Though Gordon Murray shows no sign of slowing down, when he does eventually hang up his CAD login and password, his career highlights will still be dominated by championship-winning F1 designs for Brabham and McLaren, and the game-changing McLaren F1 road car.
But Murray has had a hand in dozens of other fascinating projects, from the redesigned Midas kit car in the 1980s to the Mercedes-McLaren SLR at the turn of the millennium and, of course, his new T.33 and T.50 supercars. Arguably the coolest, though, is the Light Car Company Rocket, which Murray created with British racer and longtime friend, Chris Craft.
The Rocket came out in 1991, a year before McLaren unveiled the F1, so Murray must have been working on both at the same time. Though they were radically different cars in size, price, construction, and performance, they each featured unusual seating arrangements. Both put the driver center-stage, just like in an F1 car, but while the F1 road car offered two additional seats, behind and to the side of the driver, the Rocket’s passenger had to sit directly behind, like a motorbike million.
With its fat OZ wheels, the Rocket looks a bit like some kind of SEMA restomod update on a 1950s Formula Junior racer, and at just 850 lbs (386 kg) it weighs about the same, despite wearing a full complement of lights and license plates for road use. But instead of an old-fashioned 1.0-liter car engine in the rear tuned within an inch of its life to turn out 100 hp (101 PS), there was 1,000 cc of Yamaha motorcycle engine that generated an easy 143 hp (145 PS) and revved reliably to north of 11,000 rpm.
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The engine is used as a stressed member, just like in an F1 car, and drives the rear wheels through a five-speed sequential transmission, though there’s also a reverse gear and a clever two-speed final drive to make cruising tolerable. Amusingly, all five gears are available in reverse.
Fewer than 50 Rockets were built in the UK between 1991 and the late 2000s, and the car seen here, which starred in Clive Neville’s book The Light Car Company Rocket: The Singular Vision of Two Men, is currently located in New York and is for sale on Bring a Trailer. It features an uprated 1,170 cc stage 3 engine with goodies like Carrillo rods, hotter cams, a flowed head, and Jenvey throttle bodies, so must go like the proverbial rocket.
Murray described the Rocket recently to Classic and Sports Car magazine as a “mini McLaren F1” in terms of its focus, but while this car won’t be cheap, it’ll cost you a damn sight less than the $25 million you need to get into a real F1 these days.
You can check out the auction listing here.
