How BRM's design dead-ends spurred an F1 champion to go it alone

“We are out to get the 1969 Formula 1 world championship. We want to extract more power from our V12 engine and to achieve our success this year. In 1962 I challenged BRM to the effect that if they didn’t win the championship, we should drop it altogether. I have not made quite the same challenge this year but the same feeling exists…”

With this peculiar mixture of clarity and equivocation Sir Alfred Owen outlined his aspirations for the coming season. The venue for the BRM launch, Shell Mex House, an imposing riverside art deco edifice boasting the largest clock face in Britain, was suitably prominent for an occasion high on patriotic bombast. BRM had always seen itself as the British Ferrari but its trophy cupboard attested to a history more dense with competitive troughs than peaks. Many present thought Sir Alfred, the wealthy industrialist whose group of companies had underwritten BRM since 1952, was only fooling himself. Indeed, Shell sponsored the ‘real’ Ferrari, not BRM.

There was also not a great deal in the way of new developments to be announced. It was already known 1964 champion John Surtees would be joining the team from Honda’s moribund F1 programme, racing alongside Jackie Oliver, fresh out of Lotus. Richard Attwood had been let go before the end of the 1968 season in favour of USAC racer Bobby Unser, who walked away after one race. Pedro Rodríguez had been shuffled over to BRM’s satellite team, Reg Parnell Racing. Of a new car there was no tangible sign.

Behind the scenes BRM was, as usual, in disarray, and the purse strings were being drawn tighter as the decline of the British motoring industry exercised a trickle-down effect on the other companies in the Rubery Owen group. The introduction of the opinionated and uncompromising Surtees into a factional world already adequately populated by strong characters would have explosive effects.

Central to the melodrama would be the car itself. Since the beginning of 1968 BRM had been relying on iterations of a chassis whose design and initial manufacture had been outsourced to former Lotus and All American Racers engineer Len Terry’s Transatlantic Automotive Consultants. Why did BRM, which did not want for engineering resources, take the subcontractor route? A wholly accurate conclusion is difficult to reach given the number of differing accounts, but the common denominator in these is the troubled 3-litre H16 engine and the energy expended in trying to troubleshoot it.

By 1968 BRM had supposedly abandoned the heavy and unreliable H16 in favour of a V12 originally designed by Geoff Johnson for sportscar racing. The V12 was also heavier and thirstier than Cosworth’s genre-defining DFV V8, and not especially reliable, but it had shown encouraging signs in Bruce McLaren’s M5A in late ’67 – and works BRM driver Jackie Stewart had lobbied for it to be used in the team’s Tasman campaign that winter before he departed to join Ken Tyrrell’s Matra outfit. But BRM chief engineer Tony Rudd, the instigator of the H16, remained convinced of his engine’s potential.

After failures with the H16, BRM switched belatedly to a V12 but it was thirstier than the prevailing DFV V8

Photo by: James Mann

Like many gifted engineers before and since, Rudd had developed a blind spot for his pet project’s shortcomings and continued to labour in vain on a reboot of the concept with a lighter block and multivalve heads through ’68, seeing Terry’s V12-engined P126 as a stopgap. When the lightened H16 was finally ‘ready’ the dyno revealed it to be scarcely more powerful than the original – and it still, as Stewart had pointed out, “needed as much fuel, water and oil as the Queen Mary.”

During 1968 BRM built its own version of the P126 chassis, varying only in detail and badged P133, before introducing the P138, which was different chiefly in having a BRM-built gearbox in place of a bought-in Hewland transmission. The first car was introduced at the ’68 Italian GP for Rodríguez, who retired, then raced at Watkins Glen by Unser, who also retired; it was then, after a winter lay-off, presented to Surtees, who was unimpressed – despite the promise of a new 48-valve iteration of the V12 claimed to be good for over 400bhp.

Having failed to recognise the H16 concept as a bust, Rudd further denuded his internal political capital with BRM’s chiefs by not working well with Surtees. “Il Grande John” wanted a new car; what he would get was the P139, a heavily revised (by chief designer Alec Osborn) version of the existing concept with the fuel tanks and ancillaries relocated to improve its balance.

