Inside The Company Building Absurdly Quick Fan-Powered Cars

• The YouTube show Everything Electric visited the headquarters of McMurtry Automotive to learn about the origins of the Speirling fan car.
• The company had to invent several technical solutions to make the Speirling possible, and a lot of work was done in-house.
• McMurtry is now taking orders for this single-seater track toy, and the first deliveries are expected to kick off in 2026.

McMurtry is on a mission to create small, lightweight electric vehicles that are insanely quick. And it’s been doing a pretty bang-up job, to put it mildly. Its first product, a track-only single-seater called the Speirling, can hit 60 mph in just 1.4 seconds and scorch the quarter-mile in eight. 

Much of the technology that made all of this possible was developed mostly in-house by McMurtry, as Everything Electric Cars (formerly The Fully Charged Show) discovered when it visited the company’s headquarters. The video has the best explanation available regarding how and why McMurtry went to the trouble of developing its fan downforce system, the key to its on-track performance.

Basically, you get more downforce this way than with conventional wings and spoilers and much less of the drag, which is important in an electric vehicle that also needs to use the electricity in its battery as efficiently as possible.

The video is a fascinating look behind the scenes at one of the most innovative car companies out there, and the innovations that went into creating such a bonkers vehicle.

The battery pack, for instance, forms a tub around the driver, which helps with weight management and keeps as much mass as possible in the center of the vehicle. McMurtry is definitely a serious engineering company, and you can tell by the quality and complexity of its product, which will spawn a slightly less extreme road-legal version later on.

There was some skepticism around the Speirling when it first surfaced. It seemed unlikely a few years ago that you could buy a car that looked and drove like it claimed to, since there was nothing else quite like it. Several prototype iterations later, and we have the finished thing, ready to be yours for $1.3 million.

That’s a lot for a track toy that’s not road legal, but it’s really special. This tiny single-seater keeps the weight down thanks to a bespoke carbon monocoque, despite having a fairly large 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack. Its power output of 1,000 horsepower is impressive, although it’s not among the most powerful EVs you can buy today—there are cars available now with 3,000 horsepower.

However, it weighs just over 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg), helping it become one of the fastest-accelerating cars available anywhere. (It’s even comparable to the even more powerful and expensive Rimac Nevera.) It will also reach a top speed of 190 mph (305 km/h), and get there quickly.

But while it’s absurdly quick in a straight line, it’s when you take a corner that the real magic reveals itself. The Speirling can generate more than 2,000 kg of downforce on demand thanks to a powerful fan that essentially sticks it to the tarmac. Unlike in a traditional car, which builds downforce as its speed increases, the Speirling can achieve full downforce from a standstill.

Its downforce-generating fans are the reason why a prototype Speirling smashed the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb record by almost three seconds, beating an actual Formula 1 car driven by an F1 driver. They are what make the Speirling so quick around the corners, and they also help in other ways. If the driver loses control, there’s still downforce pushing the car into the road, so the spin quickly stops and the driver can start driving in the right direction again.

For a deeper dive into what makes the Speirling special, check out the video linked above. 

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