By rare and prestige correspondent Dave Elland.
British Racing Motors has unveiled the fully restored BRM P351, its one-of-one Group C sports prototype and the newest racing chassis in the marque’s history. The 1992 Le Mans racer returned to Silverstone 34 years after making its competition debut there, now restored to its original specification and preparing to race again.
Built for the 1992 World Sportscar Championship, the P351 combines a carbon-composite monocoque with a naturally aspirated 3.5-litre BRM V12. Only one was ever completed. It raced at Silverstone and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where it reached 216mph on the Mulsanne Straight in qualifying, matching the speed of the factory Peugeot and Toyota entries. Its original V12 and gearbox have now been completely rebuilt by Dawson Racing, with the restored car running on sustainable fuel ahead of its return to competitive motorsport.
For its unveiling, the P351 was joined on the Silverstone grid by BRM P15 V16 Chassis IV – Britain’s first Formula One car and the machine that represents the beginning of the BRM story in 1949. Together, the P15 and P351 brought the earliest and newest chapters of BRM’s racing history side by side: Formula One to Group C, V16 to V12, and more than four decades of British racing engineering, with both cars active and built to be raced.
BRM acquired the P351 in late 2024 and entrusted its restoration to Ian Dawson of Dawson Racing – an engineer with his own history with the car.
Following its original Group C career, the P351 had been substantially reworked in the 1990s into the open-top BRM P301. Its roof was removed and its BRM V12 replaced by a Nissan twin-turbo V6, with Dawson working with the car during this later chapter at Pacific Racing. Almost three decades later, the task was to put it back.
The P351 has now been returned to its original closed-cockpit 1992 specification. Its original naturally aspirated BRM V12 and original gearbox have both been completely rebuilt, while the missing cockpit roof was reverse-engineered using surviving original paperwork and period photography.
The finished car now runs on sustainable fuel and, crucially, has not been restored simply for display. The P351 is being prepared to return to competitive racing.
For the unveiling at Silverstone, the P351 was joined on the grid by P15 V16 Chassis IV, representing the beginning of the BRM story more than four decades earlier.
BRM was founded in Bourne, Lincolnshire in 1949 as Britain’s first Formula One team, with an extraordinary ambition: to bring together British industry and engineering to build a car capable of taking on the world.
The P15 was that first car. Powered by BRM’s supercharged 1.5-litre V16, it began a story that would eventually see BRM win the 1962 Formula One Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Championships with Graham Hill, 17 World Championship Grands Prix and race with some of the greatest drivers of the era.
However, BRM’s history was never confined to Formula One. Across the following decades, its engineering extended into sports cars, endurance racing, Can-Am, rallying and Le Mans – including the remarkable Rover-BRM Gas Turbine programme of the 1960s. The P351 became the newest chapter of that competition history in 1992: not another Formula One car, but a carbon-composite Group C prototype designed for endurance racing and Le Mans.