Jack
Brabham

Jack Brabham was born on 2 April 1926 in Hurstville, near Sydney. He took an interest in cars and engineering early on and worked in a garage as a teenager. From 1944 to 1946 he served as a mechanic in the Royal Australian Air Force, and he then ran a small workshop of his own. In 1948 he began racing midget cars, small open-wheel cars that ran on oval dirt tracks, and won several Australian championships. From 1953 he concentrated on circuit racing in Cooper cars in Australia and New Zealand, and in 1955 he travelled to Europe.

In Britain he became part of the Cooper racing team. He made his Formula One debut aged 29 at the 1955 British Grand Prix. At Monaco in 1957 he pushed his stricken car to the line to finish sixth. In 1959 he took his first world championship win for Cooper at Monaco and later in the season added another at the British Grand Prix. In the final race at Sebring he ran out of fuel on the last lap and pushed the car home in fourth, but he still won the title by four points from Tony Brooks. In 1960, with the new Cooper T53, he won five races in a row: the Dutch, French and Belgian Grands Prix, followed by the British and Portuguese. He claimed a second championship.

The Cooper was outclassed in 1961 and Brabham finished the season 11th in the standings. That year he also entered the Indianapolis 500 with a rear-engined Cooper and finished ninth. In 1962 he moved to his own team, which he had built up with Ron Tauranac. When the 3-litre formula arrived in 1966, he backed a Repco V8. With it he won the French Grand Prix at Reims, becoming the first driver to win a championship race in a car of his own construction, and then three more races in a row. He secured his third title at the Italian Grand Prix, and he remains the only driver to have won the championship in a car bearing his own name.

In 1967 he finished second behind his team-mate Denny Hulme, while the team won the constructors' title. He raced on for one more season in 1970, winning the opening round in South Africa and leading at Monaco until the final corner before finishing second. He ended the year fifth in the standings and then retired. His career totalled 126 starts, 14 wins, 31 podiums and 13 pole positions. Back in Australia he kept racing, including a guest drive in Melbourne in 1984, and he appeared at historic events into the 2000s. His son David also drove in Formula One for the Brabham team. Brabham was knighted for his services to motorsport.

Source: Wikipedia, “Jack Brabham”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.