Tony Brooks
LAST OF THE ‘50s GREATS
TONY BROOKS, WHO DIED ON MAY 3, aged 90, was one of the truly great F1 drivers. From his debut win in the 1955 nonchampionship Syracuse Grand Prix for Connaught and through his years with Vanwall (1957-58) and Ferrari (’59), he was a giant of a driver. On his day he could reduce everyone else to bit-parts, even the great Stirling Moss, his team-mate at Vanwall.
“There are drivers with much greater reputations than Tony who couldn’t hold a candle to him, ” Moss said once when I was interviewing him about his greatest rivals. “He is the most underrated great driver of them all. In style he was very much like Jim Clark, very effortless. But he didn’t have that competitive need to be always running at the front – which I did.”
Which was all that separated them, really. A highly intelligent man, he was very attuned to just what a lethal activity he was taking part in and he would never – ever – stretch his luck, never push on if he didn’t feel totally secure in the car and the circumstances. But when those boxes were ticked he was often quite sublime. His pace around the 14-mile Nordschleife at the Nürburgring was habitually surreal. Sadly it was in trying to keep up with him there that Peter Collins fatally crashed his Ferrari in the 1958 German Grand Prix.
Brooks rose to prominence at the nonchampionship Syracuse Grand Prix in 1955 when, having raced sports cars for Connaught earlier in the year, he was given a call by the British manufacturer to represent them, and duly won the race, the first international grand prix win for a British car in over 30 years at the time.
In an era where mechanical reliability was less assured than it is today, a frustrating 1956 spent with BRM yielded a non-start and a retirement from Brooks’s two entries, but a move to Vanwall for 1957 was rewarded with his
