virtually impossible to slip because of the load going through them. And it’s got a very clever traction control system - so between the two, it’s virtually 100% torque and it gives it to you in one big hit. On Silverstone, where I’ve got a bit more room to play, I can get it to slightly move, but it’s pretty well planted.”

Is the Spéirling a big step forward compared with a Formula 1 car?

“It’s so different. The acceleration from 0-60mph is nearly twice as quick as what I did in my fastest launch in an F1 car. That’s how rapid it is. Plus, it’s 100% torque and there are no gearchanges, so it’s completely linear acceleration to wherever we gear it. At Goodwood, we gear it to 150mph – where I was for four seconds – so we could have gone a lot quicker but we didn’t think we needed it.

“Because we designed it to be a race car, we didn’t have any rules. We could just come up with the most crazy thing. And why it’s gone so mad in the car world is because there will be race engineers and car designers all over the world thinking: ‘Why haven’t we been doing that?’ There’s these companies charging £3-4 million for a hypercar, and we’re going to be 10-15sec quicker than them around a race track like Silverstone.”

What has been your contribution to the development programme?

“The rear wing wouldn’t have been there without me. When we first started testing without the fan system, it was quite tail-happy, because it’s quite a heavy car and it didn’t have any downforce. The biggest area I struggled in was changing direction: the rear wanted to give way. So we put a rear wing on it which gives about 250kg of downforce, which massively helps the balance of the car. When the fan system’s off, it’s a lot more stable.

“Then various updates, interior preferences, just little bits along the way like the mirrors. They originally had cameras, but racing around Silverstone with people on track days, I had moments where the rear-view camera didn’t give me enough visibility and I nearly got hit a couple of times. So we put wing mirrors on and I think it actually makes it look even more like a normal car.”