Remember when we drove Rover-BRM’s turbine-powered racer?

By Ryan Standen
From the archive
 | 17 Apr 2026
Classic & Sports Car – Remember when we drove Rover-BRM’s turbine-powered racer?

From Briggs Cunningham’s 1950 Cadillac ‘Le Monstre’ to the wild 2012 DeltaWing, Le Mans has had its fair share of curious racing cars.

But, flicking through the January 1985 issue of Classic and Sportscar (as it was then), via C&SC’s digital archive, I spotted an endurance oddball that I hadn’t seen before: the 1965 Rover-BRM racer.

I soon realised that I’d met its older sibling, the Rover P4-based JET1, at the Science Museum in London, but was unaware that the marque’s turbine-engine technology – developed during WW2 – had also found its way into a Le Mans racer.

Classic & Sports Car – Remember when we drove Rover-BRM’s turbine-powered racer?

The turbine-powered Rover-BRM has since returned to the Circuit des 24 Heures du Mans; the restored car was demonstrated at Le Mans Classic in 2014

It was the first gas-turbine car to be campaigned in a serious competition and it impressed on its debut – despite being designed and built just 10 days ahead of the Le Mans 24 Hours test day in April 1963.

Its 10th-place finish wasn’t classified because technically the Rover-BRM’s outing was a demonstration run, not a proper entry.

The rules changed for 1964, so the redesigned Rover-BRM was allowed to tackle the 24-hour enduro officially. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the start line because the upgraded engine wasn’t ready in time.

Well, that was the official line – truthfully, the car had fallen off its trailer on the way back from the test weekend.

It was rebuilt for 1965, but Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart could only manage 10th, following damage to the heat exchanger – after swallowing a button from someone’s overalls, according to engineer Tony Rudd.

Classic & Sports Car – Remember when we drove Rover-BRM’s turbine-powered racer?

This Rover-BRM story started on p36 of our January 1985 magazine

For that January 1985 feature, our then resident hotshoe Willie Green was offered time behind the wheel of this sleek sports-racer at Donington Park.

‘It is a very, very pretty car, with touches of Ferrari 250LM and Lotus Plus 2 about it,’ he wrote in our magazine.

Big brake discs compensated for the lack of engine braking, but the delay in acceleration – circumvented by applying the throttle a few seconds early – took some getting used to. As did instruments for jet temperature that read to 700°C.

‘Mind you, the 7000rpm tacho looks unexciting until you realise that you have to add a zero to all the markings – it actually reads to 70,000rpm!’

Willie described the 140bhp output as ‘unsparkling’ and admitted that the turbine-powered car needed a very long straight to truly impress, but he was eventually won over by the peculiar experience: ‘If you do floor the accelerator, the effect is just like taking off in a jet plane… The Rover-BRM is one car I most certainly shall never forget.’

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Ryan Standen

Ryan Standen is Classic & Sports Car’s Editorial Assistant