It was accompanied by the new
630 version, again with B.R.M. power but tragedy quickly intervened
when Roby Weber, one of France's most promising young up-and-coming
drivers lost control on the Mulsanne Straight and crashed fatally
 For the race that year
two further 630 chassis appeared, 02 for Pescarolo/Jaussaud and
03 for Beltoise/Servoz-Gavin, the former race number 30 (with a
red band across the "bonnet") and the latter race number
29 (with a green band). The motor let go in the twelfth hour on
the Beltoise car and Pescarolo's car had the driver's door snatch
off and had to be retired. This was the last time Matra used the
B.R.M. engine at Le Mans but interestingly 630-03 was the chassis
to be fitted with Matra's own V-12 engine which so nearly did so
well in the 1968 race (see FSW 04-2003).
But it is not the end
of our story! The B.R.M. V-8 made another appearance, this time
again short-lived, in the Nomad Group 6 sports-racer in 1969. This
was the second of three cars constructed at the behest of Mark Konig
who had campaigned Lotus cars beforehand. He commissioned his mechanic
Bob Curl to come up with the multi-tubular space-frame design and
the first car was fitted with a Williams and Pritchard aluminium
coupe body enclosing a Ford twin-cam 1600c.c. engine.
This car first appeared
at Crystal Palace in May 1967 and went on to a class win in the
Auvergne 300 kms and a further class win (with Tony Lanfranchi)
in the Paris 1,000 kms. But it was considered too heavy and a glass-fibre
tail and doors were fitted. Retirements followed and so a B.R.M.
1.5 litre V-8 was substituted, bringing some useful continental
results. |
For
1969 the original car was sold and the second Nomad built, this
one an open spyder with an ultra-light glass-fibre body. It used
a number of B.R.M. components such as wheels and suspension uprights
and was given a 2-litre B.R.M. V-8, producing 250 b.h.p. coupled
to a Hewland FT400 gearbox under a long sweeping tail. This is how
it ran at Le Mans that year, Konig having the experienced Lanfranchi
as co-driver. But car number 62 did not get far and I recall the
writer's disappointment at seeing it become one of the earliest
callers at its pit after the start! Eventually trouble with the
oil seal in the gearbox accounted for its early retirement. This
therefore concluded Rudd's B.R.M. contribution to Le Mans history.
The marque B.R.M., however,
was revived as an entity in 1992 under the inspiration of John Mangoletsi,
complete with the backing of the Owen Organisation. This was the
P.351 designed by Paul Brown and equipped with a V-12 engine, the
work of Graham Dale-Jones. Development work was done by Terry Hoyle
with technological support from Ricardo, the designers of Audi's
remarkable race-winning transmission of recent times.
The car, however, was
not really ready and all sorts of problems bedevilled its early
life. It missed its intended debut at Silverstone and, on arrival
for practice at Le Mans, Wayne Taylor was the only driver to get
a chance to qualify before it expired on the Mulsanne Straight.
Strangely (or was the sparse number of starters that year anything
to do with it?) co-drivers Harri Toivonen and Richard Jones were
seemingly going to be allowed to take part without even qualifying!
Anyway, Taylor took the
opening stints which constituted some twenty laps by midnight by
which time the car had had enough and so the problem of drivers
never arose, a relief, I'm sure, for the organisers!
Thus ended the part played
by B.R.M. in the story of the 24-hour race. Modellers might like
to note that the Matra 620s are available from DAM (kits DAM022,
023 & 025), JPS (JPS281) and Mini Racing (MRA620) and the B.R.M.
P.351 is made by Provence Moulage (PM2820). We await the Nomad to
complete the chapter! |
I
was sorry to learn of the recent passing of that fine motor engineer
Tony Rudd, albeit at a good old age. He was, of course, the man
who put some sense into B.R.M. and in 1961 his 1æ litre V-8 engine
appeared and it went on in the following season to give Graham Hill
his first World Championship and to impart some real credibility
to those famous three letters. B.R.M.'s priority was naturally the
world of Formula 1 and Rudd's design brought many wins for the marque.
The V-8's capacity was also later stretched to 2-litres, in which
format it scored successes in the Tasman series of races run in
those times in the Antipodes during our "off" season.
We don't therefore naturally
link the name B.R.M with sports cars although lack of F1 success
in the later seventies steered their thinking into creating a Can-Am
contender. It was also an unnatural name to be associated with such
a long distance event as Le Mans. However, there was input from
B.R.M. not least in the chassis of the first turbine contender,
the Rover-B.R.M. of 1963-65 although for the purpose of this article
I am going to concentrate on the involvement of Rudd's V-8.
It was Matra which first
harnessed its services in 1966. Matra itself was a relative newcomer
to the motor racing scene and started out by taking over the ailing
René Bonnet concern whose cars were made in their Romorantin
factory south of Orléans. They started with Formula 3 cars,
designed and constructed by engineers used to working with space-bound
missiles and Beltoise's exciting win in the 1965 Rheims Formula
3 race put the company on the racing map.
Being French, the company
soon turned its eyes towards Le Mans and the order was given to
create a sports-prototype for the 1966 race. The first of these,
labelled M620, underwent aerodynamic tests on the airfield at Villacoublay
in south west Paris only in March in the hands of Jo Schlesser and
it was powered by the 2-litre B.R.M V-8. This same car then appeared
in a sort of matt-grey finish at the Le Mans test days when, with
Schlesser and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud driving it finished ninth quickest.
|
To build up further experience it took
part in the Monza and Spa 1000 kilometre races but with no success
and eventually was nominated as the team's reserve at the Le Mans
race.
Meanwhile three similar
machines were hastily constructed for the race, the second chassis
running for the first time only a week before! The third and fourth
cars had bigger brakes but they only arrived for the race itself!
The line-up was as follows: car 41, with yellow off-side front wing,
was chassis 04 entrusted to Beltoise and Servoz-Gavin; car 42, chassis
03, had red as the identification and was driven by Schlesser and
Alan Rees; car 43, chassis 02, for Pescarolo and Jaussaud had what
we have come to associate with his team, the green front wing, the
colour that now dominates Pescarolo's Courage sports-racers.
Such hurried preparation
did not exactly bode for any likely result and all three failed
to finish: the Pescarolo/Jaussaud car had the B.R.M. motor fail
after eight hours - after all they were really Grand Prix units!
- the transmission on the Beltoise car cried enough after 23 hours,
while the remaining car was victim of other's problems: Schlesser
arrived at the Esses to be confronted with Georges Hélgoin's
spinning C.D-Peugeot which he could not avoid. However, he tried
to retrieve the Matra and while doing so was struck by the Ferrari
330P3 of Scarfiotti. That Matra, chassis 03, never raced again!
Later, chassis 02 was
fitted with a 4.7 litre Ford V-8 as in the GT40 and this car appeared
at the 1967 Le Mans Test Days in early April. . |
 |
|