At Zandvoort BRM unveiled the P139 in public for the first time. By this point the team was claiming the V12 produced 450bhp, a figure greeted with great scepticism by contemporary reporters

Surtees was given sole use of the two P138 chassis for the season opener in Kyalami while Oliver made do with a P133, but the only race-ready 48-valve V12 developed a problem during practice so Surtees swapped to a spare chassis with an older-spec engine. No one thought to notify the officials, so his times were struck off and he was forced to start from the back. To compound a weekend which had begun with both cars immobilised by electrical issues caused by botched preparation at the factory, both works cars succumbed to engine issues. Surtees was already a lap down when he halted on lap 40.

The early part of the season offered no further succour for the increasingly disgruntled Surtees. A crash caused by a puncture during practice for the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch wrote off the newer P138 chassis and damaged the 48-valve engine.

He was fifth in a Spanish Grand Prix blighted by high-speed accidents caused by failures of the high-mounted wings being sported by the new generation of cars, but this was by no means a success: he was the last car running, six laps down on the winner. Oliver’s car had a split oil line which was only detected when a mechanic saw the pool of oil on the grid. In Monaco, where the high wings were banned, Surtees was eliminated when his gearbox failed and an unsighted Jack Brabham crashed into him.

As Surtees agitated for change, Rudd had something else in mind. The ban on high wings had been clumsily implemented and the provisions for where and how lower wings could be mounted, or how large they could be, were unclear and the subject of frequent revision by the FIA. The young engineer and aerodynamicist Peter Wright, later to pioneer ground-effect aerodynamics at Lotus, received a ground-breaking mandate as he would later recall: “Tony said, ‘I hate these wings, go and figure out how to make the body produce the downforce.’ That was the clear objective he set. I started ferreting about and designed a ‘wing car.’”

Work on the P139 dragged as resources were diverted towards Wright’s secret project. As Rudd would divulge in his autobiography It Was Fun, he became so enthused by the results of Wright’s research in Imperial College’s wind tunnel that he cancelled the build of the second P139 chassis in order to focus on the development – in secret – of the ‘wing car’ at BRM’s facility in Bourne. It’s claimed Surtees only got wind of the project when he arrived at the factory for his seat fitting
and wondered where all the engineers had got to…

Surtees' brief union with BRM was not a joyful one, and was six laps down in the Spanish GP aboard the updated P138

Photo by: LAT Photographic

There was a long break between Monaco and Holland owing to the cancellation of the Belgian GP, and at Zandvoort in late June BRM unveiled the P139 in public for the first time. By this point the team was claiming the V12 produced 450bhp, a figure greeted with great scepticism by contemporary reporters.

The key feature was a slimmer monocoque, though BRM maintained Terry’s wrap-around structure rather than adopting a ‘bathtub’-type open design as used by the likes of McLaren. The bodywork was tightly waisted at the rear, between the wheels, though any aerodynamic gains here were offset by the presence of oil coolers on each side.

While the theory behind the slimmer structure was to reduce the frontal area and achieve higher speeds, the V12 was thirstier than Ford’s DFV and required larger fuel tanks than its rivals. The addition of pannier-type tanks around the P139’s waist negated the gains found through redesigning the monocoque. There were hidden problems, too, with the suspension geometry and strength which would only become apparent later.

Surtees tried the P139 in practice, found its twitchy handling not to his liking, and reverted to the P138 for the race. He and Oliver (still driving a P133) were the slowest of the works entries and the tensions at Bourne became obvious to all when Surtees – already three laps down – had to make a splash-and-dash stop on the final lap of the race, during which there was a heated exchange of views in the BRM ‘box’.

The disagreements lasted long into the night at an ill-tempered meeting, followed by a high-level summit at HQ where Sir Alfred Owen asked Rudd to tender his resignation… or sacked him. As ever with BRM, accounts vary.

A restructure of operations followed in which Aubrey Woods returned as chief engineer and Tim Parnell, whose father’s team had been inactive since Monaco, joined as team manager. With Owen’s say-so, Surtees had already sounded out Tony Southgate – most recently the architect of Bobby Unser’s 1968 Indy 500-winning Eagle – to join the BRM engineering team as chief designer. There was a brief overlap between the two before Rudd departed to join Lotus Engineering.

