British Racing Motors

Formula One team

BRM, Britain's National Racing Project

Conceived as an all British challenger after the war, BRM struggled for a decade before Graham Hill brought it the 1962 championship.

British Racing Motors was founded in 1945 by Raymond Mays, who had built ERA racing cars before the war, and his longtime associate Peter Berthon. The idea was a national prestige project, an all British Grand Prix car paid for by the motor industry through a trust fund, and it was based in the Lincolnshire market town of Bourne. Its first engine, a supercharged V16 of great power and great difficulty, proved unreliable, and as backers lost patience the industrialist Alfred Owen of the Rubery Owen group took over the whole team. From 1954 to 1970 the works cars were entered as the Owen Racing Organisation.

BRM first started a World Championship race at the 1951 British Grand Prix, but its first victory did not come until Jo Bonnier won the 1959 Dutch Grand Prix. The breakthrough season was 1962, when Graham Hill won four races, the drivers' championship and the constructors' title for BRM. Hill won ten races for the team in all, including three at Monaco, and BRM finished second in the constructors' standings in 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1971.

Jackie Stewart won twice for BRM in the middle 1960s, and Pedro Rodríguez, Jo Siffert and Peter Gethin added wins in the early 1970s. The last came at the 1972 Monaco Grand Prix with Jean Pierre Beltoise. The Owen Organisation later ended its support, and Louis Stanley, husband of Alfred Owen's sister Jean, kept the team going on a smaller scale.

BRM's final World Championship start came in 1977, the year of its last entries. Across 23 seasons from 1951 to 1977, its cars started 197 championship races and won 17.

Drivers

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