Brian Redman was one of the best racing drivers Britain produced in the late 1960s and 1970s. Formula 1, however, never quite became his story. On 12 May 1968, at the Circuit de Jarama outside Madrid, he finished third in the Spanish Grand Prix driving a Cooper-BRM. It was the only podium of his F1 career, and very nearly the whole of it.
A driver in the wrong category
By 1968, it was already clear that Redman’s natural home was sports car racing. He had the precision, the smoothness and the mechanical sympathy that endurance racing rewarded, and he would go on to prove it repeatedly in events that lasted hours rather than laps. F1, with its narrower machinery and its appetite for outright political ambition, was a slightly awkward fit. He raced in it anyway.
His drive at Cooper in 1968 came at a peculiar moment for the team. Cooper had been one of the defining forces of the early 1960s, winning consecutive constructors’ titles with Jack Brabham and later Bruce McLaren. By 1968 it was running on reputation more than results, a once-formidable outfit now subsisting on a BRM V12 engine and fading infrastructure. Third place at Jarama, with Graham Hill winning for Lotus and Denny Hulme second in the McLaren, was considerably better than the car probably deserved.
Jarama, May 1968
The Spanish Grand Prix that year carried the particular weight of a sport still absorbing the death of Jim Clark, killed at Hockenheim just five weeks earlier. Clark’s absence hung over the early part of the season in the way that only the truly irreplaceable can manage. Formula 1 continued, as it always did, with everyone quietly aware that something fundamental had changed.
Redman threaded through it all to take third. It was a clean, composed drive from a driver who was never going to overwhelm the field in a Cooper-BRM but who made nothing worse than it needed to be. In a sport that hands out podiums to very few, he collected one.
A short stay in F1
His Formula 1 career did not extend far beyond that afternoon. Later in the 1968 season, Redman was involved in a serious accident at Spa-Francorchamps, suffering injuries that ended his immediate involvement in single-seaters and effectively redirected the rest of his career.
In sports cars, he became a genuinely formidable figure, winning at Le Mans and across the major endurance programmes of the era. He was the kind of driver who attracted admiration from the people who knew most about driving, even when the wider audience was looking elsewhere. The one F1 podium, sitting there in the record from Jarama in May 1968, is a small and slightly strange footnote to a career that deserved more column inches than it usually got.
