19/05/2014
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
Jack Brabham is perhaps the most under-rated of all drivers, yet he won three World Championships, and nearly a fourth in his retirement season. He took 14 World Championship victories and 15 non-Championship F1 races. He is the only driver to win the World F1 Championship and European F2 Championship in the same year and the only driver to win the World Championship in a car bearing his name.
Jochen Rindt won 31 Formula Two races and that, most people agree, was the true mark of his talent since all the top drivers competed and the cars were closely matched. Jim Clark won 13 F2 races, but Brabham won 27. It's true Jack had a longer career than either Rindt or Clark, but there was no Formula Two, 1961-64, and Jack didn't compete in the class during the last three years of his career.
In 1966, Jack had a Honda engine which powered him to 10 of those 27 F2 wins, and that is often said to be luck, but luck had nothing to do with it. Jack was the shrewdest operator there has been, he organised his career like no other driver.
Jack was the first modern driver to establish his own team, the Brabham Racing Organisation. At the time, he drove for Cooper and BRO entered races that Cooper did not. Over the winter of 1959/60, he persuaded his old friend, Ron Tauranac, to leave a secure job and to move his young family to England. Ron had designed and built a series of specials (called Ralts) so it was a bit like Lewis Hamilton setting up a new team with a pal who'd designed Formula Ford cars. Jack knew his man, however, and says, "I wouldn't have done it with anyone else."
While Jack was on his way to his second World Championship, Ron devised tuning kits, engineered the Herald-Climax that Jack's garage sold, and established Motor Racing Developments. The MRD-1, a 1961 Formula Junior car, was an immediate success, then Jabby Crombac pointed out that, in France, MRD was pronounced merde. The cars were renamed Brabham.
BRO was a customer of MRD in Formula One. Jack did not drive a works Brabham, 1962-65, BRO bought customer cars and run them in a separate factory. BRO was not always even the first to get the latest cars because Tauranac operated on a 'first come, first served' basis. Jack did, however, get special attention when it came to uprating the cars and, as a partner with Ron in MRD, he was active there as well.
Ron Tauranac says, "In the early days, Jack'd do all the most difficult machining." He would also help customers set up their cars and, once, seeing that a Brabham customer had no idea how to drive a circuit, he taught the guy the lines.
When Honda bought a Cooper prior to its entry to Formula One, the Weber carburettors baffled their engineers. Jack interrupted one of his trips home to show them how it should be done. The fledgling Honda team was knocked out by the fact that the World Champion made the effort and, after they had seen him at work, they were devotees for life.
When Honda decided to enter car racing, they approached Lotus to build an F1 car and Jack to run an F2 team. Colin Chapman received a mock-up of the Honda F1 engine and sat on it, to delay Honda's entry to F1 and to wind up Coventry Climax. Chapman was crossed off Honda's Christmas card list but, to this day, Brabham and Tauranac are consultants to Honda.
Jack ran an F2 Honda engine in 1965 and, for the first race he qualified nine seconds off the pace. Instead of throwing his toys out of the pram, he taught the small band of engineers how to go motor racing and the engineers included two future Presidents of Honda, Tadashi Kume and Nobuhiko Kawamoto. At the last race, he took pole and finished second, just 0.6 seconds behind Clark's Lotus.
Brabham and Tauranac then told Honda precisely what sort of engine to build - the first had been 'peaky', top heavy and the shape made it impossible to install harmoniously. Honda responded and delivered an entirely new unit within a few months. Tadashi Kume says, "Jack and Ron taught us how to win races."
That is why Jack won ten races with a Honda-Brabham. It was not luck, it was Jack's integrity and engineering input that turned Honda from a makeweight into a winner. In fact, it could have been 11 wins because he spun out of the lead at Rouen. All the race reports say that his gear lever came off in his hand, but Nobuhiko Kawamoto reveals the true story. "Before the race I received a call from Mr Honda who was concerned that the engines were lasting so long that we were not learning anything. He wanted us to run an engine until it broke so I built one with a used crankshaft and bearings.
"Jack-san did not finish the race, the engine seized five laps from the end and he spun. He walked back to the pits and we were apprehensive, thinking that he would be angry. Jack-san, however, smiled and pulled the gear lever out of his pocket so everyone, including the journalists, thought that he retired because of the gear lever.
