On the plane home from Argentina, Jack Brabham was busy frantically plotting, in cahoots with his friend and comrade John Cooper. Complacency is the work of the devil in motor sport and, just two months after pushing his frumpy little back-to-front car over the line at Sebring to become an unlikely (and exhausted) world champion, Brabham knew he and Cooper needed to work fast if they were to stand any hope of retaining their hard-won crowns in 1960. By the time they landed in London, the concept of the car you see here had been sketched out. The Cooper T53, aka the Lowline, was the fully justified result of good old-fashioned competitive paranoia.
The trigger was another funny-looking thing that Brabham compared to a biscuit tin. But in Buenos Aires at the opening world championship grand prix of the new decade, the boxy, inelegant (and also mid-engined) Lotus 18 had startled the world champions with its pace and obvious potential. The Scot called Ireland hadn’t won the race, but had led it convincingly before a broken gear linkage and subsequent spin dropped Innes to an eventual sixth. Brabham’s team-mate Bruce McLaren, the then youngest F1 race winner at the dramatic Sebring 1959 finale, had inherited his second consecutive grand prix victory as Jack’s title defence struggled to get into gear, but the writing was on the wall. The company that had turned Formula 1 inside out and on its head in the space of a few months would play second fiddle in this still emerging mid-engined revolution, without a dose of direct action. Following a sweltering non-points race in Cordoba from which Brabham returned empty handed, that flight home would prove
