1959 BRM P25

This car competed in the Flockhart Trophy Race for pre-1961 Front-Engined Racing Cars at the Vintage Sports Car Club's SeeRed meeting at Donington Park in May 2011.

It's Anthony Ditheridge's 1959 BRM P25, although the programme of the event shows it as number 140. BRM’s in-period Project 25 classification covered the engine design alone, the spaceframe chassis structure comprising Project 27. This car is he ninth of the team’s 2½-litre 4-cylinder Type 25s to be built and was the fourth to use the `1958 spaceframe Project 27 chassis in place of an original semi-monocoque design which had been used for the preceding five cars. Those semi-monocoque BRM Type 25s built from 1955 to 1957 are recorded within the team archive as cars ‘251’ to ‘255’. The subsequent six pure spaceframe cars built 1958-1959 were then referred to as ‘256’ to ‘2511’, even though their Project 27 chassis frames were numbered in sequence ‘27/1’ to ‘27/6’. Hence, this car was referred to in contemporary BRM team records – which survive today – as ‘259’, while its specific chassis frame stamping reads – again perfectly correctly – ‘27/4’. The P25 was said to be the fastest of the 1954-1960 Formula 1 era, partly due to the oversquare (102.87 mm bore x 74.93 mm stroke) engine allowing for larger valves to be fitted. The car was plagued with reliability problems, however, and the only Grand Prix win was Jo Bonnier's victory in the 1959 Dutch Grand Prix in chassis 258.

The car behind the BRM is the 1956 Willment Climax of Barry Cannell which took part in the 1950s Sports Racing Cars race, and has a 4-cylinder inline 1,963cc Climax FPF engine.