Bend it Like Brabham — The F1 Team That Made a Mockery of the Rulebook
The Brabham team is perhaps one of Formula 1’s most notorious fallen giants. After helping to start the 1960s boom of driver-owned teams which also saw the genesis of stalwarts such as McLaren, Brabham won two drivers championships in 1966 and ’67 — including a title for team owner Jack Brabham which remains the only championship won by a driver in a car bearing his own name.
Towards the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s though, Brabham experienced a series of events which severely dented its competitiveness.
First, the reliable Repco V8 engines which had powered the team to successive championships in 1966 and 1967 lost their edge, and were superseded by the legendary Ford-Cosworth DFV, which set a new standard for Formula 1 engines.
While Brabham did switch over to the DFV from 1969 onwards, Jack Brabham himself was nearing the twilight of his driving career by then, and eventually opted to retire after the 1970 season.
Brabham also opted to sell of his stake in the team when he retired, and after one season under the stewardship of the team’s co-founder Ron Tauranac, control transferred over to the man who Brabham had sold his stake to.
That man was Bernie Ecclestone, and it is his period as owner of Brabham which this article concerns.
Ecclestone’s tenure as owner of Brabham would see the team grow in stature, and gain a reputation for pushing the limits. This was in large part the result of a decision by Ecclestone to promote a young South African engineer called Gordon Murray to the position of chief designer, replacing co-founder Tauranac.
Murray had been at Brabham since 1969, but with his new position of prominence, he had more remit to implement his ideas. It didn’t take long in this role for him to establish himself as a frontrunning designer, with cars that returned Brabham to the front of the field and which included innovative features such as rising-rate pullrod suspension and carbon brakes which are used in Formula 1 to this day.
While Murray was establishing himself as a top designer, Ecclestone was also busy upsetting the Formula 1 apple cart with his own ambition.
In 1974 he — along with several other prominent owners of British-based teams — formed the Formula One Constructor’s Association, which was intended to give a voice to F1's teams in counterbalance to the Commission Sportive Internationale which ran the sport.
As might be expected, this would see Ecclestone and to some extent his team at the very centre of political wranglings in Formula 1 over the following years.
While both Murray and Ecclestone had established themselves in F1 by the mid 1970s, it was 1978 that would prove to be the real turning point for both them and the Brabham team.
For Murray, 1978 was the year that saw him really establish his reputation as something of a maverick rather than just a good designer, and that was all down to one of the most infamous Formula 1 cars of all time — the BT46B “Fan Car”.
The fan car was Murray’s response to the utter domination of the Lotus cars of the time, which achieved unprecedented downforce figures through their use of ground effect aerodynamics.
Murray looked for a way to one-up Lotus’ cars, and found inspiration in Jim Hall’s Chaparral 2J Can-Am car which used fans to generate downforce, along with reports of the Tyrrell team experimenting with a similar system on their 008 chassis. Murray quickly got to work on adapting the fan idea to work as an upgrade for his BT46 car, with the concept promising to hugely boost the competitiveness of the Brabham and potentially even usurp the dominant position enjoyed by Lotus at the time.
Getting the concept to work was no sure thing though, as was aptly demonstrated by Tyrrell, who quickly abandoned their fan car project due to a myriad of problems. Murray chose to persevere regardless though, and by mid-season his work yielded tangible results…
It was at the Swedish Grand Prix in June that Murray’s latest brainchild was unveiled, and the paddock was somewhat predictably up in arms almost immediately.
The BT46B was visibly radical, with a large portion of the rear end of the car taken up by the exit duct of an enormous fan which was driven by the car’s Alfa Romeo 12-cylinder engine.
Protests were lodged by rival teams, most notably Lotus, who contended that the fan clearly represented a moveable aerodynamic device, which was expressly prohibited in the regulations.
Murray had pre-empted these complaints however by carefully designing the system so that more of the fan’s output went towards engine cooling than went towards creating downforce. This explanation was lent further credence by the fact that the “A-spec” BT46 design had experienced well-documented cooling issues in testing due to the failure of another of Murray’s madcap ideas to cool the car entirely using flat panel heat exchangers instead of conventional sidepod radiators.
Nevertheless, it is this kind of exploitation of the technicalities of the rulebook that Murray and Brabham would quickly become famous for.
