MOTORSPORT
BOURNE AGAIN
RACING LINES
Lincolnshire’s BRM returns after a long-lost treasure surfaces
Damien Smith
BRM was launched at RAF Folkingham in December 1949
“As bad as it gets!” fired back Sir Stirling Moss when I once asked for his verdict on the BRM P15 V16, Britain’s first true Formula 1 car. “I can’t think of anything that was good about that car other than the brakes and gearbox – and the fact that it broke so early you couldn’t do many miles. An absolutely appalling car, boy.”
It’s fair to say that our much-missed hero never was one to varnish his opinion. But that damnation, forever frozen by his unhappy experience in the 1952 Ulster Trophy race at Dundrod, stuck for a car that was supposed to keep the British end up in the early years of the F1 World Championship. Instead, in the face of Italian domination courtesy of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Maserati, it became something of a national embarrassment: too complex, too unreliable, too much of a handful… The P15 – universally known as the BRM V16 – became emblematic of the setting sun that cast lengthening shadows on our crumbling empire in the 1950s.