Great Aussie took on world and won

IN 1966, Jack Brabham became the first F1 driver ever to win in a car bearing his own name.

Jack Brabham in his 1961 F1 car at Silverstone.

TASMANIA, April, 1994. Jack Brabham, with Grahame Ward in the left seat, was running third overall in the Targa. They had worked their factory BMW M3 into third, had passed most of the slower cars and were looking for the team in second.

“Let’s go for it,” Jack said.

Brabham pushed the loud pedal hard as they roared down a hill into the village of Natone on the way to the checkpoint in Burnie. At the bottom of the hill the road turned into a double left-handed corner. Jack tried to take a racing line but the car was in the gravel and garbage at the edge of the tarmac and started to lose grip.

“I think we’re in trouble.”

Jack kept the power on to get grip. The M3 hit a very large tree with its right-hand wheel, twisted straight up in the air and came down on its side. “If Jack hadn’t kept the power on the middle of the car would have hit the tree and we would have been very, very seriously injured” Ward told me this week.

“But Jack didn’t swear. He was a wonderful person. He didn’t think it was necessary. Even when he won a race, he would only have a celebratory drink. He was too busy doing things.”

“Jack called himself a 10-pound Australian when he got to the continent in 1955 (a reference to the English who migrated to Australia after the war at a cost of £10). He reckons he only had 10 quid when he left Australia.”

What Brabham did have was a letter of introduction to race teams like Ferrari. “Ferrari ignored him. So he went out to beat them. He told Mark Webber, ‘Don’t you ever drive for Ferrari’.”

Jack had driven a Cooper in Australia and New Zealand. So the family that owned the world’s largest racing car company gave him a job. The founder’s son, John Cooper, said: “He didn’t so much start working for us as just start working with us. He acted as a kind of fitter-cum-welder-cum-driver and he was bloody good at all of it.” He was a better driver than a welder. In 1959 and 1960 he won back-to-back FI championships for Cooper. At the end of the 1960 season, Jack and Ron Tauranac started building their own cars in secret so as not to upset company founder Charles Cooper.

Brabham and Tauranac changed motor racing forever by sticking the engine in the back of the car.

In 1966, together with Australian engine maker Repco and a car designed by Tauranac, Brabham became the first F1 driver ever to win in a car bearing his own name.

Until his death, the 1966 win was one of his proudest achievements, particularly “doing it with an engine made in Australia”. The following year a Brabham driven by Kiwi Denny Hulme won both the drivers’ and constructors’ world championship.

Only two Australians, Brabham and Alan Jones, have won world championships.

Brabham was a great Australian. He shone a light on Australian technology at a time when we were best known for sheep and wheat. A boy from Hurstville, with the help of a couple of Australian mates, took three of the most prized and competitive championships on earth.

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John Connolly is a starter in the Shitbox Rally, leaving Perth today. To see videos of his progress, to check regularly at theaustralian.com.au/motoring