After much furore, the fan car was eventually allowed to race, and it quickly proved highly competitive.
The cars qualified second and third for the race, with Ulsterman John Watson in second and Brabham’s Number 1 driver Niki Lauda just behind him in third. In front of both however was Mario Andretti’s Lotus 79, which took pole position.
At surface level, this would seem to suggest that perhaps the BT46B was not all it was cracked up to be, but in actuality it was a deliberate choice in order to confound rival teams.
Both Brabham cars had been sent out for qualifying with their fuel tanks full to the brim, while every other team ran minimal fuel loads in qualifying in order to extract as much lap time as possible. So effective were the BT46Bs that even while carrying all of that extra dead weight, they still lined up second and third.
Race Day provided an even more emphatic display of the fan car’s capabilities. Despite Andretti leading in the early running, and Watson retiring with car issues, the BT46B proved the class of the field.
This was particularly true after Jean-Pierre Jabouille’s Renault blew its engine which coated the track in oil, forcing most competitors to ease off. Meanwhile, the incredible downforce of the fan car allowed Lauda to simply disappear into the distance, seemingly unaffected by the slippery conditions. The Austrian won the race by some 34 seconds, and in doing so secured one of the most notorious victories in Formula 1 history.
The result only caused more protests from rivals though, which prompted a response from Brabham owner Bernie Ecclestone.
While Murray had been pushing the boundaries of F1 car design, Ecclestone had been showing similar ambition on the political side of the sport. 1978 had seen Ecclestone promoted to be chief executive of the Formula One Constructor’s Association which he had helped to found four years earlier. This made him one of the most powerful figures in the sport and placed him in direct opposition to the newly-appointed head of the CSI (soon to be renamed FISA) Jean-Marie Balestre.
Ecclestone’s new position presented a conundrum however. While he now held immense influence within the sport, his team being involved in a furore over regulations so soon after his appointment did not look good, and if Ecclestone had stepped in to protect Brabham, it would doubtless have prompted fury from FOCA’s members.
Faced with the prospect of losing support for his leadership of FOCA, Ecclestone made the decision not to fight the protests against Murray’s design. The CSI duly banned fan cars outright, meaning the BT46B has the distinction of winning the only race it entered.
In the aftermath, Murray was angered that his team boss hadn’t fought for his design, and that his work on the BT46B was rendered null and void with the exception of that one victory at Anderstorp. Nevertheless, he remained with Brabham, and it wouldn’t be too long before he’d get another chance to bend the wording of the rulebook to his will.
As the 1980s began, ground effect became the new vogue, and like most designers Murray created a new car to fit with these principles - the BT49. In its initial form it was not notably innovative, but it did turn Brabham into a legitimate title contender once again by getting the fundamentals of ground effect right and returning to the faithful Cosworth DFV engine which the team had initially left behind back in 1976.
The BT49 just failed to win the championship in its first full season, as Brabham’s new lead driver Nelson Piquet was just beaten by Williams’ Alan Jones. For 1981 though, Brabham would have a chance to hit back.
Sweeping last-minute rule changes were set to come in for the new season, with FISA looking to curtail the incredible cornering speeds enabled by ground effect by mandating that all cars ride a minimum of 6 centimetres above the ground, which would be enforced by pit lane checks at every race. This was effectively ban on the spring-loaded side skirts which were considered crucial to the ground effect of the day.
These rules were incredibly unpopular among the largely British FOCA-aligned teams, who had derived a large amount of their competitiveness from a strong understanding of ground effect. Brabham were initially among those angered by the changes, but Murray soon realised that he could turn the upheaval into a boon.
As ever, Murray carefully studied the wording of the new regulation and saw within it an opportunity. He realised that since the ride height was only checked in the pit lane, it was possible to create a system that enabled the car to be raised up clear the ride height check in the pit lane but be lowered when on track to still have full ground effect.
FISA had anticipated this to some extent and explicitly banned driver-operated devices to alter ride height, but Murray was one step ahead and devised a system which would automatically raise and lower the car’s ride height as necessary with no driver input.
The system was instead triggered by the downforce generated by the car’s conventional wings at high speed, which would compress the new C-spec BT49’s special suspension until small rubbing strips on the bottom of the car’s sidepods contacted the track, at which point ground effect would take over and keep the suspension in the compressed position. Then, once the race was over, the car would complete a slow cool-down lap to allow the suspension to gradually raise back up in order to clear the ride height check in the pit lane.
Once the kinks in the system had been worked out, Piquet and the BT49C became the pairing to beat in 1981. This was only curtailed when rivals introduced their own methods of lowering their car when out on track — many of which were driver-operated and unambiguously illegal, but which were conspicuously ignored by FISA.
That said, Brabham were far from squeaky clean themselves, facing consistent rumours of running illegal cars in 1981. Chief among these was a rumour that at least one of their chassis was significantly below the minimum legal weight limit, with both rival team personnel and even drivers repeatedly accusing Brabham of having a special set of weighted bodywork which they’d quickly attach whenever the car was called to be weighed.
The accusations could never be proven though, and Brabham remained in contention for the 1981 title.
Brabham’s primary rival was the Argentine Williams driver Carlos Reutemann, who had led the championship essentially all season through sheer consistency. By the final race the gap between he and Piquet was down to a single point though, making the Las Vegas race a decider for the ages.
When it came to that decider, the gloves were really off at Brabham. Unlike with the fan car uproar in 1978, where Ecclestone had restrained himself in order to preserve his political influence, this time he did almost the exact opposite. Clearly feeling more secure in his position as FOCA boss and the primary foil to FISA’s hegemony over Formula 1, Ecclestone did everything his considerable political clout afforded to secure the title for his team.
Notably, this included an incident which Ecclestone admitted to in an interview decades later, where he purportedly came to an agreement with title rival Reutemann’s physiotherapist to “favour Piquet instead” in the lead-up to the deciding race at the much-maligned Caesar’s Palace circuit.
Despite the underhanded nature of such a move, it appeared to have the desired effect, as on race day Reutemann seemingly inexplicably slid backwards from pole position to finish outside the points.
As a result, Piquet was able to snatch the championship and give Brabham its first title since the back-to-back Repco-powered championships of 1966 and 67 when Jack Brabham himself still owned and drove for the team.
With the long-awaited title secured, the temptation within Brabham may have been to rest on their laurels and stick with the formula that had worked for them in 1981. In actuality though, they did anything but.
Instead, Brabham opted to join the ever-growing list of teams using turbocharged engines by signing a deal with BMW, who designed a 4 cylinder turbocharged engine for them which promised to be extremely competitive. The engine made appearances in practice sessions towards the end of 1981, but with the title on the line Brabham opted to defer its race debut until next season.
1982 would also see the rules change as well, as the unpopular ride height rule introduced in 1981 was walked back by FISA, who once again opted to allow full ground effect including the floor-rubbing skirts which had been such a point of contention. The concerted campaign to skirt the rule and protest against its introduction by the FOCA teams — not least of them Brabham — had paid off.
The debut of the BMW engine and the new BT50 chassis which Murray had designed to house it at the first race of the 1982 season was very much a mixed bag. Piquet qualified the well to put new car on the front row at the Kyalami circuit, but both he and new signing Riccardo Patrese quickly succumbed to car problems during the race which put them out well before half distance.
It was decided after that inauspicious debut that the BT50 and BMW engine needed some more development time, so the old Cosworth-engined BT49 was updated once again and pushed back into service while the BT50 was worked on.
Murray knew that without the grunt of the BMW engine in the BT49 it would struggle to contend with the teams who still had turbo power. Once again though he had another trick up his sleeve to try to make up for the power difference, and yet again it was one that sent shockwaves throughout the Formula 1 paddock.
The updated D-spec BT49 was fitted with large water tanks inside its sidepods. This was explained as being the reservoir for a water cooling system for the car’s brakes — with Renault having run such a system a few years earlier which provided a convenient alibi should anyone question the system’s legality. In actuality though, its purpose was to enable the car to run well below the minimum weight limit for most of the race, just as the Brabhams had been rumoured to be doing in 1981.
While non-turbo cars such as the BT49 severely lacked in power compared to their turbocharged rivals, they had one advantage in that they could potentially be much lighter thanks to their engines being less complicated.
The issue was that the minimum weight limit was set high enough that most non-turbo cars would have to be ballasted up to meet it, which minimised this advantage against the turbos.
