BRM’S last Formula 1 hurrah
The championship-winning team had fallen on hard times in the late 1960s, but the arrival of fresh faces and new cars gave it one more boost as the next decade began
Things were not looking good for BRM in 1969. The team that had scored a Formula 1 world title double in 1962 had slumped to fifth in the constructors’ championship in 1968, and hadn’t won a points-paying grand prix since the Monaco GP in 1966. And things were getting worse. BRM had the services of 1964 world champion John Surtees and rising star Jackie Oliver, and had finally discarded the troublesome H16 engine in favour of a V12, but the squad’s P138 and P139 were a long way behind the pacesetting Matra MS80 of Jackie Stewart. Surtees was one of the key players to persuade chairman Louis Stanley, who was married to Jean Owen, the sister of BRM owner Sir Alfred Owen, that change was needed. “It was an interesting period,” recalls Oliver. “BRM was a very successful team, but there was no designer and the car was old-fashioned. The ways John sorted things out upset people, but he was right.”
Surtees would finish third in the 1969 United States GP towards season’s end before leaving to focus on his own team, but the changes he’d helped instigate soon started to have an effect. And one of the key ones was getting up-and-coming designer Tony Southgate on board.
Southgate was working with Dan Gurney’s team in the States when Surtees approached him at Riverside. “I accepted in a microsecond because I wanted to get back into F1,” recalls Southgate, who joined BRM in July 1969.
There were other changes. Long-time BRM engineer and designer Tony Rudd stepped down during 1969, Aubrey Woods became chief engineer and Tim Parnell became team manager in August.
Southgate quickly saw the enormity of the task ahead. “I thought, ‘There’s only one way we can go with this – and that’s up’,” he says. “BRM were different because they made the whole car. I think the engineers sometimes concentrated too much on a particular aspect and didn’t keep up with modern trends.”
At the German GP at the Nurburgring the P139 flexed so much that even Surtees – a Nordschleife master – didn’t want to race it. “John was scared so we made up an excuse,” recalls Southgate of the car’s withdrawal from the event.
Southgate didn’t have much time to produce a new car for 1970, so the P153 was neat and tidy rather than revolutionary. He even put a stop to fledgling ground-effect experimentation because it was “too risky”. Stanley brought in Yardley sponsorship, and Pedro Rodriguez, who had starred for the team in 1968, returned alongside Oliver.
“Last summer’s long overdue shake-up within the cloisters of BRM at Bourne seems at last to be bearing fruit,” wrote Autosport’s Patrick Mcnally in February 1970. He described the P153 as an “utterly practical straightforward design”, and pointed out it was lighter than its predecessor, with titanium and magnesium being used. The car did carry over some parts from before – not an unusual occurrence at the time – such as gearbox and driveshafts.
With limited time available, Woods could not produce an all-new engine, but extensive work was done, particularly on the cylinder heads. BRM remained one of the few teams to build its own engine rather than plump for the Cosworth DFV.
“The V12 was nice and compact, light and had good horsepower,” reckons Southgate. “It used a lot more fuel [than a DFV] so you had more at the start of races. Reliability was tricky because to make it that small they’d been very tight on the bearings, about 10% too small. They threw rods. We had 12 engines while I was there, and by the time I left in 1972 only one didn’t have a welded-up block.”
The 425bhp engine also couldn’t be used as a stressed member like the DFV, though Southgate made it semi-stressed and doesn’t believe that was a disadvantage. “The car was well-balanced,” says Southgate. “Pedro slotted in and was great.”
Oliver agrees that the improvement was clear. “The 1969 car was a tractor and Tony’s was a modern car, but the engine department was not,” he says. “The V12 was powerful but not reliable. It should have won a lot of races.”
There were other teething problems, too. In the seasonopening South African GP, Oliver had two stub axle failures in practice, then retired from the race with gearbox problems.
