The 1986 Brabham BMW BT55

José Miguel Barros / FORIX.com

For the 1986 season, Brabham designer Gordon Murray penned the BT55 which aimed to take several radical steps forward with essentially one design.  The original idea was given to Murray by Nelson Piquet, who in his Formula 3 days recalled how he used to duck down as low as possible in the cockpit to gain extra speed by achieving better airflow. 

The first plans for the BT55 began midway through the 1985 season, and a wooden mockup was constructed and presented to Nelson Piquet, who rumour has it was rather concerned over the driving position which required the driver to be in a reclined position with their chins resting on their chests.  What sort of influence this had over Nelson Piquet's decision to leave Brabham and join the Williams Honda team for the 1986 season we will never know.


For the project to realise it's full potential, vast amounts of funding were necessary from Italian sponsors Olivetti and Pirelli, and both were keen to see Italian drivers recruited to fill both seats.  Prior to this decision, Ayrton Senna or Niki Lauda (whom Ecclestone had tried to persuade out of retirement on the plane back from the 1985 Australian GP) could have filled one of the driver slots, but the decision was made to recruit Riccardo Patrese and Elio de Angelis.  Although both drivers had vast amounts of experience, when the full complexity of the BT55 was revealed to the Motor Racing Press, some already voiced their doubts over the technical ability of both drivers.  Major changes to the engine and gearbox were necessary in order for them to fit into the lowline car.

When early testing began in Rio, the cars suffered badly from overheating as well as the Weissman designed 7-speed gearbox tending to disintegrate  at an alarmingly fast rate.  In addition to this, it was discovered  that canting the BMW engine over  at an angle was causing it to suffer from oil scavenging problems as well as being very slow to release its full power. This early season disruption was to prove very costly to the Brabham team, and  by the time the 1986 season got underway at Rio the BT55 chassis had undergone major changes and revisions and had still not been fully run in, and only managed to complete a handful of laps during the practice sessions.
  During the race, Patrese retired early on but Elio  managed to finish in a distant 8th place albeit 3 laps down and missing 2 gears.  Clearly it was not the start that the team had hoped for, and things really got no better as the BT55 proved to be a very difficult car to drive.  It suffered from such crushing poor engine response out of the slow corners that the improvement gained in extra downforce from the low line design proved to be negligible.  The loss of Elio in testing one of the BT55/2 chassis at Paul Ricard proved to be a fatal blow to team morale and severly dampened Gordon Murray's appetite for the project. 

By the time of the British Grand Prix the team had collected a mere 2 points, and resorted to bringing back one of the 1985 upright BT54 chassis in order to evaluate the performances between the two cars.  In fact the team were happy to go back to using the BT54 for the rest of the season, but BMW could not provide sufficient upright engines.  Later in the season however, there were signs of encouragement for the team as the BT55 proved better suited to the faster high speed tracks such as Hockenheim and Monza where Patrese qualified well and ran strongly.  A quick look at the speed trap at Monza told the whole story, slowest of all out of the corner but fastest at the end of the straight.

For all the revisions to the chassis, the gap between Brabham and the rest did not close and by the end of the season Murray had departed the team. The relationship between Ecclestone, BMW and Olivetti was  strained beyond repair and although in 1987 the "upright" BT56 car ran well at times, the team was in terminal decline and by 1988 had been sold.

In 1988 however, Gordon Murray returned with the McLaren team and the "low down" design was adopted by Steve Nichols all conquering MP4 chassis that gave Ayrton Senna his first F1World Championship.

Riccardo Patrese confers with Elio over the BT55's strange behaviour 

 

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