A NEW THE HISTORY OF BRABHAM FORCE PART: 1946-65 RISES
PICTURES
Two ages of Brabham: the first resplendent in green and gold, spawned on a solid backbone of Aussie grit imbued by its tough-nut twin founders; the second marked by the chiselled, strikingly original and ceaselessly ambitious creations of its visionary designer, matched perfectly by the pin-sharp presentation demanded by the softly-spoken force who not only reinvented this team but eventually the whole landscape within which it existed. Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac, Gordon Murray and Bernie Ecclestone: starkly different men in just about every respect, yet forever conjoined in a shared ambition to achieve perfection. Brabham was always a broad church and, 30 years after its final grand prix, still shines in its absence as one of the great powerhouses of Formula 1 motor racing.
Less flashy than Team Lotus (and let’s face it, less successful too), Brabham was left trailing in the wake of rival F1 cornerstones Williams and McLaren as the decades rolled by. The numbers leave it joint seventh with Renault in the list of race-winning constructors, on 35 grand prix victories, plus 120 podiums and 40 pole positions. Long outlasting Cooper from which it took such inspiration and learning, Brabham withered before Tyrrell but ran for longer at the sharp end. Yet the numbers and truncated timeline that halted so abruptly in 1992 only tell a sliver of the story. It’s the way Brabham went about F1, the way it won, and then eventually lost, that matters today. Then there’s the drivers: Brabham himself, Dan Gurney, Denny Hulme, Jacky Ickx,
