Brabham: The Untold Story of Formula One and Australia's greatest ever racing driver

By Tony Davis and Akos Armont

Companion book to the compelling new documentary film of a motor sports hero

Sir Jack Brabham was unique in the world of motor racing. He was the boy from Sydney who took on the elite of motor racing and won three F1 world championships, the last one in a car not only built by his own Brabham company, but with an Australian engine he'd helped develop.

To those who saw him on the podium, Jack Brabham might have seemed glorious and triumphant. But he was also a man of secrets. He shunned the media, rarely using 'two words when none would do'. He kept vital information from his competitors, his team mates - and his family. It led to unrivalled success. It led to wealth too, much of it hidden around the world. But it also left a trail of hurt and bewilderment ...

In this first ever book-length biography of Jack Brabham, his extraordinary accomplishments are laid out with new commentary from his rivals, colleagues, employees and long-time engineering partner Ron Tauranac. And, with the help of his sons Geoffrey and David, it represents the first major attempt to unravel the enigma who became known as 'Black Jack'.

PRAISE

'Do buy the book, its a great read over the festive season or otherwise!' Primotipo

'A thorough, broad portrait of a motor sporting giant, an Aussie icon who rarely allowed outsiders to take a peek inside at a personality that offers more surprises than anyone might have guessed' Cars4Starters

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781460711224

Tony Davis

Tony Davis is a Sydney-based author, journalist, academic and motor racing enthusiast. He has written more than a dozen books, including The Big Dry (a novel shortlisted in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards), Roland Wright (a children's series published in the US and Germany), the bestselling Lemon! books about the worst cars ever made, and Wide Open Road (the companion book to the ABC television history of motoring in Australia).

Book preview

Contents

A note on sources

The triple (1966)

The man who wasn’t there (2019)

Australian suburbia (1948)

Gravity racing (1926)

American Johnny (1946)

Passing the torch (1948)

On the road (1950)

Two important partnerships (1951)

A serious car (1953)

Across the pond (1954)

The Coopers (1947)

London calling (1955)

Trials and tragedy (1955)

The black art (2018)

Grand prix debut (1955)

Italian folly (1956)

‘Nothing else to do but carry on driving’ (1957)

Monte Carlo revelation (1957)

Seeing the world (1957)

The Ferrari snub (1955)

Paris days (1957)

Bruce to Europe (1958)

Ron pitches in (1958)

Death all around (1958)

The selfish business (1959)

New manager, new teammate (1959)

Taking an early lead (1959)

Feeling the heat (1959)

British high (1959)

Portuguese low (1959)

Not world champion (1959)

Dangerous diversion (1959)

The interloper (1959)

The push (1959)

Aftermath (1959)

Triumphant return (1960)

Aerial banking (1958)

Maranello calls (1960)

Lowline (1960)

Catching up (1960)

Hulme’s baptism of fire (1960)

Amid the ghosts (1960)

Ferrari rules (1960)

The hidden man (1960)

Film star (1961)

The hustle (2015)

Falling to earth (1961)

Racing on two continents (1961)

Road testing (1961)

Cooper no more (1961)

Carless (1962)

Moss comes to grief (1962)

He wasn’t there again today, how I wish he’d go away (1963)

Moving forward (1963)

Hulme advances (1963)

Dirty Jack (1964)

Noddy (1964)

Indy fireball (1964)

Triumph at last (1964)

Spreading thin (1965)

Ron spits his dummy (1965)

Another big secret (1964)

Brilliant and a little bitter (1965)

Jack the athlete (1966)

A slow start (1966)

Irving showdown (1966)

The modest beginnings of safety (1966)

Contrast (1994)

‘A huge smile . . . such as I had never seen before’ (1966)

Honda magic, too (1966)

A perfect day (1966)

The sharp end of the season (1966)

Betty (1966)

The season captured (1966)

No one I’d rather have been sitting next to (1966)

Denny sets the pace (1967)

Mirror, mirror (1967)

Decision day (1967)

Jochen and his crew (1968)

Simplification (1968)

Wings and things (1968)

Toughing it out (1968)

Friction (1969)

A very close call (1969)

Jack sells out (1969)

The final season (1970)

‘Bloody devastating’ (1970)

Bingle (1970)

‘All the pain disappears’ (1970)

The very end (1970)

After racing (1971)

Later Ron (1972)

Three sons at the wheel (1973)

Arise Sir Jack (1979)

‘Nothing to complain about’ (2014)

Addendum (2018)

Special thanks to . . .

