Is the Spéirling a big step forward compared with a Formula 1 car?
“It’s so different. The acceleration from 0-60mph is nearly twice as quick as what I did in my fastest launch in an F1 car. That’s how rapid it is. Plus, it’s 100% torque and there are no gearchanges, so it’s completely linear acceleration to wherever we gear it. At Goodwood, we gear it to 150mph – where I was for four seconds – so we could have gone a lot quicker but we didn’t think we needed it.
“Because we designed it to be a race car, we didn’t have any rules. We could just come up with the most crazy thing. And why it’s gone so mad in the car world is because there will be race engineers and car designers all over the world thinking: ‘Why haven’t we been doing that?’ There’s these companies charging £3-4 million for a hypercar, and we’re going to be 10-15sec quicker than them around a race track like Silverstone.”
What has been your contribution to the development programme?
“The rear wing wouldn’t have been there without me. When we first started testing without the fan system, it was quite tail-happy, because it’s quite a heavy car and it didn’t have any downforce. The biggest area I struggled in was changing direction: the rear wanted to give way. So we put a rear wing on it which gives about 250kg of downforce, which massively helps the balance of the car. When the fan system’s off, it’s a lot more stable.
“Then various updates, interior preferences, just little bits along the way like the mirrors. They originally had cameras, but racing around Silverstone with people on track days, I had moments where the rear-view camera didn’t give me enough visibility and I nearly got hit a couple of times. So we put wing mirrors on and I think it actually makes it look even more like a normal car.”