DESIGN AND INNOVATION THE DESIGNERS


Mike Pilbeam


Mike Pilbeam might be best known for his successful hillclimb cars, but there’s far more to his motorsport CV than just rapid ascenders


By Mike Breslin


very quickly. How many designers have worked on


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projects as diverse as the BRM four-wheel drive F1 car and the Lotus gas turbine, as well as a wide range of single seaters, sportscars, touring cars and even rally cars? Oh, and while we’re at it, how many have got to name their own street? Mike Pilbeam has. In fact, he’s pretty much done it all – and we’ll come back to the street naming later. But it all started off with numbers, which is fitting, because Pilbeam’s approach to any project is to make sure the numbers are right first. ‘I always try to design from first principles, to understand what is necessary to make a car both fast and reliable, and to do that you have to understand the maths and the laws of physics – they don’t change, and are not likely to in a hurry.’ It was actually while he was studying


for a degree in mathematics at Bristol in the late1950s that Pilbeam first came into contact with motorsport, taking a trip to Silverstone to watch an F1 race. ‘I thought, “oh this is good stuff”. But, to be honest, I knew nothing about engineering. Then, when I left uni, I thought I’d like to explore the theoretical aspects of it at least, and the only way I could think of doing so was to build a car.’ Like many who went on to greater


things in the world of motorsport, Pilbeam’s first racecar was built for the


hink Pilbeam, think hillclimbing. And yet there is so much more to the man than designing cars that go up narrow British country lanes,


1172 formula in 1959, and he went on to build a version of it for a customer, which won a number of races. But it was his talent with numbers that opened the door to Formula 1 in 1963. ‘I’d realised that rather than being a pure mathematician and working in infinite numbers and all that, I wanted to do something in motorsport. So I wrote to a number of companies, including BRM, and eventually I was offered a job. I was there under Tony Rudd, who in his book refers to me as a ‘number cruncher’, and I suppose that’s what I was at that time. I was a stress engineer to begin with, which involved doing calculations on engine and chassis parts. Tony Rudd’s wording of it was that I was there to make sure things didn’t break. But I like to think there’s a bit more to it than that. It was making sure they were also as light as they could be.’


Experimental project A year after his arrival at BRM, Pilbeam was given the chance to design his own Formula 1 car, but the P67 was something extraordinary. ‘Tony wanted to do it as an experimental project. They wanted to see if four-wheel drive was a good idea for when the 3.0-litre formula came along. He said there was no money for it, but you can have a bloke in the workshop to help, and any bits that anyone else doesn’t want, you can use! Apart from the transmission, of course, and we spent quite a bit of time with Ferguson’s doing that.’


As Pilbeam says, the idea behind the car was to see if 4WD might work in F1,


“I thought I’d like to explore the theoretical aspects of it at least, and the only way I could think of doing so was to build a car”


www.racecarengineering.com • August 2011 45


Able to turn his hand to all motorsport disciplines, in 1998 Pilbeam developed a Hyundai coupe rally car, designated MP83


but ultimately it just didn’t quite add up: ‘In order to get the balance of handling right you needed to have quite a lot of bias on the rear drive, and you ended up with about 30-70 torque split front to rear, at least with the tyres that existed then. We couldn’t get any better than that, which means you’re not making as much use of the front drive as you’d like to. It was quite good, but it lost power and it was heavy, and that overcame the positive performance aspects. We decided it was a nice idea, but we weren’t going to do it.’ But the P67 was not the only


groundbreaking work he was involved in at BRM, where as early as 1965 they were using data logging. ‘I’m pretty sure we


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