Third driver George Eaton suffered an engine failure on his old P139, while Rodriguez finished a delayed ninth. “The biggest problem was the stub axles broke,” admits Southgate. “With the bolt-on wheels, which are not as strong as knock-on, where the flange meets the axle is a critical area and I got it wrong.”
Southgate immediately beefed up the rear, only for the fronts to fail in Spain. That put Oliver out of the race in a fiery crash with Jacky Ickx’s Ferrari and forced BRM to withdraw an angry Rodriguez, who was running in the points (then awarded to the top six). “He wouldn’t come in and when he eventually did he was furious. He said ‘don’t worry about that!’” recalls Southgate.
Rodriguez wasn’t too interested in qualifying, but he did tend to move forward in the races. Unfortunately, there were still a lot of retirements and Oliver’s finishing record was even worse. Rodriguez took sixth at Monaco – he’d been second only to
Stewart’s March in the wettest practice session – despite a stop for a sticking throttle, while Oliver’s V12 failed him.
Southgate identified that he needed to get as much oil through the engine as possible and added an enormous oil tank for the Belgian GP at Spa, which would provide a season highlight. At a track on which he always excelled, Rodriguez qualified sixth and charged into the lead in five laps. He then held off a determined Chris Amon (March) to take BRM’S first win for four years.
The P153 was now showing its pace but reliability remained a weakness. Both Oliver and Rodriguez ran in the top five in the Dutch GP, and Rodriguez quickly got into the top six from 10th on the grid in France, but each time issues, normally engine or gearbox related, denied the team. “Pedro should have had much better results, but we had the axles and the engine was a bit like a grenade,” says Southgate.
Perhaps Oliver’s best drive came at the British GP – “Pedro was bloody quick at Spa, I got my own back at Brands Hatch,” he says. The Briton qualified fourth, with Rodriguez back in 15th after two engine failures in practice, and ran third behind the battle between Jochen Rindt and Jack Brabham following Ickx’s early retirement. Sadly, engine failure once again robbed him.
But in the second half of the season Rodriguez, along with Stewart, became one of the main threats to the rapid Ferraris, and four points finishes in the final five races helped the Mexican to seventh in the drivers’ table. He split the Ferraris by qualifying second for the Italian GP, and might have won the United States GP had he not needed a late splash-and-dash, enough to drop him behind rookie Emerson Fittipaldi’s Lotus.
BRM slipped to sixth in the standings, but things were clearly coming together and for 1971 Southgate produced the P160, the last great BRM. “I had more time to think about the package with the P160,” says Southgate. “It was a refined, sleeker and neater version of the P153. The P160 was my favourite F1 car and all the drivers said it was easy to drive.”
BRM switched from departing Dunlop to Firestone tyres, resulting in a move to 15in rears (as opposed to 13in all-round on the P153) and some tweaks, but otherwise the package was proven. The P160 also had a lower and wider monocoque, revised
suspension geometry, and a better oil system.
Rodriguez’s 1970 drives for BRM and the JW Automotive Engineering team in sportscars had established him as one of the top three or four drivers in the world, while Porsche star Jo Siffert, already a GP winner, replaced Oliver.
The squad was no longer “a new team” as Southgate describes it in 1970. “In 1971 we got it all working,” adds the 81-year-old. “The engine was at its best and the whole car was competitive.”
Rodriguez, who jumped from 10th to fifth on the first lap, and Siffert suffered with overheating in the South African GP, but the non-championship Spring Cup at Oulton Park provided a fillip. Rodriguez beat Stewart’s Tyrrell and the Mclaren of Peter Gethin to win, then finished fourth in Spain.
Siffert ran second early on and looked set for third at Monaco before an oil pipe broke on a day when Rodriguez, never at his best around the principality, biffed a kerb. The roles were reversed at Zandvoort, Rodriguez engaging in one of the great wet-weather battles with Ickx before finishing second, and Siffert recovering to sixth after an early spin.
