Is Gordon Murray F1’s greatest innovator? | Frankel’s Insight

I’m told it was Albert Einstein who said ‘The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple’ and though he wasn’t, he could so easily have been talking about Murray. How else do you explain a car like the McLaren F1, which seats three, has space for their luggage yet was still smaller, lighter and incomparably more powerful and faster than any remotely similar two seat car of the era?

Of course when Murray came to design the F1 he came with two distinct advantages over the competition, and that’s before you include his extraordinary brain. First, there was nothing for him to unlearn. As his first road car he approached it unhindered by all the processes, habits and traditions that usually limit the horizons of car designers. Second, he came straight from racing at the very highest level, where nothing is off the agenda, where every component has to justify its existence and where there was a creative environment for free thinking that allowed him to approach the challenge with a perspective denied to everyone else.

His innovations in Formula 1 are legendary and these are some of my favourites.

The first for which he became famous was the rising rate suspension on the BT44 - only his second F1 design - which had titanium springs and remote, pull rod activated suspension. Today such a design is pretty much mandatory in any purpose-built racing car, but half a century ago it was a revolution. For Brabham it meant going from a couple of third place finishes in the 1973 season with the previous BT42, to three outright wins in 1974.

Of course the car for which he is most famous is the BT46B ‘fan car’. What is perhaps less well known is that Murray only designed it thanks to an inherent limitation in the car’s design over which he had no influence, namely its Alfa Romeo engine.

The problem was that 1978 was the year that Lotus really got ground effect aerodynamics to work properly, using venturi to accelerate the exit of air from under the car, making a low-pressure zone that not only created vast downforce, but did so for no additional drag penalty, which then as now is the Holy Grail in motor racing. But with the wide, low flat-12 engine in the Brabham - Ferrari faced the same problem with its 312T3 - there was simply no space for venturi.

Murray’s first idea to reduce the performance shortfall was to design the BT46 without conventional radiators, with panels built into the bodywork creating what would become known as ‘surface cooling’. The reduction in drag was enormous, but there was just not enough surface area to get the system to work, so the car had to be redesigned using conventional front-mounted radiators, bringing the whole project pretty much back to square one. Another, no less radical idea, was needed.

So, Murray used skirts to seal the car to the ground and the fan to suck the air out from underneath, getting around the rules that banned moveable aerodynamic devices by showing that its ‘primary’ purpose was cooling. It entered one race - the Swedish Grand Prix - and was so fast its drivers had to qualify on full tanks so as not to reveal its true speed, whereafter Niki Lauda romped away to an unchallenged victory. Brabham boss Bernie Ecclestone then withdrew it before it could be banned which, Murray once told me was just as well as, ‘the one I had on the drawing board would have pulled the driver’s head off…’

Actually the Gordon Murray F1 car I like most was neither the BT49 nor the BT52 that took Nelson Piquet to World Championships in 1981 and 1983, but Murray’s last Brabham, the BT55 of 1986, despite the fact it was a complete failure. It’s since become known as the ‘low-line’ Brabham and I’d rank it as one of the prettiest F1 cars of its or any other era.

As the name suggests the idea was to build a car as low to the ground as possible, not primarily to lower the centre of gravity but more to provide unimpeded airflow to the rear wing. So Murray reclined the driver to a 30-degree angle and got BMW to redesign its 1.5-litre straight-four engine so that it would lie almost on its side.

And the shame is that it has gone down in history as a failed concept when, in fact, there was little wrong with the idea; it was the execution - specifically issues relating to installation of the slanted engine with its attached gearbox that never allowed it to realise its full potential. Riccardo Patrese was the only person to race it for a full season (Derek Warwick replacing Elio de Angelis after the latter’s tragic fatal accident in testing) and his results speak for themselves: he contested 15 rounds, retiring in no fewer than 10, eight of which through mechanical failure.

Murray never did get to perfect the design, leaving as he did for McLaren at the end of 1987. But it has been noted before that the MP4/4 of 1988 bore a remarkable resemblance to the BT55 and Murray himself has said it was an evolution of that original thinking, but rather better executed. You can say that again: in a 16-race season it won no fewer than 15 times, making it statistically the most successful F1 car until Red Bull spoiled the party by winning 22 out of 23 in 2023.