Meet Gordon Murray's real '90s masterpiece
Ask most people to name Gordon Murray's ultra-rare, lightweight, high performance car from the early 1990s and you'll only get one answer.
However, there was another, and you could see it on the Cartier lawn at the Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard – appropriately enough parked alongside the McLaren F1.
It's called the Rocket, and it made its world debut at the 1993 Goodwood Festival of Speed, so it's one of the cars in the New When FOS Was New Too class.
Murray designed the exterior of the Rocket, but the engineering and construction of the car fell to former F1 and endurance racer Chris Craft. Craft, who finished third in the 1976 Le Mans 24 Hours with Alain de Cadenet, came up with the idea of the Rocket and set up the Light Car Company with Murray to build it.
The Rocket certainly is light. At just under 400kg, the Rocket is one of the lightest four-wheeled cars ever to hit the public roads. As a comparison, the Atom 4 – also at the Festival of Speed – weighs almost 50% more...
It employs a tube-frame chassis and rather simple bodywork, with '60s F1 car styling. There's no roof or doors and, aside from a small, wraparound wind deflector, no windows either. It does have pop-up headlights, but you have to manually pop them up or down.
Power comes from a mid-mounted, one-litre, Yahama motorbike engine. This lightweight unit produces around 142PS (140bhp) in standard form, giving the Rocket a power to weight ratio of 370bhp per ton. That's enough to propel the Rocket to 60mph in just over 3.5 seconds. Top speed, at the end of the 5-speed sequential gearbox, was around 143mph.
Despite the low weight, the Rocket was capable of carrying two occupants, with the passenger sitting behind the driver. Bear in mind though that an average human increases the car's weight by 20%, so giving someone a lift rather blunts the performance, especially with the bike engine's tiny 104Nm (77 lb ft).
Like Murray's magnum opus, the Rocket attracted famous owners. Jay Leno is a Rocket owner, as was the late George Harrison. The Beatle was, in fact, a co-founder of the company and head of the car's owners' club, the Rocketeers.
But there are few owners of the LCC Rocket at all. In total, the company produced just 46 cars, making it almost twice as rare as the McLaren F1.
Photography by Tom Shaxson.
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Gordon Murray
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