"He did it to protect Honda. He was a demanding man, a hard man to work for, but he had a great heart."
John Arthur Brabham was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1926. He trained as a motor mechanic, spent the latter stages of the war in the RAAF as a fitter and then set up a motor repair business which soon expanded into general light engineering.
A friend of his, Johnny Schonberg, was a local star in midget cars and Jack had gone along, looked the cars over, and reckoned he could build something better. He not only built the chassis, but also the 1,350cc engine.
When Mrs Schonberg forced her husband's retirement, Johnny offered Jack the car. First time out, he finished last, but won a race at his third meeting and went on to become champion of New South Wales. For six years Jack combined his business with midget racing, becoming national champion three times.
Along the way he met Ron Tauranac who was then building and racing his early 500cc Ralts. Jack bought a 500cc Cooper, then one with a 1000cc Vincent engine, and ran in hill climbs and races. Tauranac was often a competitor, but still helped Jack with things such as suspension settings.
Jack won the RedEx Championship in 1952 and RedEx helped him to buy a Cooper-Bristol. That convinced him that he should go racing seriously, which meant racing in Europe, and the Brabham family arrived in England in 1955.
Jack bought a Cooper-Alta, which was a mistake, and soon installed a Bristol engine. Though he was not initially successful, Jack became a firm favourite with the crowds who loved his 'tail-out' driving technique, learned in midget racing. He also became friends with John Cooper and they struck a deal whereby Jack would work at Cooper for nothing but, in return, would be allowed to build one of the 'Manx Tail' mid-engined central seat sports cars. Into this he installed his Bristol engine and entered it in the British GP. He was last on the grid and was lapped several times before retiring. In the wet at Snetterton later in the season, though, he led Moss's Maserati 250F until the track dried. That dispelled any thought of returning home for good.
At the end of a comparatively thin season, Jack went back to Australia with the Cooper, won the Australian GP, then sold the car. Back in England, he bought a second-hand Maserati 250F which nearly bankrupted him while doing nothing to add to his reputation as a driver. John Cooper came to the rescue and entered him in some races in a 'Manx Tail'.
That's the basic story, but there was a reason why Cooper took such a keen interest in Brabham. When the 'Manx Tail' came out, drawings of it appeared in The Autocar. Jack ripped out a drawing of the engine installation, scribbled on it and mailed it to Australia. When he went home at the end of 1955, he called on Tauranac and came away with a step-gear cluster which allowed the Climax engine to be mounted three inches lower in the Cooper frame.
Jack made a significant contribution to the design of Cooper's cars and he became a works driver when Cooper began to run in Formula One in 1957. In 1959 he won his, and Cooper's, first World Championship.
Jack could see that Cooper had lucked-in to the advantage they had by being the first to go rear-engined, and he could see that Cooper could lose the initiative. The trouble was that Charlie Cooper, John's father, was resistant to change. When he went home at the end of the season, Jack persuaded Ron Tauranac to leave a secure job and transplant his young family to England.
By that time, Cooper was well on the way with a new car, the T59 'Lowline', which took Jack to five successive GP wins and a second title. He had received the parameters for the Lowline's suspension layout, by air mail, from Ron Tauranac. It's no coincidence that Cooper declined after Brabham left.
'Ginger' Devlin, the junior mechanic on the Cooper F1 team says, "Jack was worth ten men and he kept the team together. Say we were still working at two in the morning and Jack said, 'Why don't we try this?' we'd do it willingly because Jack would have worked everything out and we knew it would make a difference. If Bruce McLaren, lovely guy, did the same, we'd never be sure it would work."
Jack is notoriously taciturn, but he knew how to promote himself. He opened a garage in a blaze of publicity, his face beamed from advertisements for the Rootes Group and he had his own monthly column in the magazine, Motor Racing.
Jack's contacts with the Rootes Group meant he was allowed the use of the facilities at MIRA so the Brabham, which everyone thought was a conservative design, was the only F1 car of the day run in a wind tunnel. MIRA's dynometer also proved to Honda that its first F2 engine wasn't as powerful as they'd thought, and certainly less powerful than the Cosworth SCA.
