Most cars at The Quail arrive on a transporter and sit. The Spéirling PURE arrived and started its fans. Two of them, spinning to 23,000 rpm under the floor, pull the car onto the tarmac with 4,400 pounds of downforce before it moves an inch. Standing next to it, the noise is closer to a turbine than an engine, and the car is 40 inches tall, so you look down at the roof.
McMurtry brought the production car to Monterey for its public US debut on August 14, then took it to the Reunion at Laguna Seca on August 15. That was a deliberate choice of venue. The prototype's 1:18.413 lap there in August 2024, with Philip Kadoorie driving at 50 percent power and downforce, is the number that put the company on the map in the United States. The Reverse Corkscrew hillclimb in 21.958 seconds with Max Chilton did the rest.
What the customer gets
- Power
- 1,000 hp, rear-wheel drive, single seat
- Weight
- 2,980 lb
- Battery
- 100 kWh, 25 to 31 miles of range at LMP2 pace
- Downforce
- Up to 2,000 kg from the fan system, 3 g in cornering and braking
- Top speed
- 190 mph
- Wheelbase
- 86.6 inches
- Price
- £995,000, roughly $1.3 million before taxes and transport
- Production
- 100 cars, two per month, first deliveries later in 2026
- Reservations
- About 25 confirmed at the reveal
Prototype to production
The records belong to the prototype, and the production car is not the prototype. The battery grew from 60 kWh to 100 kWh. Weight went from under 2,000 pounds to 2,980. The wheelbase stretched from roughly 79 inches to 86.6, the body is 11 percent longer and 14 percent wider, and McMurtry says about 95 percent of the parts are new. Whether the heavier, longer car can repeat the 1:18 at full power is a question the company has not answered yet, and one it will need to at some point, because that lap time is the sales pitch.
The tires are Michelin S8M slicks at $800 to $900 a corner. With 25 to 31 miles of range at racing pace, a set of tires and a battery charge run out at roughly the same time, which is either a design flaw or a neat piece of scheduling depending on how you look at it.
Getting one into the country
This is the part the press releases skip. The Spéirling PURE is not road legal in the United States, or anywhere else, and McMurtry does not pretend otherwise. That turns out to make importing one simpler, not harder.
Because the car is not a motor vehicle under federal safety standards, there is no FMVSS approval to seek. The NHTSA entry is an HS-7 declaration, box 8. The EPA side is Form 3520-1 under code L, the racing vehicle exclusion. Nothing on that path requires a registered importer, a Show or Display petition, or a 25-year wait. What the buyer gives up is any prospect of a licence plate. This is a track car with a title from nowhere.
Moving it is a different matter. The 100 kWh battery makes the car UN 3171, class 9 dangerous goods, for air freight, with the paperwork and carrier restrictions that follow. Crated, the car takes about 7 cubic metres. Its actual weight exceeds its volumetric weight, so the airline charges on 1,350 kilograms. By sea, three fit nose to tail in a 40-foot container, which is the more likely route for the first US deliveries given two cars a month are leaving the factory.
Roughly $1.3 million for a car you cannot drive to the track, that runs half an hour between charges, and that needs a dangerous goods declaration to fly. About 25 people said yes before it turned a wheel in public. Monterey never fails to produce a car like that, and this year it was the one you could hear from three rows away.