TONY BROOKS 1932-2022
Two young Britons etched their names into motor racing lore in 1955: Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks. Moss was already an established works driver at 25 when he won the Mille Miglia for Mercedes-Benz. His pounding of Italy’s roads would have been a standout performance even had journalist Denis Jenkinson, his pace-noting navigator, not captured the occasion so vividly in the greatest motorsport article.
Brooks’s drive in the non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix was more low-key – as was the man – but ‘Jenks’, observing trackside, was just as effusive. And rightly so, for a rookie’s apparently effortless defeat of a phalanx of works Maserati 250Fs driven by established stars in front of a fervent home support was Boy’s Own stuff.
Charles Antony Standish Brooks, 23, was planning to follow his father into dentistry – Moss’s father was a dentist, too – and thus spent the tedious outward flight to Sicily revising for the impending finals of a six-year course at Manchester University. The upcoming race was of secondary importance: insouciance bred by naivete out of brimming natural talent. Brooks had yet to drive a Formula 1 car, and modestly put Connaught’s selection of him down to there being nobody else available.
He was underselling himself. The man from mill town Dukinfield – hardly a hotbed of motorsport – had caught the eye with silky, speedy performances in a variety of cars since his debut at a Goodwood British Automobile Racing Club Members’ Meeting on 22 March 1952. On that occasion – in the Healey Silverstone that he had partex-changed his mother’s MG for – he was unplaced in a scratch race and sixth in a five-lap handicap. He returned in May to win a handicap, a feat he repeated in July.
The Healey was no match for a nimbler Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica, however, and so friend and rival Dudley Hely loaned Brooks
