JACK OF ALL TRADES--and Master of Most

By James Heine Copyright © 2002 by James H. Heine. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

photo: Art Evans

Thirty-two years after he retired from racing at the end of the 1970 Mexican Grand Prix, Jack Brabham, now Sir Jack Brabham, OBE, remains the epitome of a Formula One champion.

If the first few months of this year are any indication, keeping up with three-time Formula One World Champion Jack Brabham is probably only a notch or two less difficult today than it was when he was at the height of his Formula One career. Back then, between 1955 and 1971, Brabham’s base of operations was England, and he toured the world in pursuit of Formula One’s driving and constructors titles. Today, his native Australia serves as home base, and although retired for more than three decades from racing, he still travels the world as a businessman, ambassador for motorsports, consultant, and fan of historic races and race meetings.

“I think historic races are wonderful,” he says in a telephone conversation from his British home in Weybridge, Surrey. “I’ve been driving these events since about 1975. I do one or two or sometimes three a year. I do Goodwood each year, the revival meeting and also the hill climb [the Festival of Speed], and I do a rally in south Australia called the Classic Adelaide Rally.”

In person or in conversation on the telephone, Brabham reflects his era. He is the quintessential gentleman, charming and patient to a fault with his fans, always curious and interested, and if you happen to own one of the 600 or so Brabham racecars he and partner Ron Tauranac built between 1962 and 1970, ready to pitch in if there appears to be a problem on race day. He is also, at 76, still handsome and robust, his only concession to age being a pair of hearing aids that help compensate for a case of industrial deafness caused by too many years of sitting inches in front of unbridled racing engines.

Brabham’s career spans the Golden Age of postwar motorsports, and his accomplishments put him among the best drivers and team owners in the history of the sport. In addition to his three Formula One titles (1959, 1960, 1966), he also won the Formula One Constructors Championship in 1966 and 1967, when he and New Zealander Denny Hulme dominated the series with their three-liter Repco-Brabhams. His triumph in 1966 also makes him the only driver in history to have won a World Championship in a car of his own construction.

Brabham’s many honors and awards reflect his accomplishments. Queen Elizabeth awarded him the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1967 and knighted him in 1979 (hence, Sir Jack Brabham). Australia named him Man of the Year in 1966, and the Motoring Press Association has thrice named him Driver of the Year. He is a member of the Australian Hall of Fame, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame, and the International Sports Hall of Fame. Many others have honored him, too--from his native Australia’s Boy Scouts to its Post Office, which earlier this year unveiled a stamp in his honor.

His career began modestly enough, Brabham recalls, almost as an afterthought of a serendipitous 1946 visit to a Monday-night midget race in Brisbane, Australia. He was in Brisbane on a cross-country trip with an American friend and midget racer, Johnny Schonberg. Their intended mission: Buy some surplus military equipment for Brabham’s new garage and machine-shop business. The drivers and the cars impressed him, Brabham says, but the initially frightening sight of a densely packed clutch of midgets hurtling flat out down the straightaway and being flung sideways through the corners gave him “no great desire to try it the next day.”

Schonberg, however, convinced Brabham to build a midget, which Schonberg would then drive. Brabham agreed, and a few months later the first Brabham rolled out of his Penshurst machine shop. Schonberg raced the car with some success during the 1946-47 Sidney season and got behind the wheel again for 1947-48. By this time, though, Schonberg’s wife was lobbying hard for the American to give up the sport, which he did shortly after the season got underway; “so I decided to drive myself,” Brabham says, “and I had a lot of success over the next few years.”

By the early 1950s, Brabham was looking elsewhere for racing opportunities and ventured into hill climbing and road racing. He also met Ron Tauranac, another young, talented, and ambitious Australian, and formed a friendship that, in part, would lead eventually to Brabham’s career in Formula One and the formation with Tauranac of Motor Racing Developments, the company that produced Brabham racecars.

Brabham ran his initial hill climbs in a midget, destroying the hill record at Hawkesbury by several seconds on his very first outing. Much annoyed that Brabham and his midget were so unbeatable, the organizers disallowed his time because the midget didn’t qualify as a “proper” car--it didn’t have brakes on all four wheels.

In typical fashion, Brabham fitted four-wheel brakes to the midget in time for the 1951 Australian Hill Climb Championship at Rob Roy several weeks later. “It was my second event, and I won it,” he says. “It was a little hard for the organizers to accept.”

