Raymond Mays

English racing driver from Bourne who was a driving force behind both ERA and BRM

Raymond Mays spent about three decades racing and was one of the principal figures behind two British racing stables, English Racing Automobiles and British Racing Motors. Both had their workshops behind the Mays family house on Eastgate Road, Bourne, in Lincolnshire, which made for an unusually loud back garden.

He saw army service in France with the Grenadier Guards, scored his first Brooklands victory as a Cambridge undergraduate, and became a fixture at the Shelsley Walsh hill climb, where in 1929 he fitted twin rear wheels to his car and broke the record. Later he sold tuning parts for Ford engines and wrote three books, one of them simply titled BRM. He died on the 6th of January 1980.

Teams led

• British Racing Motors, 1951 to 1959