BRM's Bourne birthday bash

Several thousand cheering BRM fans lined the streets of Bourne on August 29 to watch a parade of the marque’s finest machinery celebrate its 50th anniversary.

BRM’s founder Raymond Mays (whose centenary year this is) was a son of Bourne and in 1934 he and Humphrey Cook rolled the first ERA out of the works. The fabled voiturette was back, amid of its stablemates including Mays’ favourite giant-killer R4D, Bruce Spollon’s ex-Earl Howe R8C, Donald Day’s R14B and Duncan Ricketts’s GP1.

Musical four, eight, 12 and H16-cylinder cars, from the front-engined P25 to triangular-tubbed P201 of 1974-5, joined the V16s to tell the story of BRM, with Richard Attwood, Jackie Oliver and Howden Ganley among the ex-works drivers demonstrating them. Graham Hill’s 1962 World Championship-winner was a static display.

Former BRM designer Mike Pilbeam also ran a hillclimb machine at the pageant, organised by BRM expert Rick Hall, the world’s leading restorer of the marque.