Endnotes

Photos Section

About the Authors

Copyright

A note on sources:

It seems surprising that, until now, no one has written a book-length biography of Jack Brabham (1926–2014). During his lifetime there was a trio of ghostwritten autobiographies (1960, 1971 and 2004), each borrowing in part from the previous one, and each interesting in its own way. Now, exactly sixty years since the iconic Australian driver won his first Formula One world championship, comes the first book giving an outsider’s view of the acclaimed driver, car constructor and innovator who so dramatically changed the motor sport world. It draws on a wide range of sources including interviews undertaken by the authors and others over the years, contemporary magazine and news clippings, biographies and autobiographies of other drivers, marque histories, videos, race reports, the three Brabham memoirs, plus the extensive new interviews undertaken for the film Brabham. Jack’s sons David and Geoff have also cooperated closely.

Unless otherwise labelled in this text, or via an endnote, all quotes from David and Geoff Brabham were drawn from exclusive interviews for the 2019 Brabham film and book project. Likewise, those from Ron Tauranac, Stirling Moss, John Surtees, Ron Dennis, Doug Nye, Hughie Absalom, John Judd, Jackie Stewart, Mark Webber, Lisa Brabham, Matthew Brabham, Sam Brabham, Bernie Ecclestone, Nobuhiko Kawamoto, Mark Bisset and Iain Curry. Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac were also interviewed by Tony Davis for the Wide Open Road documentary series and book in 2011, and parts of these interviews have been incorporated in the text. The source for each substantive quote from Jack Brabham is noted, though for ease of reading, short quotes are not attributed.

Where material has been drawn from other publications or interviewers, it is acknowledged accordingly. Comprehensive interviews with Denis Hulme and Frank Matich were conducted by Michael Stahl, in 1991 and 2012 respectively, and generously made available to us. Parts of Stahl’s revealing 2013 interview with Ron Tauranac have also been incorporated and labelled accordingly.

Please note that the subject of this biography is often referred to in this text simply as Jack. This is not to be overly familiar with the man, but to reduce confusion with the brand of car, the racing team and the other companies and organisations that bore his surname.

The triple (1966)

Jack Brabham was flying his own Beechcraft Queen Air back from the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. He’d won four Formula One grands prix on the trot and this should have been the fifth. He was at the top of his game despite being forty years of age. He was still matching the raw speed of F1 drivers almost half his age, and doing so in a brilliant car built by the company he had founded, with his surname on the badge, and a Repco V8 he’d helped develop providing the power.

At the dauntingly fast Monza circuit, the spiritual home of Ferrari, he’d been showing up the fancy V12s that the Italians were so proud of. But his car started gushing oil and he had to surrender his lead and watch the red machines he hated take first and second places.

Next to the dashing Italians, the brash Americans, and the British drivers with their clipped tones and media smarts, Jack Brabham was a man apart. He was older than all of them and the swinging sixties had made no mark. His hair was still short and slicked back, his wardrobe dated and in the muted colours of the preceding decade. He’d arrived in the UK in the mid-1950s as a grease monkey, which is to say a driving mechanic, in a sport dominated by gentlemen, or those who could do a good impression of one. His first UK employer, John Cooper of the Cooper Car Company, would tell people he’d found this wild man from the Australian bush who didn’t know how to use a knife and fork.

Brabham didn’t help his own cause by talking without moving his lips, if he talked at all. The British press called him ‘Chatty Jack’, because he wasn’t.¹ Another nickname – almost certainly from John Cooper – was ‘Black Jack’. If you were being polite, that related to the dark hair, ‘nut brown’ complexion, and five o’clock shadow. If not, it referred to the blinkered, brutal competitiveness that overtook him the moment he put on a race helmet.

His on-track aggression, combined with sublime car control, had won respect from peers and critics, initially begrudgingly, by now almost universally. His cars too had become favourites; the strong, sleek, simple machines were so respected there had been four Brabham customer cars lining up on the grid at the recent British Grand Prix, as well as the two ‘works’ cars. Brabham in a Brabham had won that race, ahead of New Zealander Denis ‘Denny’ Hulme – in another Brabham.

One reason the Brabham cars were so good was that Jack had a brilliant if eccentric designer-engineer running his operation. His name was Ron Tauranac and he was now sitting in the Queen Air with Jack, heading for the tiny English airport near their factory. Tauranac was tall, painfully thin and often surly, and his prominent top front teeth and long nose also helped give him a slightly Dickensian appearance. He and Jack had worked together since the 1950s and, in the 1960s, the pair had built hundreds of cars that were winning in almost every formula. At the end of most post-race flights like this, they’d go straight to the factory to put in a few more hours’ work. Yet as they approached the landing strip, Tauranac noticed there was an unusually high number of cars parked between the low World War II–era buildings that lined the edge of the airport, and a crowd of people milling around, as if waiting for this very plane. Tauranac later recalled, ‘I said, What’s all this about, Jack? and he said, Oh they’re all the journalists. I said, What for? He said, We’ve won the world championship.’

The two other drivers with a chance of being world champion for 1966 had retired at Monza, so Jack’s large points lead was now unassailable. His third world drivers’ championship was in the bag. ‘I never used to look at points or anything,’ recalled Tauranac. ‘I hadn’t realised that when he’d retired, he’d been in an unbeatable position . . . I didn’t know we’d won. I was only interested in what I could do next on the car.’

So it was: these two extraordinarily talented but taciturn men rarely discussed even the most essential parts of their world-beating partnership with each other, let alone outsiders. In Ron’s words, ‘I wasn’t very good at talking and neither was Jack.’² Yet together they achieved a double win that will almost certainly never happen again: a driver had taken his own brand of car to victory in both the F1 drivers’ and constructors’ championships in the same year. And they did it with an engine built by a company on the other side of the world, in its very first year of F1 racing.

The man who wasn’t there (2019)

Some saw it as inevitable that Jack Brabham’s three sons would go racing. But not the man himself, nor his wife Betty. At the end of Jack’s F1 career, the couple moved from England back to Australia to take the family away from the motor sport scene. That was the plan, anyway. But Jack took on a car dealership, and it owned a small open-wheeled race car. Eldest son Geoff, just out of his teens, eventually persuaded his reluctant father to let him have a go.

‘My dad peered into the cockpit,’ remembers Geoff, ‘and said, Okay, there’s the brake, there’s the throttle, there’s the steering wheel, if you crash it, don’t come back. My whole career . . . he never, ever gave me any other advice, other than that.’

Middle son Gary said: ‘I asked him once for some racing tips; his answer was keep between the green bits.’³ The sage advice given to David, the youngest, was ‘to go fast you need less brake and more throttle’.

Geoff once talked his father into giving an interview to a journalist who was writing a book about the things that made champions champions. ‘This journalist came in with a big blank book with his pencil,’ said Geoff, ‘and he thought he had won the lottery. He was going to delve into the mind of a champion. So, his first question was, Now, tell me Jack, what makes you different to everybody else? And my dad just looked at him and shrugged his shoulders and said, Well, you’re either fast or you’re not. And that was it. The journalist tried to get him to elaborate, and he wouldn’t. He just said, You’re either fast or you’re not, that’s it, period.’

In 2019, his own racing career over, David Brabham could not have been prouder of his father’s successes. He hugely admired the way Jack never ‘put barriers up in front of him to say that he couldn’t achieve something’, yet David also had to admit he had never really understood what made his father tick, or how he could coolly step into his race car when thirty of his friends died doing just that. ‘I don’t think many people did . . . He kept a lot of things to himself. When it came to his racing, all he’d do was point to his head and go, David, it’s all in there. That’s all I can remember him saying. When you go out there and have lots and lots of different experiences, you then realise, yes, it is in the head. He was absolutely right, but he couldn’t articulate why that was so important.’

