Brabham, A legend lives again

A family legacy is reinvigorated by David Brabham, in the process bringing automotive manufacturing back to Australia. Brabham, A legend lives again. Brabham. It’s an evocative name, particularly for anyone who followed motor racing any time from the late- ’50s until the late ’80s. For me, as a kid growing up around motor sport in the ’60s and ’70s, I’d actually thought the name was onomatopoeic: “brabham, brabham!” the sound of a revving engine. It excites me tremendously that the Brabham name is back on a racing car (see page 23) – and one to be built in Australia, no less. From the nadir of shuttering an automotive industry that produced unique, if staid passenger cars, our nation goes apparently overnight to building a world-class track-day racer, with road-going supercars planned to follow.

It’s the very sort of enterprise one currently associates with the name of Jack Brabham’s former protégé, Bruce McLaren. A quick summary: David Brabham, youngest of three sons of the late, three-time Formula 1 world champion Sir Jack, had to drive a family effort to win back the rights to the Brabham name. This achieved in 2013, he set about creating Brabham Automotive. In 2015, the project received a boost from an Adelaide-based venture capital firm with its eye on the impending closure of Australia’s car-making industry, and the expertise and infrastructure it would leave behind. Thus was created the Brabham BT62, a $1.8-million track-only supercar powered by a 5.4-litre, naturally aspirated V8 making 522kW. It bristles with carbon-fibre and state-of-the-art racing technology and weighs just 972 kilograms, before fluids. Think of track-only specials like the McLaren Senna (US$1.35 million) and Ferrari FXX-K (reportedly US$2.7 million, including two years of driveand- arrive service for exclusive FXX-K racing events).

Brabham Automotive, split between David Brabham’s UK base and its new manufacturing headquarters in Adelaide, will build 70 examples of the BT62. Racing campaigns and owner experience will shore up a roadgoing supercar model to follow. All legitimately Brabhambacked – David, a Le Mans winner like his older brother, Geoff, does much of the testing and development – and built here in Australia. And that, it seems to me, is a big part of the battle won. I still blanch slightly at Bugatti: unquestionably a giant in modern automotive achievement, but somehow tarnished by its appropriation of an exhumed badge. Even the modern McLaren has taken me a while to warm to.

All are, I suppose, in the shadow of Ferrari and the everlooming image of its founder. And yet, somehow, even to this cynic, the new Brabham feels instantly authentic. The cold hard facts are that there has never been a Brabham road car. There hasn’t been any Brabham since 1992’s forgettable BT60B F1 car (BT61 was drawn, but never built). Even by then, the Brabham family had had no part of it for more than 20 years, Sir Jack having sold the racing team in 1969. Neither were Brabhams ever built in Australia, if one excludes Sir Jack’s early speedway ‘midget’ cars, such as that in which he won the 1949 Australian Speedcar Championship.

In 1955, aged 28, Jack Brabham relocated to the UK and soon drove for the Cooper team in single-seater ‘formula’ racing. Brabham continued to collaborate (initially via mail) with fellow Australian designer/engineer Ron Tauranac, devising numerous suspension, gearbox and chassis innovations for Brabham’s Cooper cars. These helped carry Brabham to the 1959 and 1960 Formula 1 drivers’ world championships. Brabham lured Tauranac to the UK in 1960, the two covertly worked on designing a Formula Junior car with which Brabham would launch his own race-car construction business, Motor Racing Developments. That first Brabham was named BT1, representing its two creators. (Famously, the ‘MRD’ name was little used, after Swiss journalist Jabby Crombac thoughtfully pointed out that it sounded rather too much like merde).

Driver/dealmaker Brabham and self-confessed workaholic Tauranac went on to win two F1 constructors’ world championships, in 1966 and ’67. Jack’s victory in the 1966 F1 drivers’ championship, in a car built by his own company, remains a unique achievement. Their cars also won numerous championships in lower formulae. What’s too often overlooked is that MRD/Brabham was tremendously successful and admired as a customercar constructor. They built well over 500 sports-racing and formula-racing cars prior to Tauranac, who bought out Jack’s share in 1969, selling the lot in 1971 to Bernie Ecclestone. The new enterprise produced a further 200- odd customer Brabhams until 1973, when it turned its focus onto its own F1 cars.

That would yield two more F1 drivers’ championships in 1981 and ’83 (both for Brazilian, Nelson Piquet), but the team’s fortunes (and finances) rapidly declined after Ecclestone’s sale of it in 1988, and it ceased operating in 1992. Ownership of the name thereafter was a muddle, until January 2013, when David Brabham wrested it back from a German BMW tuning firm. It was no small consolation that the patriarch lived to witness this; Sir Jack Brabham passed away in May 2014, aged 88.

Sources: Robb Report Australia, July 2018

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: