British Racing Motors (BRM) was a British Formula One motor racing team. Founded in 1945 and based in the market town of Bourne in Lincolnshire, it participated from 1951 to 1977, competing in 197 grands prix and winning seventeen. BRM won the constructors' title in 1962 when its driver Graham Hill became world champion. In 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1971, BRM came second in the constructors' competition.
History BRM was founded just after the Second World War by Raymond Mays, who had built several hillclimb and road racing cars under the ERA brand before the war, and Peter Berthon, a long-time associate. Mays' pre-war successes (and access to pre-war Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union design documents) inspired him to build an all-British grand prix car for the post-war era as a national prestige project, with financial and industrial backing from the British motor industry and its suppliers channelled through a trust fund.
This proved to be an unwieldy way of organising and financing the project, and as some of the backers withdrew, disappointed with the team's slow progress and early results, it fell to one of the partners in the trust, Alfred Owen of the Rubery Owen group of companies. Owen, whose group primarily manufactured car parts, took over the team in its entirety. Between 1954 and 1970 the team entered its works F1 cars under the official name of the Owen Racing Organisation. Berthon and Mays continued to run the team on Rubery Owen's behalf into the 1960s, before it was handed over to Louis Stanley, the husband of Sir Alfred's sister Jean Owen.
A factory was set up in Spalding Road, Bourne, Lincolnshire, behind Eastgate House, Mays' family home, in a building called 'The Maltings' (the adjacent former ERA works, vacated in 1939). Several people involved with ERA returned to the firm to work for BRM, including Harry Mundy and Eric Richter. The team also had access to a test facility at Folkingham aerodrome.
BRM V16
The first post-war rules for the top level of motor racing allowed 1.5-litre supercharged or 4.5-litre normally aspirated engines. BRM's first engine design was an extremely ambitious 1.5-litre supercharged V16. Rolls-Royce was contracted to produce centrifugal superchargers, rather than the more commonly used Roots type. The design concept of the V16 had not been used extensively on automobiles before so that design problems were many and the engine did not fire for the first time until June 1949. It proved to be outstandingly powerful but its output was produced over a very limited range of engine speed, coming on suddenly if the throttle was applied carelessly, resulting in wheelspin as the narrow tyres proved unable to transfer the power to the road. This made the car very touchy to drive. Engineer Tony Rudd was seconded to BRM from Rolls-Royce to develop the supercharging system and remained involved with BRM for nearly twenty years.
The Type 15, which was the designation for the V16 car, won the first two races it actually started, the Formula Libre and Formula One events at Goodwood in September 1950, driven by Reg Parnell. However, it was never to be so successful again. The engine proved unreliable and difficult to develop, and the team were not up to the task of improving the situation. A string of failures caused much embarrassment, and the problems were still unsolved when the Commission Sportive Internationale announced in 1952 that for 1954, a new engine formula of 2.5 litres naturally aspirated or 750 cc supercharged would take effect.
Meanwhile, the organisers of all the grands prix counting for the world championship elected to run their races for Formula Two for the next two years, as Alfa Romeo had pulled out of racing and BRM were unable to present raceworthy cars, leaving no credible opposition to Ferrari other than outdated Lago-Talbots and the odd O.S.C.A. The V16s continued to race in minor Formula One races and in British Formula Libre events until the mid fifties, battles with Tony Vandervell's Thin Wall Special Ferrari 375 being a particular highlight of the British scene.
Crisis
The Type 25 was BRM's next car. It used an extremely oversquare (4.05 x 2.95 in, 102.87 x 74.93 mm) 2.5 L atmospheric four-cylinder engine designed by Stewart Tresilian and (as became typical with BRM) it arrived late and took a lot of development; it was so late that the Owen Organisation started the 2.5 L formula with a Maserati 250F. The P25 was initially unsuccessful, not winning a race until a victory at the Dutch Grand Prix in 1959. Colin Chapman helped to improve the car in 1956. Stirling Moss believed that the BRM engine was superior to the Coventry-Climax unit used in his Cooper, and a P25 was briefly run in 1959 by the British Racing Partnership, for Moss (and also Hans Herrmann), and Rob Walker also backed the construction of a Cooper-BRM to gain access to the engine.
The P25 was becoming highly competitive just as the rear-engined Cooper started to become dominant; the P48 was a quick reaction to this, using major components from the P25 but in rear-engined format. The P48 was revised for the 1.5 L rules in 1961, but once again BRM's own engine was not ready and the cars had to run with a Coventry-Climax four-cylinder unit in adapted P48 chassis, achieving very little in terms of results.
