It has been 50 years since Graham Hill won the Formula One World Championship for BRM, and this achievement was celebrated at the Shelsley Walsh Hillclimb meeting on the first weekend of June.
This venue’s connection with the marque goes back even further, as one of BRM’s founders, Raymond Mays, regularly competed at Shelsley Walsh in the 1920s and 1930s and held the hill record on many occasions.
Several significant BRM Grand Prix cars were on display at the meeting, including the P25 in which Jo Bonnier gave BRM its first World Championship race victory at the Dutch Grand Prix in 1959. This car was fresh from a 2nd-place finish at the recent Grand Prix de Monaco Historique in the hands of its owner, Gary Pearson.
Bruce Spollon brought along his ex-Bonnier and Hill P48 (one of two P48s on display) which, appropriately for this venue, was also driven in period by racer and hillclimb champion Tony Marsh. Another hillclimb car on display was the Roy Lane Techcraft BRM that now resides in the Coventry Transport Museum.
The distinctive P57 with its “stackpipe” exhausts from 1962 had also been brought along in the iconic BRM transporter by preparation experts Hall and Hall. Delighting the crowds with a couple of runs up the hill on Saturday was the superb ex-Jackie Stewart P261, driven on this occasion by Mike Luck of Classic World Racing, which looks after the car for current owners Richard Attwood and Mike Ostroumoff.
On the Sunday, many of the original BRM personnel gathered together, including David Owen OBE (son of former team owner Sir Alfred Owen), Tim Parnell (son of Reg Parnell and a former team manager) and Tony Southgate (designer of the P153 and P160). Despite the unseasonal weather, some of the original mechanics also made the long journey from Bourne in Lincolnshire, where BRM was based, to take part in the celebration.
A large number of spectators also braved the conditions to witness this unique gathering of cars and personnel associated with this iconic marque.