Why would a man so clearly intelligent and capable be unable to explain such things? ‘I don’t know if it was something that he couldn’t, or something that he chose not to. I’m guessing here, but Jack had a lot of secrets, so if he spoke a lot, he was more likely to speak out of turn. So, he developed a system of not talking so much. With some of the things that he had secret going on in the background, he wouldn’t expose himself. That’s how I would view it.’

David admitted it wasn’t only professional things Jack was keeping to himself. ‘Yeah, he had secrets he didn’t want to tell at home too.’ Even now, David is still finding them out.

Australian suburbia (1948)

There was no television, but wartime rationing of meat and clothing was finally ending, and Bob and Molly Dyer’s Pick a Box was new on the radio and grabbing the nation’s ears with its generous prizes and ‘The money or the box’ catchphrase.

Rows of fibro housing were turning the farms that ringed the cities into suburbia – and a car was on its way to fill those new driveways. General Motors was preparing to launch the Holden: the first high-volume car entirely built in Australia. It would be sparse and utilitarian – the seating material of the original ‘48-215’ Holden was rumoured to be made from surplus army blankets – but it was rugged, surprisingly fast, and the subject of huge national pride.

Eastern Europeans – ‘New Australians’, or less politely, ‘reffos’ – were arriving in large numbers, many of them lured by a brightly coloured poster in the displaced persons camps in Europe. It said ‘Australia: land of tomorrow’. They worked at farms and factories and on the huge civil projects being dreamed up for this land of tomorrow. Many cursed the heat and bland cuisine, and scratched their heads at cricket, the insanely complicated summer sport that unified the Australian states divided by their varied versions of football in winter, none of which were played with a ‘proper’ round ball. Cricket unified the classes too, which were not meant to exist but quite clearly did. To the locals there was one undisputed hero, the Australian that Wisden, the cricketing bible, would eventually describe as ‘beyond any argument, the greatest batsman who ever lived and the greatest cricketer of the twentieth-century’. He was Don Bradman and he was leading his final cricketing tour to England. His team of that year, 1948, would become known as ‘The Invincibles’ after completing their thirty-four tour matches without a loss.

In the noisy, far less glamorous world of speedway racing, a blood sport that drew large working-class crowds and cost several lives a year at the showgrounds in most capital cities, a thin young mechanic with a similar name was winning races almost from the start. By some estimations, the achievements of Brabham would go on to be every bit as remarkable as those of the batsman known affectionately as ‘The Don’. Except, of course, The Don never designed and built his own bat.⁴

Jack Brabham would survive the treacherous cinder speedway tracks when many of his rivals would not, then conquer all on the crude road racing circuits of Australia and New Zealand. His talent and determination were as obvious as his unconventional driving style: hunched over the steering wheel, sliding the tail out to seemingly impossible angles. People insisted he go to Europe and test his skills there. He would do just that, but there was still a long and exceedingly dangerous road to reach the point where the world would take notice.

Gravity racing (1926)

Billy carts – known by some as soapbox racers – are among the crudest and most accident-prone vehicles ever invented. Traditionally, a billy cart’s chassis was made from a plank of salvaged four-by-two, while a dismantled wooden fruit box served as the bodywork. The wheels came from a discarded pram or were simply ball bearing races hammered onto each end of whittled wooden axles. The steering was effected with a piece of rope tied to the front axles, this action sometimes assisted by the legs on those axles. Motive power was gravity, and there was almost never a braking system beyond digging your heels into the road and hoping for the best.

‘You couldn’t buy anything,’ said Ron Tauranac, who built his first billy cart relatively late in life – in his first year of secondary school. Ron lived in Wollongong, sixty kilometres south of Sydney. His parents had moved their family from Kent, in England, when he was three, in search of a better life. Instead, they were soon hit by the Great Depression. ‘You had to find things on the scrap heap. I had two iron wheels and two rubber-tyred wheels, but no air or anything, and they were about the same diameter. If I put the rubber on the front and the iron wheels on the back [and] I went down the hill and turned the corner, the back would slide out. And if I put the iron wheels on the front and the rubber on the back, the front would slide out. Years later I learned that was called oversteer and understeer.’

Tauranac’s solution was simple: put the rubber wheels on one side of the billy cart, and the iron wheels on the other. Simple, effective and a sign of things to come.

