Why Gordon Murray’s Brabham BT55 never fulfilled its lowline promise

Forty years ago Gordon Murray introduced the world to the Brabham BT55, a car whose roller-skate profile looks extraordinary even today, never mind when compared with some of its ungainly rivals in 1986.

It was a bold concept, but it carried some flaws that meant that it didn’t fulfil its potential. Sadly it is also remembered as the car in which Elio De Angelis lost his life in a testing accident at Paul Ricard.

The Brabham may have been a failure, but some of its DNA was retained by Murray when he moved to McLaren, and implanted it in the MP4/4 that dominated the 1988 season in the hands of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.

The BT55 was Murray’s attempt to return Bernie Ecclestone’s team to the form that saw it winning titles with Nelson Piquet in 1981 and 1983. That last success was followed by two years of disappointment – the 1984 season was lost to unreliable KKK turbos on the BMW engine, and then 1985 was largely wasted trying to adjust to a change to Pirelli tyres.

“I kept having Bernie switch things on me,” Murray recalls. “Just when it looked like the BT44 was going to be invincible we went to a big heavy old flat-12 Alfa engine in 1976. And then we went back to Cosworth and were immediately competitive. Then we struggled to get the BMW to work. When we got that to work, we changed tyres. That was another Bernie thing, ‘Deal with this one, Gordon…’”

Looking to make a step, Murray began to explore the ‘lowline’ concept that would be at the heart of the BT55.

“It wasn’t so much lowering the centre of gravity, although that helped, obviously,” he recalls. “The main thing was the lift/drag was phenomenal, as the rear wing was in such clean air. The one thing that was constant and bad even with the BT52 was that upright BMW engine with the airbox right in front of the rear wing. And I tried everything I could. We tried it open, we tried it faired in, we tried a separate pod. And it was pretty obvious from the wind tunnel results. Once in desperation, I just shaved that off [in the tunnel], and of course the rear wing came to life. So after three years of that, I thought I’ve got to do something to get rid of that airbox.”

“Gordon presented a car that was very different from all the rest”

The inspiration came from a Brabham Indycar project he’d worked on with Ron Tauranac in 1971, and which featured a lay-down Offenhauser engine and a gearbox from US wizard Pete Weismann.

“We had the crankshaft miles off to one side, and the diff in the middle, so how do you get around that?” says Murray. “Pete came up with a Z-drive gearbox; the gears brought the output shaft back in line with the diff. That always stuck in my head. And at the end of this three-year period with the upright BMW, I thought I’ll do the same thing, I’ll take the engine, lay it down and then I’ll ring Pete and tell him I want another modern Z-drive gearbox. Which is exactly what I did.”

Murray says that BMW’s Paul Rosche was happy to produce a special version of the engine: “We had just won a world championship with them. And they knew the next year was their problem with the turbos, for which they apologised.”

Packaging the drivers in what was also the team’s first all-carbon chassis was a key part of the concept. Brabham newcomer De Angelis and his team-mate Riccardo Patrese – returning after two years at Alfa – were obliged to lie more or less flat in the cockpit.

“I was there when Elio and Riccardo came along to sit in the mock-up,” recalls engineer John Gentry. “And the mock-up was even more extreme than the final version. The steering wheel was almost horizontal, with the steering column going down between the driver’s legs, which was not much fun. And the guys just laughed. Their chins were digging into their chest. And the horizontal steering wheel was like driving a bus!”

The drawbacks became obvious in the first track test at Donington.

“I did one lap and I came back to the pits,” says Patrese. “And I said, ‘There is a problem. I cannot breathe in this car.’ I couldn’t breathe at all. Because being so flat down, to look forward I had to bend my neck too much.”

That was only partially addressed with a tweaked seating position. Despite his discomfort Patrese was excited by the BT55.

“Gordon as usual wanted to do something special, because he presented a car that was very different from all the rest,” he says. “Very flat, very low, with an engine put in an unconventional way. There was a lot of expectation, because, of course, everybody had the hope that the car could perform quicker than anybody else. And the car also was very beautiful to look at.”

“We were all so confident beforehand,” says team manager Herbie Blash. “I remember being in the pub with Bernie and Gordon, and we had the two drivers. It was before we went off to Rio, and we were talking about who’s going to win the first race. We’d already won the world championship as far as we were all concerned! This car was so special. And unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.”

Ecclestone insists that he was more cautious: “Honestly, I react to reality, not dreams of people. When designers come up with a car and think it’s going to win the championship, well that’s why you built it, for that purpose. So I never took notice of things like that. I’ll have a look and see…”

Once proper running got underway in the warm climes of Rio some fundamental issues with the engine and the oil system emerged.

“Unfortunately, it all took so long that we finished the car just before the first race,” says Murray. “And the engine just never, ever worked. We couldn’t control the oil temperature. As long as you ran the engine it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter. And in right-handers, I think it was, all the oil was staying up in the cylinder head and getting thrashed to death by the valve gear, losing all the horsepower and massively increasing the oil temperature. I knew we’d cocked up on laying the engine over.”

There were also some fundamental issues with the suspension.

“The only place to put the springs and dampers was at the extreme rear of the gearbox, where they were sort of out of sight,” says Murray’s number two David North. “There was nowhere else to bury them without completely messing up the airflow. The biggest problem with having them at the back was all that load, all that torsion, had to be transmitted along the length of the magnesium gearbox case. A bit of a disaster. That wasn’t the only thing – the wishbones were asymmetric, and it was all pretty nasty.”

“When designers come up with a car and think it’s going to win, well that’s why you built it”

“The rear end of the car just didn’t work at all,” Murray confirms. “We had no way out really; the driveline angles were ridiculous. The monocoque wasn’t stiff enough, the wheelbase was too long for traction. But the big problem was that the engine wouldn’t scavenge the oil back from the cylinder head.”

