BRM's last blast: Beltoise's 'stunning' Monaco win remembered

“BRM was something else: as many characters as a stage play,” he told Simon Taylor in 2012. “Big Lou, Louis Stanley, reckoned he was the boss because he was married to Jean, […] Stanley liked to think of himself as England’s Enzo Ferrari. He was fine as long as everything was going his way and making him look good.

“There were about 20 people in the drawing office. Aubrey Woods – everybody called him Strawberry – was the engine man. Alec Stokes, who did the gearboxes, was called Budgie because his hobby was breeding budgerigars. He’d been there since 1948. Raymond Mays was still around, just being Raymond Mays. Tim Parnell was the team manager, with down-to-earth common sense and a great sense of humour.”

Southgate was the thrusting young designer to usher in a new era for the team – but he knew he had a job on his hands.

“I got there when obviously things were changing and they’d got to change,” he remembers.

“But when confronted with the likes of Lotus and the new, upwardly mobile brigade charging through the paddock in those days, I don’t think BRM could quite understand what was going on and, if it did, it didn’t know what to do about it.”

Southgate’s first effort with BRM was the P153, a clean, neat design that would bring race wins for both Pedro Rodriguez in 1970 and Jo Siffert the following year.

Ever modest, Southgate points out areas he wanted to improve, and how these carried over to Beltoise’s winning machine, the P160.

“The biggest problem was the oil system, the lubrication of the main bearings,” he says.

“The BRM V12 engine was actually very impressive. It was only two inches longer than the DFV, and it weighed the same, very light – but made at the expense of whittling everything down to the smallest size, including the bearings which were too small. Things were always breaking.

“The solution would have been to make everything a bit bigger, which would have meant an entirely new engine, a bigger cylinder block, which we couldn’t do.

“So we increased the capacity of the oil system by putting a great big oil tank on the back – it wasn’t very glamorous, but it meant Pedro won in Spa.”

What came next for Southgate – who was also juggling Can-Am designs as well as race engineering during GP weekends – was an evolution of the P153, the P160.

“That massive oil tank was cleaned up and revised, which in the end was quite neat and clean – but we were still marginal on reliability.”

What was causing the issue with reliability was Louis Stanley’s wheeze to stretch the team’s Marlboro sponsorship money – with a bit of help from a few pay drivers – to a five-car line-up, what Louis Stanley deemed a ‘World Cup’ squad of motor sport.
“You had two jobs,” Southgate recalls. “Drawing the car during the week, and engineering them on the weekend – so I literally had to handle five cars.

“I bought a tape recorder and spoke into it so I didn’t have to write down all the things we did. One driver would come in during practice, and by the time I’d got back to them four cars later, I’d have forgotten what we did! It was ridiculous. It also didn’t help the reliability with the team stretched.”

Even so, the drivers found the P160 a usable racing tool with good feedback, slightly edgier than the P153, but one that could still deliver results.

By 1972 the V12 was struggling to match the Cosworth DFV for grunt, with Southgate saying BRM was “scratching around for power”.

However, Monaco’s twisting layout nullifies the need for a bhp advantage, and come the ‘72 round (the fourth championship race of that year) new signing Jean-Pierre Beltoise was further helped by the engine’s smooth delivery, as opposed to the brutal kick of the DFV.

Beltoise, who only had limited use of his right arm after an accident in a sports car race at Reims eight years previously, had to have a hole cut in the side of monocoque to facilitate the semi-static limb. “You can always tell if it’s one of his cars,” says Southgate.

On May 14, 1972 though, nothing would hold Beltoise back. The Frenchman had talent no doubt but, up to that point, zero grand prix wins to show for his effort.

Team manager Tim Parnell told Motor Sport what he thought of their charge in 2001.

“I always felt Jean-Pierre gave us 100%,” he said. “He was a real racer, a real trier without a doubt. He had a lot of spirit – and he was terrific in the rain.”

Qualifying had put him fourth on the grid, behind Lotus driver Emerson Fittipaldi and the two Ferraris of Jacky Ickx and Clay Regazzoni.

Come race day conditions couldn’t have been much worse – Ickx was considered by many the wet weather master during this period, but Beltoise had other ideas.

As the flag fell Ickx got the power down well, but longer gear ratios for the wet helped the BRM bear down on the Belgian and nip up the inside into St Devote, sailing into the lead.

From there, it was no looking back: “He just buggered off!” remembers Southgate. “It was absolutely stunning.

“I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. It was a combination of him, the tyre and suiting the car.”

While the others fought it out for the scraps, Beltoise was imperious. By lap 21 he was 21sec ahead of Ickx, ultimately leading the entire race and winning with a margin of almost 40sec on the Ferrari man.

The BRM driver lapped the rest of the field, even, as Southgate points out “all the other BRMs! Frenchmen always seem to go a bit faster at Monaco.”

In spite of the relative speed, Beltoise lapped at a slower average pace than the last Frenchman to win Monaco, Maurice Trintignant, on a dry circuit 14 years before.

After years of struggle and pain, it was a victory Beltoise sorely deserved – not that it changed him much.

“He was no diva – on to the next one,” says Southgate.

It didn’t change much for the other protagonists either – this was a final win for the BRM team on the slow slide, and Southgate would move to Shadow for 1973, seeing the writing on the wall with Louis Stanley and co, with money running out a few years later.

Nonetheless, this last Bourne victory is still one of F1’s greatest drives.