Then there was the Repco engine which took Jack to the 1966 World Championship. Repco had the franchise to service Coventry Climax engines in the Tasman series. Jack went to Repco with an Oldsmobile block and persuaded them it would make an ideal Tasman and sports car engine. By the time Jack had quietly worked on Repco, though, he'd got his F1 engine. One reason why the F1 engine worked so well was because BRO had an engine shop and John Judd was recruited to run it. In 1971 Brabham and Judd founded Engine Developments Ltd, which is why the successful Judd-VW F3 engines had 'Brabham' on the camcovers.
One incident sums up the man. The 1968 Repco engine was supplied with faulty valve seats, which was discovered when an engine was stripped after practice for the Belgian GP. Ron Tauranac recalls, "Jack contacted John Judd at BRO with a request to make new valve seats, he then flew back to England with two cylinder heads and collected the seats. To fit them he heated the heads in his wife's kitchen cooker at three in the morning."
Jack flew back to Belgium, snatched some sleep while the team fitted the heads and then raced on Spa, the most awesome circuit in the world.
No driver in history has worked as hard as Jack Brabham to put himself in a position where he could win.
After more than 50 years of racing, Jack was still delighting crowds with his driving. Five days after he suffered what he describes as the worst accident of his career, at the first Goodwood Revival Meeting, Jack told us, "Got to get fit. Got a rally in South Australia next month."
Jack's latter years were not comfortable. He had been very deaf for a long time due to the fact that he did not wear ear plugs because he wanted to hear every beat of his engines. His vision was impaired and he had to undergo kidney dialysis. Despite this he still acted like a great champion, and not only attended events in Australia, but made the long journey in 2008 to attend the tribute to Tony Brooks at the Goodwood Revival.
Sir Jack Brabham was the first postwar driver to be knighted and the accolade was awarded not only for his three World Championships but for the massive contribution he made to motor sport overall.
Jack Brabham's Wins{/n}
1955: Formula Libre: Australian GP - Cooper-Bristol.
1957: F2: Brands Hatch, Monthl‚ry, Brands Hatch, Oulton Park - Cooper-Climax.
1958: F2: Goodwood, Brands Hatch, Casablanca - Cooper-Climax. British F2 Champion.
Nurburgring 1000 kms (with Stirling Moss) - Aston Martin.
Formula Libre: New Zealand GP - Cooper-Climax.
1959: F1: International Trophy, Monaco GP, British GP - Cooper-Climax - World Champion.
F2: Goodwood, Brands Hatch - Cooper-Climax.
1960: Dutch GP. Belgian GP, French GP, British GP, Silver City Trophy, Portuguese GP - Cooper-Climax - World Champion.
F2: Brussels GP, Pau GP - Cooper-Climax - European F2 Champion.
Formula Libre: New Zealand GP, Lady Wigram Trophy - Cooper-Climax.
1961: Brussels GP, Aintree 200 - Cooper-Climax.
Inter-Continental Formula: Snetterton, Brands Hatch - Cooper-Climax.
Formula Libre: New Zealand GP, Lady Wigram Trophy - Cooper-Climax.
1962: F1: Danish GP - Lotus-Climax.
1963: F1: Solitude GP, Austrian GP - Brabham-Climax.
Tasman: Australian GP.
1964: F1: Aintree 200, International Trophy - Brabham-Climax.
F2: Karlskoga, Albi GP, Oulton Park, Monthlery - Brabham-Cosworth, Champion, Les Grands Prix de France.
Tasman: Australian GP, Warwick Farm, Sandown Park - Brabham-Climax.
1965: Tasman: Sandown Park - Brabham-Climax.
1966: F1: Rand GP - Brabham-Climax. International Trophy, French GP, British GP, Dutch GP, German GP, Oulton Park Gold Cup - Brabham-Repco. World Champion
F2: Goodwood, Pau, Barcelona, Zolder, Crystal Palace, Reims, Karlskoga, Finnish GP, Monthlery, Albi - Brabham-Honda. Champion, Trophes de France; British F2 Championship.
1967: F1: Oulton Park Spring Trophy, French GP, Canadian GP, Oulton Park Gold Cup - Brabham-Repco.
1969: F1: International Trophy - Brabham-Cosworth.
1970: F1: South African GP - Brabham-Cosworth.
F1 World Championship: 14 wins, 13 pole positions, 12 fastest laps, 261 points.
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