The groundbreaking Brabham that gave F1 a preview of Murray's design genius

One of Formula 1’s great technical-commercial partnerships came about almost entirely by accident. It nearly didn’t happen at all. In December 1969, the early phases of a winter so bitter it would go down as the stormiest on record until 2014, 23-year-old engineer and sometime racing driver Gordon Murray arrived in England from his native South Africa in the hope of getting a job with Colin Chapman at Lotus.

Imagine, in hindsight, what a combination that might have been. But the stars were destined not to align. Murray had exchanged letters with Chapman and caught a bus to Lotus’s Hethel HQ expecting to be interviewed by Lotus Cars chief engineer Brian Luff. Instead he discovered that not only had he arrived into a protracted bout of inclement weather, an economic downturn had gripped the car market. Lotus
wasn’t hiring – quite the opposite.

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Murray spent the following months scraping by, living in an unheated bedsit in a hangdog London suburb, continuing the job hunt. Acting on a tip, he doorstepped the Brabham F1 factory – where co-owner Ron Tauranac happened to be waiting to interview someone for a design role. Believing Murray to be that someone, Ron grilled the young engineer and was impressed enough to offer Gordon a job on the spot.

As Murray knuckled down to an apprenticeship drafting suspension components to Tauranac’s exacting standards, he exercised his creativity by sketching his own 750 Formula car in his spare time. Change was blowing through the company as Jack Brabham embarked on his long-planned retirement from racing and return to Australia, selling his share of the team to Tauranac – who found the administrative grind too great, the business of sponsor-wrangling not to his taste. By May 1971 Ron had agreed a sale to Jochen Rindt’s former manager. Like Murray, this man was destined to turn the sport on its head with his energy and inventiveness, albeit in the commercial rather than engineering sphere. His name was Bernard Charles Ecclestone.

Tauranac remained as an employee, but he and Ecclestone were cut from the same my-way-or-the-highway cloth. Ron would later recall coming back from a long weekend to find the motorcycle designer and former sidecar racer Colin Seeley, an old acquaintance of Ecclestone, installed at his desk as new managing director. Tauranac asked if he could take a leave of absence over the winter to engineer for Frank Williams in some races in South Africa; as it happened, he would only return to the Brabham factory to hand back his company car.

Ron, famously a man never to use one word when none would have sufficed, was perhaps not the most convivial of bosses. By the early months of the Ecclestone takeover Murray was ready to move on and entertaining offers of work elsewhere. In later years Bernie would relish telling journalists that Tauranac advised him to fire Murray, so instead Bernie fired everyone else and made Murray his chief designer. Closer to the truth is that Gordon had good offers from the Tecno F1 team and Alain de Cadenet’s Le Mans project and had to be talked out of leaving (he would design the sportscar, powered by a Cosworth V8, by night). Ralph Bellamy’s departure for Lotus also left the position of chief designer vacant.

Gordon Murray, Carlos Reutemann and Bernie Ecclestone (left to right) struck up an successful partnership at Brabham

Brabham’s ‘lobster claw’ BT34 and its successor, Bellamy’s BT37, had underperformed in 1971 and ’72. Instructed to build a “completely new” car for 1973 by Ecclestone, Murray did just that – in four months flat. The BT42 was utterly unlike its predecessors except for the front-mounted radiators: wedgy, short in the wheelbase, with around 30% of the fuel load located behind the driver rather than on either side of their hips, it was a calling card for an ambitious engineer destined to be viewed as one of F1’s great innovators.

The detail engineering was clever, too. Back home in South Africa Murray had built his own racing engine so he was unafraid to tinker with the established Cosworth V8 to suit his car concept, re-casting the valvetrain cover so he could mount the springs and upper suspension links to it; he also redesigned the Hewland gearbox’s lubrication system to save power and converted the casing to accept the rest of the suspension links.

The tub’s triangular profile was not only intrinsically stiff and aerodynamically slippery, it enabled Murray to shape the auxiliary tanks so fuel didn’t climb up the sides under g-loadings. Pleasingly, the triangular profile also mirrored the vee-angle of the engine itself, but this was but a consequence of Murray’s big-picture idea: shaping the upper surfaces of the car to generate negative pressure underneath, boosting grip.

The BT42 made an inauspicious debut at Brands Hatch for the Race of Champions in March 1973 – a stuck throttle sent John Watson into the barriers hard enough to break both his legs and render the first chassis a write-off. Two new cars were ready for the fourth round of the F1 season – the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuïc Park in late April, with the still-injured Watson a spectator. Brabham’s rising star Carlos Reutemann qualified a modest 15th but had risen to second place and was chasing down race leader Emerson Fittipaldi when a driveshaft joint failed nine laps from the finish.

The revisions made the BT44 a sweeter-handling, more responsive, quicker car than its predecessor but Brabham’s 1974 campaign was hindered by some of the same old problems: inconsistency inside and outside the cockpit and a lack of funds

The ’73 season, though, belonged to Fittipaldi and Ronnie Peterson in the better-funded, more developed Lotus, and Tyrrell’s Jackie Stewart. Reutemann’s promise was masked by engine issues or sub-optimal tyre choices; in the other BT42 Emerson’s somewhat less rapid older brother Wilson managed just one points finish, in the German GP at the Nurburgring.

Convinced that he was heading in the right direction, Murray evolved the BT42 into the BT44, with a new front-end treatment and rising-rate suspension actuated by pullrods.
He had come up with this arrangement for his (unfinished) 750 Formula car, partly because he disdained the rocker-arm setup used by other rising-rate exponents, but also because he had been striving for a low bodyline in the club racer.

Beneath, an early attempt to harness what would become known as ground-effect aerodynamics: a sacrificial fiberglass ‘vee’ under the new nose cone, aiming to wash underfloor air outwards and create a partial vacuum behind it. While
Lotus’s later solution would be more optimal – channeling
and accelerating underfloor airflow rather than trying to exclude it – secret testing with an anemometer at Kyalami suggested it worked well enough for Murray to run the car
with a much slimmer rear wing.

Photo by: James Mann

Murray's BT44 saw the first signs of ground-effect aerodynamics coming to the fore

“We kept it secret until the Austrian Grand Prix in 1975, when we had a fuel leak in the pits,” recalled Murray. “They lifted the car up – I told them not to – and Alastair Caldwell from McLaren saw the vee. Pretty soon everybody had one.”

The revisions made the BT44 a sweeter-handling, more responsive, quicker car than its predecessor but Brabham’s 1974 campaign was hindered by some of the same old problems: inconsistency inside and outside the cockpit and a lack of funds made obvious by the team’s plain white livery. Bernie, always averse to dipping into his own pockets, persisted with a string of pay-drivers in the second seat (Richard Robarts for a handful of races before handing over to Rikky von Opel, then latterly the much more gifted Carlos Pace).

On its grand prix debut at Reutemann’s home race in Buenos Aires, the BT44 could have won – Carlos took off into the lead but then spluttered  to a halt on the final lap. Somehow the team had missed a fuel churn in the hurly-burly ahead of the race start. In Brazil Reutemann’s front-row qualifying position was squandered – and this would be a recurring theme – by soft-compound tyres which faded during the race. Bernie, it’s said, liked to insist on soft-compound tyres because he failed to grasp the trade-off between performance and degradation.

For round three, in South Africa, Brabham’s pair of BT44s bore Texaco decals. It might have looked like a big-bucks acquisition, compensating for Ecclestone missing out on the deal that took Marlboro to McLaren, but in fact Bernie had lost at cards to a Texaco suit and this was the forfeit. What a weekend to be unlucky at the table: thanks to a combination of Ferrari’s Niki Lauda retiring and Lotus struggling with the new electronic-clutch 76, Reutemann won by over half a minute.

Returning to blank-page white, the BT44s netted just two more victories in 1974, both at fast circuits which demanded agility: the Osterreichring and Watkins Glen. Pace, a top-drawer driver available at a bargain rate after falling out with John Surtees mid-season, made it a 1-2 in the USA. John Watson netted two points finishes in his privateer BT44 run
by Paul Michaels’ Goldie Hexagon Racing outfit.

Over the winter Brabham recalled and stripped the two chassis used by Hexagon and rebuilt them in Murray’s B-spec, with a neater, smaller crash structure and nose cone up front, a slightly slimmer cockpit, tidier and more aero-optimal radiator plumbing, and new rear brake ducting. Murray also knocked back a job offer from Colin Chapman, reveling in the creative freedom Ecclestone gave him.

For 1975 Ecclestone landed what is surely one of motor racing’s most visually pleasing sponsors: Martini. The blue and red stripes complemented the BT44B’s angular lines and the season got off to a competitive but frustrating start as Reutemann again fell short of victory on home ground, this time as terminal understeer set in on the closing laps. Engine failure had caused Pace to spin out of a leading position.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Adorned with the iconic Martini sponsorship, the Brabham BT44B took a win apiece for Reutemann and Pace in 1975

Poor tyre choice – again – meant Reutemann went backwards at Interlagos but Pace went on to record what would be his only F1 victory at the circuit which now bears his name. With the January racing out of the way, the circus reconvened at Kyalami in March. Brabham locked out the front row but Pace was troubled by brake issues and Reutemann couldn’t hold off the charging Tyrrell of home hero Jody Scheckter.

Reutemann racked up three more podiums, plus a win at the Nürburgring. But retirements at Silverstone and Watkins Glen and a poor showing in Austria cost him his shot at the drivers’ title, since only the best six results of each half of the season counted. Car development halted mid-season as Ecclestone landed another big commercial fish: Alfa Romeo, ambitious to return to the fray with a flat-12 engine after a 25-year hiatus. Given Ferrari’s increasing dominance against a pack largely composed of Cosworth customers the multi-cylinder logic was sound; still, there was no chance of shoehorning the Alfa into the BT44B. New car required.

Neither the overweight and underpowered flat-12 or the V12 which replaced it were especially competitive but Murray relished the challenge, enjoyed Alfa’s “delightfully unstructured” approach, and continued to appreciate Ecclestone’s backing such that he continued to turn down offers from Chapman in the years to come.

Brabham cars began to achieve a consistency of results their engineering warranted in the early 1980s, when Murray’s still mould-breaking ideas designs were propelled by equally outrageous BMW turbo four-pots

The BT44s were sold on to the RAM team run by another Ecclestone chum, John Macdonald, where they raced on through 1976 – albeit steered by talents rather less prodigious than Carloses Reutemann and Pace. Brabham cars began to achieve a consistency of results their engineering warranted in the early 1980s, when Murray’s still mould-breaking ideas designs were propelled by equally outrageous BMW turbo four-pots rather than temperamental Italian multi-cylinders.

Race record

Starts: 69    
Wins: 5    
Poles: 2      
Fastest laps: 4     
Podiums: 9    
Championship points: 88

Specification

Chassis: Aluminium monocoque   
Suspension: Double wishbones with pullrod-actuated, inboard-mounted rising-rate springs/dampers (f); Multi-link with coil-over shock absorbers (r)
Engine: Naturally aspirated Cosworth DFV 90-degree V8  
Engine capacity: 2993cc      
Power: 460bhp @ 10500 rpm     
Gearbox: Five-speed Hewland manual
Brakes: Steel discs front and rear      
Tyres: Goodyear
Weight: 570kg     
Notable drivers: Carlos Reutemann, Carlos Pace

Photo by: James Mann

It wasn't a world beater, but it led Murray on to greater things to come