BRM was founded just after the Second World War by Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon. Mays had built hillclimb and road racing cars under the ERA brand before the war, and his access to prewar Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union design documents inspired him to build an all-British Grand Prix car as a national project, financed through a trust fund drawing on the British motor industry and its suppliers. When some backers withdrew, disappointed at slow progress, Alfred Owen of the Rubery Owen manufacturing group took over the team entirely. Between 1954 and 1970 the works cars competed officially as the Owen Racing Organisation.
A factory was established at Spalding Road, Bourne, Lincolnshire, in a building called The Maltings adjacent to Mays' family home, Eastgate House, and to the former ERA works. The team also used a test facility at Folkingham aerodrome.
BRM's first engine was an extraordinary 1.5-litre supercharged V16, designed to take advantage of the postwar formula that allowed either supercharged 1.5-litre or normally aspirated 4.5-litre engines. Rolls-Royce provided centrifugal superchargers rather than the more conventional Roots type. The engine produced exceptional power but delivered it over a very narrow rpm range, causing sudden wheelspin when the throttle was applied and making the Type 15 (P15) extremely difficult to drive.
The V16 won its first two starts — a Formula Libre and a Formula One event at Goodwood in September 1950, driven by Reg Parnell — but was never again so successful. Unreliability and the team's inability to develop the engine adequately caused years of embarrassment. The situation remained unresolved when new engine regulations for 1954 rendered the V16 obsolete.
The 2.5-litre four-cylinder P25 arrived late and required extensive development. It did not win a race until a victory at the Dutch Grand Prix in 1959. Colin Chapman assisted with improvements to the car in 1956, and Stirling Moss considered the BRM engine superior to the Coventry-Climax unit in his Cooper, briefly running a P25 through the British Racing Partnership in 1959.
The P25 was becoming genuinely competitive just as the rear-engined Cooper began to dominate Grand Prix racing. BRM responded with the rear-engined P48, a rapid adaptation using major P25 components. When the 1.5-litre formula took effect in 1961 the BRM engine was not ready, forcing the cars to run with Coventry-Climax four-cylinder units with little success. Owner Alfred Owen threatened to withdraw funding unless race victories were achieved quickly.
The resolution came through engineer Tony Rudd, who had been with BRM since 1950 originally on secondment from Rolls-Royce to develop the V16's supercharging. Rudd was progressively given greater technical authority, becoming chief development engineer and eventually chief executive. Under his management the team's long-standing basic engineering and reliability problems finally disappeared.
BRM built a new 1.5-litre V8 engine (the P56) that matched Ferrari's Dino V6 and the Coventry-Climax V8. Graham Hill and Dan Gurney had briefly gone on strike in 1960 to demand better management; after full executive authority was given to Rudd in early 1962, the team's transformation was rapid. Hill won the 1962 World Drivers' Championship in the P57, giving BRM the constructors' title. The P57 V8 was also sold to privateer teams and appeared in Lotus, BRP, and other chassis during the 1.5-litre formula.
Jackie Stewart joined the team in 1965, partnering Hill. Stewart won at Monza on his debut season, and both drivers provided BRM with strong results through the mid-1960s.
For the 3-litre formula that took effect in 1966, BRM built one of motor racing's most complex engines: the H16, essentially two flat-eight units — derived from the successful 1.5-litre V8 — stacked one above the other with the crankshafts geared together. The H16 was powerful but very heavy and unreliable. Team Lotus also used the engine, and Jim Clark won the 1966 United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen in a Lotus 43 with an H16 — its only world championship victory. The engine earned BRM the nickname "British Racing Misery."
The H16 was replaced by a V12 designed by Geoff Johnson, first developed for sports car use. Pedro Rodriguez won the 1970 Belgian Grand Prix in the P153 V12, and Jo Siffert and Peter Gethin took further victories in 1971. The team's last championship win came when Jean-Pierre Beltoise drove a brilliant race through rain to win the 1972 Monaco Grand Prix. Both Siffert and Rodriguez were killed before the 1972 season began; the team went into a drawn-out decline thereafter.
The Owen Organisation ended its support, and the team was continued by Louis Stanley as Stanley-BRM until 1977. Old P201 cars were initially used with the P207 proving a complete failure. The team competed in 197 world championship Grands Prix before finally closing.
BRM's seventeen Grand Prix victories and single championship season represent a modest return for a project conceived as a national endeavour to beat the world. The V16 in particular has become a legendary piece of engineering — extraordinarily complex, spectacular in sound and appearance, but never fully tamed. In celebration of BRM's 70th anniversary, John Owen commissioned the construction of three authentic new V16 P15 cars using original engine components. A driveable virtual recreation of the H16-powered P83 and the P261 featured in the PC simulation Grand Prix Legends.