From the 1930s, when Ron was building his first vehicles, until the 1970s billy carts hurtled between, and sometimes beneath, the motorised traffic in almost every Australian street with a decent hill.

It was also with billy carts that Jack Brabham made his start as a vehicle constructor and racer. He was born in 1926 of British stock, like most Australians of the time. His paternal grandfather, Thomas Brabham, from Twickenham in southwest London, arrived in Melbourne and eventually bought a ‘grocery shop business’ in Adelaide. His son, also Thomas – or Tom – married a woman named May and they settled in Hurstville in Sydney. It was a working-class suburb to the south, popular because it was on the train line. Tom took up the family trade, running a wholesale grocery business. He and May had a single child, John Arthur, and in the same week Tom took delivery of his first car, a 1926 Willys-Knight open tourer.

Family lore suggests this coincidence of car and baby led to the fascination that John Arthur, known as ‘Jack’, had with machinery, particularly things with wheels or wings. Soon he would have a Meccano set and build his first engineering creations. He also made model aeroplanes inspired by then-famous, later legendary, Australian aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith. The local train line had been electrified the year of Jack’s birth, but he was much more fascinated by the steam trains, which still occasionally made their way along it. At Hurstville Primary School he hated history but loved geography. He said he always had an ambition to see the world.⁵ Travelling overseas was a rare thing for working-class Australians back then, unless there was a war on. Funnily enough . . .

Jack’s favourite billy cart ‘track’ was the steep and treacherous Patrick Street in Hurstville. His skills were sharpened by avoiding cars coming out of the fifteen or so side-streets and even more numerous driveways. Through his teens he often rode his bicycle to the Royal National Park to swim. That was about forty kilometres south of Hurstville, making for an eighty kilometre round trip. He tried racing on the banked bike track at nearby Hurstville Oval. In his first race he came fourth and discovered two things: he wasn’t cut out to be a competitive cyclist, and he didn’t like losing.⁶ So he quit bicycle racing while he wasn’t too far behind.

The next family car was a Chrysler 77, in which Tom taught Jack to drive. Although just twelve and struggling to see over the bonnet, Jack showed plenty of aptitude and was soon allowed to drive the grocery trucks. At first it was around the yard and later back from the markets, despite the lack of a licence. It wasn’t uncommon back in that far less regulated era, particularly in the very early hours.

Jack went to Kogarah Technical College for a grounding in engineering and mechanics, though he had little idea of what he wanted to do in life. When World War II broke out, he decided he’d be a pilot, though many, many young boys thought similarly and, anyway, he was still too young to apply. Instead, he left school at fifteen, and worked briefly in an engineering shop then at a repair and maintenance garage in Treacy Street, right near what is today Jack Brabham Drive. While working there – for a man named Harry Ferguson – he continued at college, two or three evenings a week.

When Jack turned sixteen, his father helped him buy his first motorcycle, a second-hand 350 cc English-made Velocette. Jack pulled it apart, reassembled it and resold it for a modest profit. Then he bought another. Before long, a business was born buying, repairing and reselling motorcycles. He concentrated on Velocettes, since he was building up experience on them. The competitive streak was there too, buying the Sydney Morning Herald at 5 am on Saturday, the big classifieds day, and racing off to be first to see anyone who had a Velocette for sale. With Australia under threat of Japanese invasion, everything from fuel to sheet metal (not to mention food and clothing) was even scarcer than normal. Fixing second-hand motorcycles in terrible condition with minimal equipment and materials built up Jack’s skills in ‘making do’.

He covered a great distance on his motorbikes, up and down the east coast of Australia. When he gained his car licence at seventeen, he’d go west on shooting trips. Meanwhile, Jack gained a huge amount of experience working for Harry Ferguson. With mechanics in scarce supply, Ferguson gave him increasing responsibility and independence. ‘Improvisation, I learned,’ said Jack, ‘was the cornerstone of a good mechanic.’⁷

When the Brabhams moved to nearby Penshurst, Jack converted the back veranda into a motorcycle workshop. He also worked on his dad’s trucks, which had been converted to burn charcoal when the war broke out. By the time Jack turned eighteen he had completed two out of the three years of his Mechanical Engineering course. That was deemed enough and he joined the Royal Australian Air Force. Alas, he did so not as a pilot but as a spanner man. It was 1944. He was trained as an RAAF flight mechanic and stationed at Williamtown, near Newcastle, mainly working on the big twin-engined Bristol Beaufighters. He would later claim he learned to slide and correct a car on the frequent trips between his home and RAAF stations during the war.⁸ But while running an errand on an RAAF motorcycle-and-sidecar rig, the rusty frame snapped and he crashed heavily. Either way, he spent a week in hospital.

