What has McLaren F1 designer Gordon Murray been up to these days? A couple cool things, like designing new TVRs and developing tech to make city cars better. Also, this sports car concept from Yamaha, which I really want to happen.
Meet the Yamaha Sports Ride Concept. I like to think of it as the MR2 we’ve been asking Toyota to make for nigh-on 15 years now. It has kind of an 80s retro-future vibe, doesn’t it?
While there’s no word on powertrain for this concept (MotorAuthority speculates a three-cylinder engine or electric drive) it weighs just 1,653 pounds because it makes use of Gordon Murray’s iStream Carbon chassis technology—a super-affordable way to make carbon fiber chassis at high volumes for mass production. I’ll let them describe it:
Using Formula One-style technologies, iStream Carbon relies on two carbon skins sandwiching a honeycomb core, which is in contrast to many expensive handmade supercars which employ monolithic (single skin carbon) panels. And unlike any other carbon fiber chassis technology, iStream Carbon is said to be a fully mechanized system with a cycle time of just 100 seconds.
A baby supercar, then, not in power but design.
I could get behind that, especially since Yamaha says is “designed to express a driver-machine relationship close in feeling to the world of motorcycle riding.”
Cool. I hope this happens somehow.
Contact the author at patrick@jalopnik.com.