“I found myself in the middle of a hornets’ nest,” Southgate would recall. He was very much part of ‘Team Surtees’ in this factional tumult, having been employed at the behest of BRM’s lead driver, something which sat ill with many time-served employees. Nevertheless he knuckled down to his mandate, which was to improve the P139 in the short term while working on an all-new design for 1970. Southgate rapidly concluded the P139 would require a lot of work to make it competitive, for its suspension and mountings were flexing under load.

There was also the question of the ‘wing car’. Wright recalls the project progressed as far as testing experimental bodywork: “We ran with pannier sidepods, which were empty. We measured some pressures and figured out that they didn’t do any harm, but they didn’t achieve very much.”

The rear of the P139 was significantly strengthened but it did little to initially turnaround its fortunes

Photo by: James Mann

A key piece of knowledge was missing, and Wright would make the discovery by accident several years later while working at Lotus and evaluating a similar theory in the wind tunnel. For ground-effect aerodynamics to work, the underbody airflow has to be sealed off at the sides to prevent more air being drawn in through there, compromising the suction effect. The Lotus breakthrough came when an ageing wind tunnel model began to sag, generating the negative pressure Wright was seeking.

Southgate terminated the ‘wing car’ project and focused on appeasing Surtees. BRM withdrew from the French GP on 6 July but reappeared two weeks later for its home event with a much-changed P139 for Surtees. Apollo 11 entered the orbit of the moon on race day but BRM’s performance was less than stellar.

The P139 had new bodywork which formed a continuous line from front to rear in plan view, with the oil coolers consolidated into a single unit between the gearbox and rear wing. Despite additional strengthening at the rear to bolster torsional rigidity, the P139 was claimed to be lighter than before. Surtees qualified sixth, made a determined start, and had reached third place as the field exited Stowe – and then his front suspension broke. Oliver, 13th on the grid in a P133, got as far as lap 19 before his gearbox failed.

At the Nurburgring the P139 featured a new rear spoiler and – supposedly – strengthened front suspension. But its handling continued to be “spooky”, according to Southgate, to the extent that Johnny Servoz-Gavin was faster in an F2 Matra. Disconcerted by the flexing of the chassis, Surtees refused to race and the team had to confect an excuse for his withdrawal.

Before retiring with gearbox failure in Mexico Surtees was overtaken by privateer Silvio Moser in a two-year-old Brabham, an occasion which to Surtees confirmed the wisdom of his decision to abandon BRM and take his own team into F1 the following season

A second P139 was ready for Oliver at Monza but the BRMs were two seconds off the pole. Oliver stopped when he lost oil pressure, and Surtees was a non-classified runner having pitted for repairs when his car was struck by part of Graham Hill’s exhaust. Engine failures ruled both cars out of the Canadian GP at Mosport but attrition elsewhere enabled Surtees to reach the podium at Watkins Glen, when he moved into third – albeit two laps down – after Jack Brabham made a late fuel stop.

For the US GP BRM also brought a third P139 chassis with a new rear suspension configuration instigated by Surtees, aimed at lowering the roll centre. He didn’t race this until the season finale in Mexico where, as an indicator of BRM’s financial problems, pay driver George Eaton raced the original chassis P139-01 as a third factory entry. Before retiring with gearbox failure Surtees was overtaken by privateer Silvio Moser in a two-year-old Brabham, an occasion which to Surtees confirmed the wisdom of his decision to abandon BRM and take his own team into F1 the following season.

While Southgate’s all-new designs provided a competitive uplift, BRM remained in flux after Sir Alfred Owen suffered a debilitating stroke in October 1969. P139-03, photographed here, entered a peaceful retirement after starting just one race. But it had seen off the ‘wing car’…

Race record
Starts: 11    
Wins: 0  
Poles: 0    
Fastest laps: 0   
Podiums: 1    
Championship points: 4   

Specification
Chassis: Aluminium monocoque 
Suspension: Lower wishbones with upper rocker arms and inboard springs/dampers (front), lower wishbones with upper radius arms and outboard springs/dampers (rear) 
Engine: Naturally aspirated BRM P142 V12
Engine capacity: 2998cc    
Power: 450bhp @ 10750rpm   
Gearbox: Five-speed manual  
Brakes: Steel discs front and rear    
Tyres: Dunlop  
Weight: 550kg   
Notable drivers: John Surtees, Jackie Oliver  

Surtees complained of the BRM P139's chassis flexing at the Nurburgring and withdrew from the race

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images