Jack was a long way from the wartime action, but often made it into the air on test flights. When he was in his eighties he would talk of such things, often in detail, though he still gave almost nothing of himself away. ‘This particular time the pilot came down from the officers’ mess and wanted to know who wants to go, so I put my hand up. They were talking a long time up in the officers’ mess, so I got sick of waiting and I got involved in a card game in the little hut next door. I sort of forgot about it. The next thing I heard the aeroplane taxiing out and I thought, Oh, well, I’ve missed it.

‘The pilot was demonstrating the aeroplane to the new pilot, so he decided to feather one of the propellers and show him how you stop the engine and start it again. When he feathered the propeller, something happened to the electrical system and he couldn’t feather it back again. Eventually it crashed. The pilot had taken the tractor driver instead of me, right at the last minute, and he actually got out of it, but he was really badly hurt and in hospital a long time.

‘Unfortunately, the aeroplane had broken up and the pilot had got thrown out and killed. While we were trying to get the tractor driver out of the back, I realised, well, we’re walking around in two or three inches of petrol. It only had to catch fire and we would have all been gone. So that was the start of my charmed life . . . my first great escape, I call it.’⁹

American Johnny (1946)

Speedway was the common man’s motor sport. The dirt track ‘Colosseum’ gave any brave, perhaps even reckless, youngster a chance to compete. The vehicles didn’t cost a fortune to build or run and there was plenty of money to win if you survived and did well. It drew huge crowds and could be unbelievably noisy as the combined roar of a dozen or more un-muffled engines bounced off the concrete grandstands. If you were close to the action it was filthy too, with the cars and bikes throwing up dust, mud, clay and stones. At least some of the spectators were there for the lethal mayhem that would often develop.

When Jack Brabham was demobilised, he set up a workshop on the land behind his grandfather’s house in Inverness Avenue, Penshurst, near Hurstville. Soon after, he met a former American serviceman who had married the daughter of a neighbour. His name was Johnny Schonberg and he must have been an exotic being in the bland southern suburbs of Sydney. The lanky Yank had not only seen action with the US military, he now raced a midget speedcar on the cinder track around the Sydney Sports Ground.

Brabham became very fond of Schonberg, despite his smoking. The pair went together to a war disposal auction in Darwin, hoping to pick up some trucks or machine tools, or anything else useful and cheap. En route, at Brisbane, Johnny spotted an ad for a speedway meeting. Jack had never been to a motor sport event before and was fairly nonplussed by the idea. He was ‘more intrigued than impressed’ when they walked around the pits looking at the crude little machines about to be raced. The components were mainly old, and salvaged from other, often unsuitable, vehicles. The windscreens – if even fitted – offered little protection for the drivers, the cockpits were filled with sharp metal protrusions and the drivers wore pudding-bowl helmets lined with cork. But the safety, or lack thereof, wasn’t even a consideration for most. They’d been through a war, after all.

In the pits, Jack focused mostly on the ingenious home-made solutions applied to various engineering problems. Once racing was underway, he was stunned by the scream of the engines, the sight of the cars bumping into each other and stuttering and sliding on the loose surface, and by the way the drivers sawed at their steering wheels to hold the cars almost sideways to the direction of travel. ‘I was a bit staggered by this racing, actually, and dirt flying over the fence and everything. It didn’t really excite me at the time. But anyway, once I got to know the cars, I thought, gee, I could build a car better than this, I’m sure.’¹⁰

On their return to Sydney – with plenty of booty from the auction – Jack watched Schonberg race his four-wheel drive, chain-driven Skirrow midget. The Skirrow became redundant when four-wheel drive was suddenly banned (probably to keep