Watch And Listen To The GMA T.50's N/A V12 Topping 10,000rpm On The Dyno

With a starting price of £2.36 million (plus taxes), the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 isn’t exactly ‘of the people’. It’s more interesting to the non-billionaire petrolheads than the average hypercar, though - we’re talking about a road-legal car with a naturally-aspirated V12 that revs to 12,100rpm. This simply won’t happen again.

On the engine front, though, it’s all been quite a tease so far. We’ve seen a three-cylinder development mule revving its heart out on the dyno, we’ve heard the whole 3.9-litre unit but capped at 8000rpm, and we’ve seen the first working T.50 driving around with a 3000rpm rev limit. Finally, though, it’s been uncorked for our viewing pleasure.

The caveat? It’s another dyno run, so it doesn’t give quite the same experience as an engine under proper load, but it’s still a joy to hear that Cosworth designed and built V12 wailing away. In the video, the engine does a simulated run of Circuit De La Sarthe for the full Le Mans experience.

There are comparisons to be drawn with the Aston Martin Valkyrie’s 6.5-litre N/A V12, which caps out at 11,100rpm. It too is built by Cosworth, and although the engine is “completely different,” Gordon Murray told us a little while back, the T.50 project benefited greatly from the bigger, slightly lower-revving V12.

As for the GMA unit, it develops 654bhp at 11,500rpm, with peak torque of 345lb ft arriving at 9000. It’s not just about how high it revs, but also how quickly it gets there - the V12 is capable of 28,400 revs per second, meaning it spins up nearly three times as quickly as the S70/2 BMW engine found in the McLaren F1.

As explained by Murray at the beginning of the video, there’s something called a ‘Direct Path Induction Sound’ system on the T.50. It involves a ram air induction intake near the driver’s head, using piping made from varying thicknesses of carbon fibre, all of which acts as a speaker to give the occupants one hell of a soundtrack.