BRM P48

The P48 retained the mechanical core of the P25, including its 2.5-litre straight-four engine producing 275 horsepower. One of its most distinctive and controversial features was a single brake disc at the rear, mounted directly to the gearbox rather than at each wheel. To manage cooling around this arrangement, the rear bodywork was cut away, leaving the spinning disc exposed. Mechanics and observers took to calling it the "bacon slicer" — an affectionate but apt nickname given the hazard it presented.

During the 1960 season, engineer Tony Rudd developed a substantially revised Mark II version of the car. The Mark II replaced the single rear disc with a conventional two-disc layout, simplified the rear suspension to a wishbone configuration, and reduced the overall profile of the car considerably. The handling improvements were significant enough that BRM based their entire 1961 chassis programme on the Mark II's principles.

BRM entered three P48s for Joakim Bonnier, Graham Hill, and Dan Gurney. The car debuted at the Monaco Grand Prix, the second race of the season, and produced a surprising result: all three entries reached the finish. Bonnier scored a fifth place, suggesting the team might be competitive. That optimism proved short-lived. Each of the three drivers managed only one further finish for the remainder of the year.

At the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, Hill brought his car home in third place behind Jack Brabham's Cooper and Innes Ireland's Lotus, which represented the car's best result of the season. The same weekend was overshadowed by catastrophe when Gurney's rear brake failed on the approach to Zandvoort's first hairpin. His BRM rolled into the spectator enclosure, killing one person and injuring several others. The incident added urgency to Rudd's work on the revised rear brake arrangement.

After Zandvoort, the team scored only once more, with Bonnier finishing in the United States Grand Prix. BRM ended the 1960 season with eight championship points, a result that reflected the car's chronic unreliability.

The Mark II development cars were raced in the 1961 Intercontinental Formula series, where they gave a better account of themselves on the revised regulations. Dan Gurney drove a P48 to victory in the Victorian Trophy at the Ballarat Air Strip circuit in Victoria, Australia, in 1961 — the only outright race win associated with the P48 model.

The P48 represented BRM's reactive rather than visionary approach to the rear-engined transition that reshaped Formula One at the turn of the 1960s. While the car itself was a stopgap, the development lessons absorbed during the season — particularly through Tony Rudd's Mark II — fed directly into the more competitive cars BRM would field as the 1.5-litre formula began in 1961. The P48's single season encapsulates both the difficulty of hurried design iteration in top-level motorsport and the dangers that mechanical compromises could pose not just to drivers but to spectators.