After a poor first weekend in Brazil Ecclestone told the team to stay on in Rio and sort things out.

“The car was so long the acceleration was not so good, just because of that low centre of gravity,” says Gentry. “My feeling was if you’ve got a low centre of gravity, your weight transfer is going to be less, which is a good thing. But with this car, it just didn’t work. We did change the cooling system quite a bit. Because the car was completely closed in, the oil temperature was massive, and water temperature wasn’t great either.”

It wasn’t a complete disaster – Patrese somehow qualified sixth in Monaco, a track that shouldn’t have suited the long wheelbase. Still adjusting to his new team after six seasons with Lotus, De Angelis had a torrid time, not bettering 14th on the grid in his first four attempts. He wanted more time in the car.

“After Monaco I was due to go to Paul Ricard,” recalls Patrese. “And Elio came to me and he said, ‘Riccardo, could you make me a favour to let the test be for me, because I’m not yet comfortable with the car? If I can do some more mileage probably it’s a help for me.’ And I said, ‘Elio for me, it’s not a problem. If you want to do the test, we ask the team. And if they agree, you go to the test.’”

De Angelis duly went to Paul Ricard. On the second morning he lost control at the fast sequence of bends after the pitstraight, a result it was believed of a rear wing endplate detaching. The car flipped over the barrier and landed upside down, and a small fire started. As it began to take hold, the circuit’s inadequate marshalling service couldn’t cope. Despite the best efforts of drivers who stopped at the scene and crew members from various teams who dashed from the pits he couldn’t be saved.

“We drove down there,” says Murray. “To be fair, in those days not many test tracks had good marshalling. A guy arrived. He had one or two little hand extinguishers which were quickly emptied, and then the fire truck came in, and they connected that up, which probably would have put it out. We were trying to turn the car over, and we couldn’t get too close because of the fire. The hose fell off the fire truck. And that was it.”

“It was just a dreadful year. That really was the last straw for me. I’d never lost a driver before”

The tragedy was a devastating blow for Murray and the team: “It was just a dreadful year, full stop. That really was the last straw for me. I’d never lost a driver before, and to lose the guy so needlessly with no fire extinguisher there – he only had a broken collarbone after the accident – it was a needless death, really.”

Ecclestone had previously experienced tragedies, with Stuart Lewis-Evans after the 1958 Moroccan Grand Prix, and Jochen Rindt at Monza in 1970.

“It was different in as far as I wasn’t as close to him as I was with Jochen and Stuart,” he concedes. “But it was bad news for me because he was killed in our car. We built the bloody car, that’s what upset me. There’s not much you can do about it.”

Ecclestone rallied the team and got it to the next race at Spa with a single car for Patrese. There was no shortage of willing volunteers for the vacant seat, but for Montreal he chose someone who hadn’t put himself forward.

“It wasn’t right to call Bernie or Gordon or anybody,” says Derek Warwick, then driving for Jaguar in sports car racing. “I felt there’s always a grieving moment for the team. I just thought that would be wrong. So I didn’t make any contact at all for maybe 10 days. Then Bernie called, and I think he liked the fact that out of respect I didn’t call anybody, because he said he had people phoning within hours, trying to fill the seat.”

Things didn’t get off to a great start with a testing crash at Donington, and Warwick found the car difficult. “I did a lot of boxing when I was younger – I broke my nose a lot of times,” he says. “Sitting in the car with my head down, I couldn’t breathe at all. The seating position was difficult for me. And it was difficult for me because obviously they’d loved Elio, and equally they loved Riccardo. He is such a nice guy as well, and he was clearly number one in the team, and I just had to pick up the bits.”

While reliability remained an issue the BT55 did show improved form as the year went on, with sheer BMW grunt propelling the low-drag device along. Patrese qualified as high as fourth in Austria and fifth in Mexico.

“The car was definitely better in very quick circuits, like Hockenheim, Monza or Zeltweg,” says the Italian. “And it was a little bit of a lazy car in the slow circuits. A quick circuit probably we could use the extra power that the BMW engine could give to us. But I think in the end it never came to a point that we felt very competitive, that’s for sure.”

“The BT55 had slightly better aerodynamics than the MP4/4”

“We had something like 1300bhp,” says Warwick, who qualified seventh at Monza. “You could not change gear quick enough. It was just amazing. I remember smiling all the way around the lap because it was just phenomenal. I was on a great lap, and the thing shit itself in the middle of the Parabolica. Otherwise I’d have been further up the grid.”

At one stage the team experimented with a shorter chassis – but it didn’t have the fuel capacity to do a race. Brabham finished the season with just two points from a pair of sixth places, much to Murray’s frustration.

“It was pretty dreadful,” he concedes. “When the wind tunnel told us how much better it was, we were all buoyant. Until we ran the thing, and it was useless! And of course that caused friction between BMW and us for the first time, which wasn’t pleasant.

“We’d just lost Nelson, with a money argument with Bernie, and Nelson had been with us for seven years. And that was like losing a right arm. The engine contract was going to come to a close at the end of the following year. And to top it all, Bernie had really lost interest in the team, and was much, much more focused on F1, and making it what it is today. So it was a bit demotivating altogether. And then when Elio got killed, it was like, ‘I think that’s it for me.’”

Romanced by Ron Dennis, with the carrot of a road car project a few years down the line, Murray went to McLaren.

“I did take the drawings,” he admits. “These days, you would probably get locked up for that! It wasn’t all the drawings; I knew we wouldn’t make the monocoque the same way, and we wouldn’t have a Z-drive gearbox.