However, the minimum weight limit at the time also included all of the car’s fluids such as fuel, oil and water. Murray realised that he could have the weight of the car measured with the water tanks full before draining them early in the race (vaguely in the direction of the brakes) in order to run most of the event underweight. Once the race was complete, Brabham were allowed by the rules at the time to top any lost fluids back up before the car’s legality was verified post-race with another weight check, which rendered the car nominally legal.
The system proved incredibly effective, as a difficult race on the bumpy, abrasive Jacarepaguá track saw an exhausted Piquet come home to win in front of his home fans, despite the fact that the circuit was believed to favour turbocharged cars coming into the weekend.
Notably, second place on the podium was occupied by the Williams of Keke Rosberg, which also featured a non-turbo engine and which tellingly also featured a similar water tank system to the Brabham. Since Brabham and Williams were both politically aligned with Ecclestone’s Formula One Constructor’s Association, suspicion was aroused that a concerted campaign of rule bending was underway.
For Jean-Marie Balestre’s FISA, enough was enough. With a full-scale war between his organisation and Ecclestone’s FOCA already on the cards, the infamously irascible Frenchman put his foot down, and both Piquet and Rosberg were disqualified from the Brazilian Grand Prix.
While there was further political fallout following the Brazilian Grand Prix, as the FOCA teams (with the notable exception of Tyrrell) boycotted the San Marino Grand Prix in protest of the disqualifications, on the technical side Murray had already turned his attention to other areas.
Perhaps as a result of the water tank trick’s ban, the South African got to thinking and quickly realised that there was another way of running the Brabham cars at a lighter weight than their rivals for much of the race. Importantly though, this new implementation would not draw complaints from Brabham’s competitors like the water tanks or the lightweight 1981 chassis had, as what Murray was planning was unambiguously legal, but considered ludicrous.
The idea was to resurrect a concept which had been absent from grand prix racing since the 1950s — the mid-race refuelling stop.
At the time, this was considered something of a hare-brained scheme, as running non-stop had been the norm for a good 25 years. Pit stops were reserved exclusively for changes of weather or rectifying car issues, as teams believed that stopping during a race cost too much time to have any competitive merit.
Murray had realised though that by starting the race with half a tank of fuel and soft tyres his cars could sprint off into an early lead thanks to the light car and grippier tyres than their rivals. Then the car could come in for a stop at half distance to have fresh, hot tyres fitted and be filled up with the remaining fuel necessary for a final high-speed sprint to the finish, with the time lost in the pits being made up for by the lighter car and the boon of having fresh soft rubber.
The BT50 was therefore modified to allow in-race refuelling with a valve on the car’s engine cover and pneumatic air jacks in the sidepods to allow easy tyre changes. The plan also necessitated the invention of a bevy of extraneous equipment, such as a rapid fuel filling system and an oven to heat the tyres before they went on the car (the modern tyre blankets we have today would not be invented until the 1984 European Grand Prix, where they were introduced by Lotus).
The scheme was first ready to be tried at the 1982 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, with much buzz being generated among pundits over the prospect of the first planned pitstop in a quarter of a century.
Almost comically though, Brabham continually faced issues with both cars before they ever had a chance to come in for their stop. Usually these issues came in the form of reliability problems with the troublesome BMW engine, which foiled the plan at both Brands Hatch and Paul Ricard.
At the German Grand Prix though everything seemed to be going like clockwork until just two laps before Piquet was scheduled to come in for his much-anticipated stop. It seemed that fate was against Brabham though, as the backmarking ATS of Eliseo Salazar clumsily punted Piquet at the Ostkurve chicane on lap 18, prompting an infamous violent outburst from the Brazilian. The pit stop would once again have to wait.
It was at the Austrian Grand Prix that the F1 circus finally got to see what it had been waiting for. The two BT50s qualified 1–2, and for the first time both lasted just long enough in the race to make it to the mid-distance pitstop. Piquet’s stop on lap 15 was slow as the Brabham mechanics — still unused to the prospect of a mid-race stop despite constant practice — were not ready for him. Nevertheless the stop was completed successfully, though Piquet retired some time later with an electrical fault.