Things were looking good, but an annoyingly small issue kept rearing its head. “I mounted the coil – a regular Lucas coil – on the rollover bar because it was strong and convenient,” explains Southgate. “What I didn’t realise was that there was a high-frequency vibration and it broke the internals of the coil.”
That cost Rodriguez second place at the French GP, but he was still fourth in the drivers’ table when he was killed in an Interserie race at the Norisring. It was a big blow, but Siffert immediately stepped up, qualifying third for the British GP and running second before the ignition coil trouble struck again.
“Pedro was treated as number one, but the equipment was the same,” says Southgate. “Jo was a very good driver – undemanding, not a technical driver. Pedro was slightly easier to please.
“When Pedro got killed, Jo took over as number one and was immediately quicker. It was obviously a difference for him; we didn’t do anything different.”
The Swiss underlined the point with his performance at the Austrian GP on the fast Osterreichring. In a season generally dominated by Stewart’s Tyrrell, Siffert pipped the Scot to pole, and the two pulled clear of the rest in the early stages. Eventually the Tyrrell fell away as Stewart struggled with his front tyres. After 42 laps Siffert was 27.2s clear of Fittipaldi’s Lotus. A rear tyre started deflating, but Siffert brought the P160 home to take victory by 4.1s.
He was a leading contender at the subsequent Italian GP slipstreaming epic too until gearbox issues slowed him. Gethin, who had only joined the team in Austria, stepped up to snatch victory in what was then the fastest F1 race. Howden Ganley finished fifth, just 0.61s behind Gethin, in another P160.
BRM was now running four cars, and in Canada and the US it attempted to run five, Ganley only failing to start at Mosport thanks to a warm-up crash. Southgate believes Stanley’s desire to run more entries hampered the team’s effort.
“Everyone was against it,” he says. “Stanley wanted to run five cars and his view was that ‘we just need to get more people, don’t we?’. We did bring in some others from outside BRM but not many. Unfortunately, Big Lou was running the show, which was bad news from the [number of] entries point of view. He was a great one for the rent-a-drive because it was useful money to BRM.
“It didn’t help at all because we couldn’t cope. I was running five cars – designers were engineers at races in those days – and there was always at least one in the pits. At one race, Howden Ganley came in and I couldn’t even remember what changes we’d made to his car!”
Nevertheless, Siffert’s second place in the final round of the championship at Watkins Glen meant BRM jumped Ferrari for the runner-up spot in the constructors’ standings. BRM was now as competitive as it had been since 1965 and reliability had improved, but it was the final peak.
The team suffered another loss when Siffert was killed in the non-championship Victory Race at Brands Hatch (won by Gethin’s P160), while Southgate felt he needed to do something radical to maintain BRM’S position in 1972.
“The Cosworth was improving all the time and a lot of people were using them, whereas the V12 was at its peak in 1971,” he recalls. “We needed a new engine, but they didn’t have the money and I don’t think they had anyone capable of designing it. I realised that the engine wouldn’t be competitive so I tried a trick all-new car.”
That car was the ill-fated P180. “I pushed my luck with weight distribution, which was normally 65% rear,” he explains. “I put a bit more weight on the rear and wider tyres – and put the radiators at the back. That made the weight distribution 70%, when I’d wanted something like 68%, and there was no way I could move weight forward. I could have moved the radiators but that would have meant reducing the fuel tanks, which would then have been too small.”
Southgate received an offer to join Shadow’s new F1 team during the campaign and left: “I couldn’t see what they could do. The writing was on the wall.”
Jean-pierre Beltoise scored a sensational wet-weather win in the revised P160B at Monaco – where BRM ran five cars and three different models – but it was to be the team’s last world championship race victory. The team finished seventh in the constructors’ table, and had started a decline that led to its demise before the end of the decade.
It was a sad end for a team that had experienced a tumultuous life from its earliest days and had won 17 world championship GPS, but at least the 1970-71 campaigns had provided one last hurrah.