Tributes will be paid to Sir Jack Brabham at motor sport events around the world in the coming months, following his death aged 88 at home on the Gold Coast, Australia.
Sir Jack was one of the most accomplished drivers and team owners in the history of motor racing, and the first driver to be knighted for services to motor sport. From his early days racing midget cars on dirt ovals in Australia, ‘Black Jack’, as he became known, rose to dominate Formula 1.
He started his motor sport career after visiting a midget car race in Brisbane with neighbour Johnny Schonberg. With a fledgling business as a car mechanic, Jack decided to build a midget racer for Johnny to drive – but halfway through the 1948 season Johnny decided to give up racing, and suggested that Jack take over. His first race was at Parramatta Speedway. ‘They were all lunatics,’ he told Doug Nye for The Jack Brabham Story.
It wasn’t long before he was racing three nights a week, and not much longer before he graduated to circuit racing in the the now famous Redex Special Cooper-Bristol, with enough success that he decided to take things further by moving to Europe. Despite a shaky start he soon graduated to the big time, becoming a works driver for Cooper and winning the 1959 and 1960 World Championships in the rear-engined Cooper-Climax.
Frustrations at Cooper eventually led Jack to start as a constructor himself, and he soon became the only driver in history to win a World Championship in a car of his own manufacture. That was 1966; the following year he won the Constructors’ Championship but not the Drivers’. His last race win came at the South African Grand Prix in 1970, his final season of racing.
Jack returned to Australia, selling Brabham to Bernie Ecclestone. The marque would go on to achieve two more world titles, in 1981 and ’83, while Jack pursued his other great passion of flying, though he returned to racing recently at historic events such as the Goodwood Revival.
During all his success, what Jack Brabham was known for above all among the racing fraternity was his ever-friendly nature and his sense of humour – he famously ‘limped’ to his car on the 1966 Zandvoort grid wearing a false beard in response to talk that, at 40, he was too old to race.
His youngest son David will drive the 1960 Cooper-Climax in the 50th Silverstone Grand Prix commemorative parades at this year’s British GP, and further tributes to ‘Black Jack’ are expected at the Silverstone Classic, Goodwood Revival and more.
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