Gordon Murray
Burning the midnight oil, designing a low-budget Le Mans car helped me to make my name in the business. Now that car’s ready to race again...
rebuilds the Duckhams shoestring racer that nearly won at Le Mans
Last year I had one of my early cars, the 1972 Duckhams LM, built for our heritage collection. The car played an important part in my career because it really helped me receive some early recognition. I joined Brabham in summer 1970 when Jack Brabham was driving in F1 for his final year and co-owned Motor Racing Developments with Ron Tauranac. I was one of five in the design office and most of the technical direction came from Ron with input from Jack.
When Ron discovered that I could do stress analysis and suspension geometry I started getting more interesting work and he entrusted me with an Indycar design study and a V8-powered hill climb car. Bernie Ecclestone appeared in 1971 and bought Jack’s 50% of the business, but nothing was really communicated to the staff and no-one knew what our future structure was to be. I was then approached by Alain de Cadenet, who wanted me to design a 3.0-litre Le Mans car to the new ACO 3.0-litre prototype regulations. Bernie had just bought Ron’s shares to complete a 100% ownership deal at Brabham, got rid of all the other designers and promoted me to chief designer. He then set out his plan for an all-new F1 car to be designed and built in 1972 for the 1973 season. I told Bernie about the de Cadenet car and he agreed to let me moonlight the job.
In 1971, Alain had bought a Brabham BT33 from Bernie and tried his hand as a Grand Prix entrant with Chris Craft driving. Things didn’t work out that well, so Alain hatched a scheme to design an all-british car to try and win Le Mans in 1972. His brief for the car was simple: small, light, good aerodynamics, use as many BT33 parts as possible and an overall budget of £5000. My fee was to be £250 to design the car; it ended up as £200 and a Hewlett Packard calculator – which I’ve still got!
I had around three months to design the car during the winter of 1971 and I worked on a small drawing board in our unheated flat near Claygate from 10pm until 3am. The car was assembled at Alain’s mews in London, tested briefly at Silverstone and loaded on a trailer behind a Transit van. Chris Craft would share the driving with Alain and apart from a couple of professional mechanics, the team was made up of friends.
In the race we passed the works 3.0-litre Alfas and the Porsches with just two hours to go and were heading for fourth place behind the Matras – all on a £5000 budget! During the final stint, Chris slid off on a wet part of the circuit, damaging the front of the car. He limped back to the pits and we made repairs, but the official would not let us out until the final couple of laps.
We still finished 12th overall and were the first Cosworth Dfv-powered car to finish at Le Mans. The little 3.0-litre car looks great in our collection; I can’t wait to enter it in a historic racing event because so few people have seen it in action.
Gordon Murray is one of the most innovative automotive designers of his generation. He designed Gp-winning F1 cars for Brabham and Mclaren and the Mclaren F1 road car