Teammate Patrese’s stop on the other hand was faultless, and he emerged still in the lead of the race. The concept had been well and truly proven, even if Patrese also skidded out with a locked rear axle not long after his stop. For 1983, almost all frontrunning teams looked to hop onto the refuelling bandwagon which Murray and Brabham had set in motion as they had to hold their hands up and admit that they had been legitimately out-strategised by Brabham.
Other teams joining the refuelling club wouldn’t be the only change for 1983 though, as at the very last minute FISA announced another raft of sweeping changes to the regulations. Chief among these was an outright ban on ground effect, with totally flat floors being mandated.
So late was this change announced that Brabham had actually finished construction of an early version of its planned BT51 car, which had to be abandoned. Instead, Murray quickly designed a new BT52 chassis, with its iconic arrow shape becoming evocative of that unique era of post-ground effect cars.
The car proved competitive, but was consistently troubled by reliability issues, and largely outmatched by the machines fielded by both Renault and Ferrari for much of the season. Nevertheless, Piquet and Brabham remained just in touch with the title as the season neared its climax.
It was at this critical stage of the season though that Brabham introduced something which completely changed the course of their campaign, and as you might expect at this point it was something which drew considerable ire when discovered.
What was different about this new development though is that it wasn’t dreamt up by Murray, but rather by the team’s engine supplier BMW.
All season long the Brabham had been hounded by problems with their engine, with detonation problems leading to poor reliability (particularly in Patrese’s case) and a lack of power. BMW decided that they could fix this problem through introduction of a new fuel, and contacted fellow German supplier BASF, who secretly concocted a new blend for the Brabham cars to run on from the German Grand Prix onwards.
The reason for this secrecy was because the fuel was a particularly exotic blend which BMW and Brabham knew was likely to draw suspicion from rival teams.
At the time, the rules for F1 fuel specified a maximum octane rating of 102.4, and also stipulated that its composition must be the same as ordinary road car fuel. The BASF mixture however included a large proportion of the additive toluene, which reduces detonation in engines. This almost totally solved Brabham’s main reliability headache, while also allowing the engines to be pushed harder and produce nearly 100 horsepower more than the ~650BHP they had output previously.
The impact of the new fuel was almost immediate. After only winning one race in the season up to its introduction, Brabham won three of the remaining six, and had a driver on the podium in two of the others.
Piquet duly snatched the title away from Alain Prost at the final race, as Brabham used their understanding of refuelling to great effect by putting Piquet on an incredibly light fuel load to start the race, allowing him to sprint away and draw his title rivals into pushing their cars too hard, before cruising home to take third place and the driver’s title once both Prost and outsider Arnoux had retired.
It was only after the season was over that other teams discovered the new fuel, and there was understandably outrage.
Most teams had read the “composition must be the same as ordinary road car fuel” as outright disallowing additives such as toluene. BASF, BMW and Brabham on the other hand argued that since some specialist road car fuels included it, they were allowed to add as much toluene as they needed to solve their engine problems. It was classic Murray rulebook engineering, even if this specific instance did not come from Murray himself.
The fuel’s octane rating was the subject of even more controversy. When measured by FISA, the BASF fuel clocked in at the legal 102.4 octane maximum despite all of the additives. However a sample of the fuel somehow made its way into the hands of Renault fuel supplier Elf, who in their own tests measured it at 102.9 octane. Renault duly postured about protesting the results of the season in hopes of having them overturned.
That posturing came to nothing though, with the by now incredibly powerful Ecclestone carefully smoothing over any discontent within the F1 paddock and ensuring that the history books recorded Piquet as having won the title that year — the first to do so in a turbocharged car.
Brabham declined after 1983, with reliability in the BMW engines mysteriously deserting them in 1984 once their special fuel had been revealed to the world. Star driver Piquet soon left for Williams after 1985, and thereafter it was a gradual downwards spiral as Murray’s radical but unsuccessful BT55 of 1986 presaged his departure for McLaren later that year.
An increasingly disinterested Ecclestone then prioritised his role on the political side of the sport and sold the team in 1987, ending the era that saw Brabham as the rule-bending bad boys of Formula 1.
The influence of the kind of rulebook engineering conducted by Brabham under Ecclestone and Murray is still very much felt though, and while other such as Colin Chapman may have pioneered the concept, Brabham took the approach to both new heights and new lows in search of an edge over their rivals…
