Chatting with Gordon Murray
It was, of course, a lot of fun to chat to the brazenly-creative Gordon Murray, the South African who came to Europe to design and build racing cars – and who went on to dominate the world. Gordon was working in a small office at Brabham, under Ron Tauranac, when Bernie Ecclestone bought that team in 1971 – and Ron’s advice at the time was to “sack Gordon”. Bernie’s natural instincts suggested otherwise. He gave the young engineer full control of the design office at Brabham – and two years later the team was winning Grands Prix with the ground-breaking, triangular-shaped Brabham BT42. With multi-world championships behind him at Brabham and McLaren, plus hundreds of other scintillating road cars and road car designs, not the least of which was the McLaren F1, Gordon today runs his highly-successful Gordon Murray Design studio in Shalford, Surrey, England – adjacent to the site where John Barnard designed and produced the Ferrari F189-640 F1 car and to where the race-winning, Enrique Scalabroni-developed, F641s were built.
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