The more the merrier?

It’s hard to remember given how vibrant it is today, but back then in Britain, motorsport was on its knees. Still battered by the war, plunged into huge debt, with rationing still continuing, no one wanted to think that the last British driver to win a Grand Prix in a British car was Sir Henry Segrave who won the 1923 French Grand Prix in a Sunbeam. But someone had a plan to change all of that. This was former racing driver and founder of the aforementioned ERA (English Racing Automobiles), Raymond Mays. He decided to put Britain back on the motor racing map by forming BRM. To do it, he planned to bring all the great and the good of British industry together to provide parts… and pots of cash.

Gaining column inches for a public hungry for success was not difficult and British Racing Motors found itself splashed across the headlines as details of the immensely ambitious project started to emerge in the late 1940s. But sometimes things are just too good to be true. With ambition wildly outstripping any ability to deliver, the project coughed and sputtered past planned target dates and race entries. Eventually, it was unveiled in December 1949, by which time and after so many false starts, public enthusiasm was starting to tail off.

But they pressed on and the Type 15 made its racing debut at Silverstone in 1950, failing to make it even as far as the starting line, the transmission snapping the moment driver Raymond Sommer dropped the clutch. True, Reg Parnell managed to salvage some dignity by winning two rather unimportant races at Goodwood, but this was hardly scaling the glorious heights intended for the car. For the next year, the BRM project suffered a string of failures punctuated by the occasional middling result. And then the rules changed, mandating 2-litre, naturally aspirated engines for the 1952 F1 season. After so much promise and so few results, the V16 BRM was already obsolete.

However the project rumbled on until 1955 thanks to the existence of the far less serious ‘Formula Libre’ category, the car’s bodywork changed quite dramatically and now renamed the P30. Despite these changes, however, it fared little better.

After that, BRM abandoned the V16 entirely, realising that trying to turn a fundamentally flawed machine into a worthy winner was a largely futile exercise.

But why did it fail? Remember that, before the war, Auto Union and its V16 engines had won the 1936 European Championship. Remember too that in 1950, that V16 was as powerful as anything else on the grid. On paper it had what it took; in reality however… In truth I think there’s a number of reasons the Auto Unions prevailed and the BRMs failed.

Firstly, Auto Union’s V16 was a large, comparatively lazy, low-revving engine, only reaching 4500rpm. This meant that it was not subject to high levels of stress and therefore less prone to breaking. From its 6-litre capacity it produced 520bhp. By contrast the BRM engine was just one quarter of the size but still expected to produce around 450bhp, an output of around 300bhp per litre compared to only 87bhp per litre for the Auto Union. And the only way to make that happen was to spin it far, far faster than the designer of the Auto Union V16 could ever have imagined, up to a stratospheric 12,000rpm, higher indeed than any other race engine of the era. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this meant that the BRM Type 15 was incredibly prone to mechanical failures.

Secondly, the Auto Unions were designed by one of the greatest automotive figures ever, Ferdinand Porsche. A man who designed said Auto Union racing cars, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Porsche 356, tanks, and even tractors. Now I’m not saying that BRM didn’t have talented and perfectly capable designers, but they certainly didn’t have Ferdinand Porsche.

Thirdly, racing had changed considerably after the Second World War. Pre-war racing was all down to power and torque, something the Auto Unions had in abundance. It’s said that Auto Union drivers could lap Monaco without changing gear! The BRM also had immense power and torque – in fact, its power output wouldn’t be beaten by another Grand Prix car until the 1970s. But now brute force was no longer enough. Manufacturers had realised that a quick lap time owed as much to handling, balance and agility than just raw speed and power. And in all these areas the BRM was sorely lacking. And even when the car was running right and all the power was available, it was delivered in such a brutal manner it often overwhelmed the abilities of both driver and chassis to cope with it.

And lastly, funding. Yes, the BRM project had British industry behind it, but the Auto Unions had the funding of the German government. And in the mid-1930s, Germany was run by a madman with a silly moustache called Adolf. And he thought motor racing would be a good source of propaganda for Germany and therefore pumped inconceivable amounts of cash into it. This meant that both Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union operated on almost unlimited budgets, something the war-torn wallets of British industry couldn’t muster.

Did BRM learn from its mistake? Yes, but only to forget it all over again. In 1962, Graham Hill clinched the title in his BRM P578 ‘Old Faithful’ and he nearly took a second championship at the end of the hectic 1964 season in his P261. These were cars powered by completely conventional, powerful and reliable 1.5-litre V8 motors. However, just when teams were starting to perfect the 1.5-litre formula (introduced in 1961), a drastic regulation change meant that, for the 1966 season, the maximum displacement would be doubled to 3-litres.

A frantic and frenzied race to reach that maximum capacity ensued. Few teams sported the full 3-litres, with the rest of the field having to make do with older engines.

One of these teams was BRM, who for the season opener at Monaco arrived with two old P261s boasting only slightly more power than the previous year. So they needed a solution. And, if you had a competitive engine before, and now you need one double the size… you simply stack two of those engines on top of each other, naturally. Don’t you?

And that’s exactly what BRM did. The result was a monster H16 engine, which is only slightly simplistically described as two flattened P261 1.5-litre engines, one sat on top of the other. Reports vary as to how much power the H16 generated, but it was somewhere around 400bhp, which was extremely competitive. However, when it arrived on the grid, according to legend, it took four men to lift it off the truck. Not a good sign, by any stretch of the imagination.

And just like the V16 that preceded it, the H16 failed. On big, fast circuits like Reims, the H16 could just about hold its own, when it held together. But on tighter circuits, it could not. Drivers Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill regularly opted for the old P261, preferring to deal with the relative lack of power than struggle with ungainly handling.

The H16 did win one race, but it wasn’t in the back of a BRM, rather a Lotus. At the 1966 American Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, Jim Clark took victory in his Lotus 43. However, this was more likely down to the unquestionable greatness of the Scotsman’s talent and a mere six drivers finishing rather than his car. It would be his only victory of the year.

Why did the H16 fail? The exact same reasons that the V16 did. Sometimes bigger is not always better.