1958 BRM P57

This car competed in the HGPCA Pre '60 GP Car Race at the Coys International Historic Festival meeting at Silverstone in August 1996.

It's Bruce McCaw's 1958 BRM P25, chassis P25/7, and was driven in the race by Robin Hall. BRM’s in-period Project 25 classification covered the engine design alone, the spaceframe chassis structure comprising Project 27. This car is the seventh of the team’s 2,491cc 4-cylinder Type 25s to be built and was the second 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’. 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.