It sounds as if you've got a 707 behind you, about to suck you up and devour you like an enormous monster

Whoosh! That’s what the crowds at the 1965 Le Mans heard as the Rover-BRM passed on its way to 10th place, and highest-placed British entry. Not bad for an experimental gas turbine, incorrectly placed in the same 2-litre class as the all-conquering Porsche 911s.

Jackie Stewart said of the experience, ‘I still recall it fondly: a terrific-looking car, and it was a real feather in everybody’s cap to be involved in such a technical achievement – we finished, after all.’ It’s a mark of the importance of this car that not only Stewart but also Graham Hill and Richie Ginther raced it, gaining publicity not just in the UK and Europe but worldwide.

Rover’s efforts with gas turbines began during World War Two, working with Rolls-Royce and Frank Whittle. But Rover’s Maurice Wilks was looking beyond aircraft, seeing a future for gas turbine passenger cars, and after the war launched into a development programme that spawned the world’s first gas turbine-powered car, Jet 1 (now in the Science Museum), three passenger cars (T2, T3 and T4) and the racer you see here.

Before the start of the 1962 Le Mans race, Rover managing director William Martin-Hurst had demonstrated the T4 round the circuit, prompting the race organisers to invite Rover to take part in the following year’s 24 Heures du Mans, competing for a 25,000NF prize (£1800) for the first gas turbine car to complete 3600km in the 24-hour race – an average speed of 93mph.

Martin-Hurst was keen, and a chance meeting at an SMMT dinner with Sir Alfred Owen, chairman of The Owen Group (component suppliers to Rover, with BRM within the group), provided a solution to the inevitable problems of lack of development time and experience.

BRM supplied the chassis from Richie Ginther’s Formula One car, which he’d crashed on the first lap of the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix. With modifications to the rear end to house the gas turbine engine and a curvaceous spider body in aluminium, the car was, against the odds, ready for testing by April 1963. Graham Hill was drafted in for tests at MIRA – and was taken by surprise by its curious characteristics (explained on pages 86-87).

‘You’re sitting in this thing you might call a motor car and the next minute it sounds as if you’ve got a 707 behind you, about to suck you up and devour you like an enormous monster.

‘You have to hold the thing on the [left foot] brake, because there’s a residual power output even when it is idling – and slow is 30,000rpm, some tickover!

‘To apply the power you put your [right] foot on the little button [accelerator pedal] and you get full power. At the same time you have to keep your foot on the brake as the thing is permanently in gear. If it wasn’t, it would just rev up ’til it burst at some astronomical revs.

‘In a gas turbine all that happens when you back off is that the engine just slowly dies away, but you are still producing power; when you back off for the first time you think the throttle is stuck wide open because the car doesn’t slow down at all – it’s still accelerating because it’s still got power. Then you panic and jump with both feet on the brake and the damn thing stops on its nose. But even then it doesn’t stop all that quickly because the engine is still driving. All you succeed in doing is to lock up the front wheels, which aren’t being driven. And to lock up the back wheels you’ve got to stop the turbine – and that takes some doing; it’s still spinning at a few thousand rpm. You wouldn’t want a brake failure on a machine like this – you’d never stop it!’ (For Hill’s full description, see the book BRM2 by Doug Nye.)

To counter this, Hill and Ginther (Hill’s driving partner for the ’63 Le Mans) would brake hard well before the corner (300 yards before the end of the Mulsanne Straight, for example) and then come off the brakes and onto the accelerator pedal before the corner (100 yards before at Mulsanne). If the timing was right, the power would start to come back in (slowly) just as the car exited the corner...

At Le Mans the Rover-BRM ran under the race number 00, as an experimental car, and was permitted to carry twice the permitted capacity of fuel for the 2-litre class that the gas turbine was initially thought to be equivalent to (by virtue of its 150bhp – although it was proved later that it should have been classed as a 1600).

The car performed admirably, finishing the race, achieving the required 3600km with over three hours to spare, hitting more than 140mph on the Mulsanne Straight and averaging 107.8mph and 6.97mpg.
A magnificent achievement.

The following year the Rover-BRM was back, this time with the new coupé bodywork that you see here, cutting-edge technology ceramic heat exhangers on the engine that would double its fuel efficiency, and new rear suspension in line with BRM’s latest chassis developments.

But the tiny team responsible for the gas turbine race development was pushed to the limit, and ran out of time to fully test the new-format engine before the June 1964 race, not helped by damage sustained by the trailer on the way back from testing in April. It was decided to withdraw the team’s entry.

» Thanks to the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon, Warks, +44 (0)1926 641188, www.heritage-motor-centre.co.uk. A DVD of the Rover-BRM at Le Mans will be released by the Centre later this year – keep an eye on the Centre’s online shop or the Octane Books & DVDs pages.