Brabham’s interest in hill climbs accelerated his progress into road racing, at which he was also successful, and by 1955 England and continental racing beckoned. “In 1955, I went to England for a year’s experience,” Brabham says. “I went with the intention of staying a year and then going back to Australia. But it took me 17 years to get home.”

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Brabham arrived in England and at the doorstep of an international career just as Cooper was turning the motorsports world upside down with its agile--and radical--mid-engined racecars. Because he had raced a Cooper in Australia and New Zealand, Brabham sought out John and Charles Cooper and earned their respect.

“During my second year in England I joined the Cooper Car Company’s works team and raced sports cars, Formula Two cars, and some Formula One cars,” Brabham says. “In 1959, Coventry Climax built a special 2.5 liter Formula One engine, and I won the World Championship that year and again in 1960.”

The following year, 1961, was not the best for Cooper. In 1960, Brabham had dominated the championship with five straight wins--at Zandvoort, Spa, Reims, Silverstone, and Oporto. Now with a new 1.5 liter formula, it was the turn of Ferrari and Phil Hill. In an uncompetitive car, the best Brabham could do was one pole, no wins, just four points, and 11th overall in the standings. “It was just a bad year for us,” he says.

The year was not without its milestones, however. In May, Brabham and Cooper showed up at Indy and changed the world of American oval-track racing forever. Brabham finished ninth, very respectable for a “rookie,” but after his appearance in the rear-engined Cooper, the age of the front-engined roadster was over.

Brabham left Cooper at the end of 1961 and by mid-1962 he and Tauranac had the first Brabham Formula One car, the BT3, ready. Brabham debuted the car at the German Grand Prix at Nürburgring. The debut was less than stellar, Brabham recalls, and he retired with a broken throttle cable linkage during the race.

The first Formula One win by Brabham would come by way of Dan Gurney at the 1964 French Grand Prix at Rouen. Gurney would repeat that effort at the Mexican Grand Prix, but there would be no additional wins for the marque until the advent of the three-liter formula in 1966.

The new formula ushered in not only the three-liter era but also another pair of back-to-back championship years for Brabham. In 1966, at Reims, Brabham won his first Grand Prix in a car bearing his name. He followed that milestone with victories at Brands Hatch, Zandvoort, and the Nürburgring, winning his third drivers championship in the process and his first constructors championship as well.

In typical Brabham fashion, the titles were the result of meticulous planning and preparation. Knowing the change from 1.5 to three liters was coming, he allowed himself plenty of time to get ready, Brabham recalls. In the end, he opted for Oldsmobile’s aluminum V-8 block as the starting point for a racing engine and convinced the auto-parts company Repco, a long-time Aussie supporter, to build the engine.

“The highlight of my career was racing my own Formula One cars,” Brabham says. “In 1967 Denny Hulme won the Formula One championship as our second team driver, and I was second, which gave us the constructors championship for a second time. All this was achieved with an Australian-built engine made by Repco in Melbourne. This, of course was a great Australian achievement, and I do not think it will be done again.”

At the end of a disappointing 1968 season in which the Brabham team struggled with a new four-cam engine, Repco bowed out of the engine-building business, unwilling to challenge Ford and Cosworth head-to-head in what obviously would be an expensive search for reliability and horsepower. Like almost everyone else, Brabham switched to the potent Cosworth-Ford in 1969, all the while thinking about retirement and searching for a top-flight driver who wouldn’t be stolen from him by a team with deeper pockets. In addition, a testing accident at Silverstone in June broke his ankle and put him out of competition until the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Brabham opened the 1970 season by winning the South African Grad Prix and then nearly winning Monaco and Brands Hatch as well. Unfortunately, Brands Hatch was followed by several retirements, including his final race at Mexico City, where his Cosworth engine let go while he was in third place and just 13 laps from the end. Still, at the end of the year he was fifth in the standings.

A lot has changed in racing since he has retired, Brabham says. “The first big change is that there is a lot of money now. The amount of money we raced for was peanuts alongside what teams have today. Plus, the technology has come to the stage where I think it is spoiling the sport.”

In addition to his numerous successes in Australia and New Zealand, his three World Championship and two constructors titles, Brabham can also lay claim to 1965 British Saloon Car Championship, the 1966 Formula Two Championship, and four European Formula Two titles. Today, his sons, Geoffrey, Gary, and David, carry on his racing lineage--and at least one grandson has shown some interest and talent, says Brabham with a strong hint of delight. “He started in go-karts when he was just eight. He’s Matthew, Geoffrey’s son. Obviously, Geoffrey’s done a lot of racing in America, and it would be wonderful if Matthew did the same sort of thing.”