“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. But us Brits, how we love a glorious failure! In the decades since, the V16 has turned from national joke to national treasure, cherished for its rarity, the sheer pluck behind its creation – and that certain sound.
As a small boy at a British Grand Prix some time in the 1980s, I covered my ears as a pair of V16s paraded around Silverstone. While those around me unkindly professed amazement that they had made it as far as our vantage point at Stowe corner, the hairraising blare from those 16 cylinders, buried in the long, bluff snout, was like some symphony from hell. I had never heard anything like it – and was utterly bewitched.
Bourne out of love
They have the same effect today. At the Goodwood Revival last year, the four originals drew a constant crowd in the paddock, as did a very special fifth example: a new P15 taking its public bow, created in remarkable painstaking detail from original drawings.
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