A $1.8 million supercar doesn’t come off the drawing board fully formed and ready for your local multi-millionaire’s garage. Gordon Murray Automotive shared last week how it put the T.33 through the ringer to calibrate its airbag control unit. The British supercar was driven through multiple simulated scenarios, all classified as misuse, where engineers wouldn’t want the airbags to deploy.
The GMA development team took its T.33XB1 development car–also known as James– to ATP Papenburg, an automotive testing facility in northwestern Germany. The proving grounds feature durability roads, a gravel track, an acoustic track, and a 7.6-mile oval. Gil Martins, a vehicle development engineer, explained, “The car will be fitted with a series of accelerometers and whenever these read a very sharp change in speed, which are telltale signs of a crash, the airbags fire.” He noted that GMA puts the accelerometers through misuse situations to collect data and teach the airbag control unit when not to fire, which is a fun excuse to abuse a fast car.
Hitting a 176-pound duffle bag for safety
The easier tests see the T.33 blast across cobblestones and highway expansion joints, but the obstacles quickly escalate. The supercar could make it all the way down a road of Belgian pave, quarried stone blocks that are far harsher than modern cobblestones, followed by a launch off a small ramp and flying 26 feet. Then, there was a 43 mph boar strike.Â
The engineers aren’t sacrificing a real boar for their endeavors: The simulated 176-pound animal was a duffle bag filled with crumb rubber. The strike was so severe that it punctured one of the T.33’s front radiators, though it was the 12 mph curb strike which did the most damage, destroying a wheel upright and a brake disc.
James will thankfully never have to go through an ordeal like that again. The GMA team repaired the development car and planned to use it for dyno work on the T.33’s Cosworth 4-liter V12 engine. For those who can afford it, the T.33 is intended to be the ultimate daily driver. The Gordon Murray-designed car weighs 2,403 pounds, as much as a new Mazda Miata, only unlike the MX-5 its engine produces 607 horsepower.