The firm moved to a purpose-built workshop on an adjoining site in the spring of 1960, but when the 1.5-litre atmospheric Formula One regulation was introduced in 1961, Alfred Owen was threatening to pull the plug unless race victories were achieved very soon.
Champions
By the end of the season BRM had managed to build an engine designed by Peter Berthon and Aubrey Woods (BRM P56 V8) (2.6975 x 2.0 in, 68.5 x 50.8 mm) which was on a par with the Dino V6 used by Ferrari and the Coventry Climax V8 used by other British teams. However, the real change was the promotion by Owen of an engineer who had been with the team since 1950 (originally on secondment from Rolls-Royce to look after the supercharging on the V16), Tony Rudd, to the position of chief development engineer. Rudd was the first professional engineer to exercise full technical control over the team, and basic engineering and reliability problems which had plagued the team for years began to vanish. He was given greater responsibility in 1960 after two of the drivers, Graham Hill and Dan Gurney, went on strike and told Alfred Owen they would not drive again, and in early 1962 full executive authority was given to Tony Rudd. Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon were sidelined. The team had designed their first mid-engined car for 1960, matching the other teams, and won the World Drivers' Championship with Graham Hill as driver, in with the P57. (During 1962, BRM also ran Lucas electronic ignition.)Super Street Cars, 9/81, p.34. During 1965, at 11,000 rpm was the rated power. However at the high-speed 1965 Italian GP (Monza) an uprated version was raced with at 11,750 rpm for short bursts. A planned 4-valve-per-cylinder version in cooperation with Weslake Engineering never materialised.
As part of Owen's attempt to make BRM pay its way, the V8 engine was sold to privateers and appeared in a number of other chassis during the 1.5 L formula, particularly in private Lotus chassis and in smaller marques such as BRP.
A number of privateers acquired 1961 and 1962 BRMs during this period, including Maurice Trintignant and Scuderia Centro Sud; these cars continued to race for many years.
The monocoque BRM P261 V8 car was soon developed and these ran on through the 1.5-litre formula and performed useful service in the early races of the subsequent 3.0-litre formula. In 1965 Jackie Stewart was signed to partner Hill; he took his first grand prix win at Monza in his debut season, and won the first world championship race of the new three-litre formula with a car fitted with a Tasman two-litre V8; once again BRM were not ready for the start of a new formula and the old cars continued to be used, even on occasion after the H16 was ready.
BRM H16
For , the engine regulations changed to permit three-litre atmospheric (or 1.5-litre supercharged) engines. BRM refused Peter Berthon and Aubrey Woods's proposal to build a V12, and instead built an ingenious but very complicated engine, designed by Tony Rudd and Geoff Johnson, the H16 (BRM P75), which essentially used two flat-eight engines (derived from their 1.5L V8) one above the other, with the crankshafts geared together.
BRM found the H16 (2.75 x 1.925 in, 69.85 x 48.895 mm) attractive because it was initially planned to share design elements and components with the successful 1.5-litre V8. While the engine was powerful, it was also heavy and unreliable – Rudd claimed that his drawings were not followed accurately and many of the castings were much thicker and heavier than he had specified (when Lotus took delivery of their first H16 it took six men to carry it from the van to the workshop). At that time, BRM earned the nickname of "British Racing Misery". BRM, Lotus, and various privateers had been using enlarged versions of the BRM 1.5 V8 of up to 2.1 litres in 1966, as competitive three-litre engines were in short supply in the first year of the new regulations. Lotus also took up the H16 as an interim measure until the Cosworth DFV was ready, building the Lotus 43 to house it, and Jim Clark managed to win the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen with this combination. It was the only victory for this engine in a world championship race. Lotus built the similar Lotus 42 designed for Indianapolis with a 4.2-litre version of the H16 (2.9375 x 2.36 in, 74.61 x 59.94 mm) but this was never raceworthy; the cars were raced with Ford V8s instead.
The H16 engine was redesigned with a narrow-angle four-valve head and magnesium main castings to reduce weight and increase power, but was never raced (it was intended for the 1967 BRM P115) as BRM decided to use the V12 unit which was being sold to other F1 and sports car teams with encouraging results. It Was Fun. Author-Tony Rudd. Book published 1993. BRM The Saga of British Racing Motors Vol. 3 1964-1968 Authors-Doug Nye/Tony Rudd. Book published 2008
BRM V12