Design Legends Murray and Goto Team Up With Exciting New Road Car Concept

F1 design legend Gordon Murray has teamed up with former Honda F1 engine guru Osamu Goto and Shell on a new super efficient city car.

The new ultra compact machine is described as a "ground-up rethink" of Murray's 2010 97 miles per gallon T25 concept city car, a machine intended to stimulate auto design into the future using an internal combustion engine.

Anticipating that by 2050 up to three quarters of the estimated 9 billion world population will be living in cities, Shell initiated the new 'Project M' putting Murray together with Goto to recreate a partnership that produced one of F1's iconic designs.

Murray last worked with Goto on the all conquering 1988 McLaren-Honda MP4-4 with which Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost won 15 of the year's 16 races.

The Shell concept is intended to be a simple, practical global city car; drawing together the most innovative aspects of light-weight engineering, streamlining, and driveline efficiency to function well  in cities where mass-motoring is a relatively new thing or already more than a century-old. Once built, the car will be tested on-the-road and is due to be formally presented to the public in November .

"I think it's time we had a step change," says Murray. "This programme's really exciting for both teams. I think the Shell car's really important because we can look into the future a bit and see where we should be going, not just in materials but in design philosophy and other technologies and take a holistic look at where the future car's going."

Former Brabham and McLaren multi-world championship winning designer Murray left McLaren in 2004 and set up Gordon Murray Design in 2007. Goto, former Director of Honda F1 and R&D Manager at Ferrari F1, founded Geo Technology – an engineering consultancy company working for the automobile and motorcycle industry.

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