How a relic of the past defeated the future

History rightly records the Lotus 49 as one of the seminal grand prix cars of the 1960s. Conjoined with the Ford-Cosworth DFV engine, it rendered its opposition obsolete at a stroke. And yet it was beaten to the world championship in its first year by one of those very dinosaurs.

Appearing for the first time on the same weekend as the Lotus - Zandvoort 1967 - Brabham's BT24 was everything Colin Chapman's masterpiece of lightweighting wasn't.

From its steel spaceframe chassis and glassfibre bodywork to its simple coil-over-springs suspension, it was a work of pragmatism and simplicity rather than restless innovation. Still, at least it had bespoke-designed, cast magnesium suspension uprights rather than the ex-Triumph Herald forgings used by its predecessors.

These differences cut to the heart of what marked Brabham out from Lotus in the 1960s. Both businesses relied on selling cars to supplement their prize money from racing, but whereas Chapman brazenly shifted lesser machinery to his customers, Brabham built a reputation for supplying competitive products to anyone.

Indeed, Jack Brabham himself had learned this the hard way when his young racing organisation acquired a Lotus 24 in 1962, only for the works team to unveil the vastly more advanced and competitive Type 25.

Having set up shop under his own name at the turn of the decade after winning his first two world championships as a works Cooper driver, the entrepreneurial and mechanically gifted Brabham built his business gradually.

In partnership with fellow Australian Ron Tauranac, whose diligent and focused engineering became a cornerstone of the Brabham brand, Jack sold competitive chassis for the junior formulae while gathering momentum in Formula 1.

The abrupt doubling of the maximum engine capacity for 1966 proved decisive: Brabham teamed up with Australian automotive components giant Repco to assemble a new three-litre V8 based on existing stocks of an abandoned Oldsmobile road car unit.It wasn't hugely powerful but the aluminium block was lighter than the equivalent V12 a cash-strapped Ferrari had been forced to repurpose from its sportscar efforts.

Meanwhile, the other British 'garagiste' teams struggled to find engines at all, since the likes of BRM and Coventry Climax had frittered away time fighting against the new regulations rather than developing products compliant with them.In this chaotic environment, Brabham became the first driver to win the world title in a car bearing his own name.

His BT19 wasn't innovative or even particularly integrated - the chassis had been sitting around in the workshop for months, waiting for a 16-cylinder engine Coventry Climax decided not to build - but it was solid, reliable, easy to work on, and could be coaxed into a four-wheel drift. Brabham clung on to his "Old Nail" even after Tauranac produced a better-integrated model, the BT20.

The 1967 BT24 was therefore Brabham's third shot at producing a three-litre F1 car, but still Tauranac resisted the pull of fashion, keeping faith with a steel spaceframe structure even as his rivals embraced aluminium monocoques. His reasoning was sound: a properly designed and built spaceframe was light enough to be in the competitive ballpark, stiffer than a monocoque designed by someone who didn't know what they were doing, and easier for a customer to fix if they crashed it.

The fundamentals of the 740 block were similar to before, but the design and casting was undertaken by Repco, enabling it to remove some of the redundant areas of the Oldsmobile design, which had used pushrod valvegear

Similar logic governed the suspension layout; Lotus mounted its springs and dampers inside the car body and actuated them via rocker arms, calculating that the aerodynamic benefit was worth accepting the rockers' relative lack of stiffness. Tauranac conducted some (albeit primitive) windtunnel tests at what is now the MIRA research facility and concluded the opposite. Accordingly, Brabhams continued to feature solidly engineered suspension setups with the springs and dampers sitting in the airstream.

The BT24 was lighter than the BT20 and slightly narrower, with the fuel tanks repositioned within the chassis frame. As well as specifying bespoke uprights for the first time, Tauranac adjusted the suspension design to be narrower at the front and wider at the rear, to suit the preferred handling characteristics of Brabham and team-mate Denny Hulme. The majority of the differences were behind the driver, where the new Hewland DG300 gearbox was mated to the new Repco 740 engine.

The key to the competitiveness of the Repco V8 in the first two seasons of the three-litre era was the very reason General Motors had dropped the original unit from mass production.

Aluminium is light but expensive and tricky to work with, and the ratio of imperfect castings to useable ones was too much for GM's bean counters. Brabham had seen a Buick-badged version of the V8 in a Scarab in Australia in 1962, and three years later he approached long-time sponsor Repco to produce a 2.5-litre variant for Tasman racing and a three-litre for F1.

Having predicted the chaos of the 1966 F1 season perfectly, Brabham was equally aware that he couldn't count on his rivals being in disarray for long.

Just as the BT24 was a finessed evolution of its predecessors, the Repco 740 engine was a careful progression of what had gone before. With the original V8, Repco had acquired 26 Oldsmobile blocks (similar to the Buick, but featuring six head bolts for each cylinder rather than five) and re-machined them to more exacting standards, then mated them to a new bottom end and new cylinder heads designed by Brabham along with Repco's Phil Irving in a rented flat in Clapham during 1964.

Reliability and serviceability were prioritised over power - for instance, the cylinder heads could be removed without disturbing the timing gear.

The fundamentals of the 740 block were similar to before, but the design and casting was undertaken by Repco, enabling it to remove some of the redundant areas of the Oldsmobile design, which had used pushrod valvegear.

On the 620 engine Repco had covered and filled the various voids and pipes with aluminium plates and epoxy resin, a facet picked up on rather sneeringly in some quarters of the specialist press.

Besides neatness, one of the prime motivators for redesigning the block was Brabham's desire to relocate the exhausts to the centre of the vee, neatening the airflow around the flanks of the car and avoiding an awkward journey for the exhaust pipes between the chassis rails.

Accomplishing this involved redesigning the cylinder heads from top to bottom, including new stud patterns which in turn required changes to the block. Revising the structure to remove redundancies from its road car roots enabled Repco's engineers to shave 15kg from the finished item, which output an honest 330bhp, a gain of 20bhp over the original.

Repco fell behind in the design of the new block and the 740 didn't appear until Monaco in 1967, round two, where Brabham raced in his "Old Nail", the BT19. A broken conrod put him out on the first lap, resulting in further delays while Repco investigated the cause. The company's physical location also caused a host of logistical difficulties.

"The airfreight was always a bind," Brabham recalled years later. "I often think back and wonder how the hell we actually won a world championship with all the problems we had - twice we had engines lost between Melbourne and London.

"One time the plane carrying our engines had technical trouble in Cairo. They put the passengers on another plane but all the cargo, including our engines, went back to Melbourne.

"Another time, I insisted on being there when they actually loaded the engine onto the plane. When I got to the other end they said there was no engine. I rang British Airways every day for three weeks, asking them where it was. They said they didn't have it. Then I got a call saying 'We've had an engine here for three weeks. When are you going to pick it up?'"

Hulme won at Monaco in a 620-engined BT20. The next round was the Dutch GP at Zandvoort, where Jim Clark took the new Cosworth-powered Lotus 49 to a momentous debut victory. Brabham ran the BT24 in practice but wasn't ready to trust the engine yet, so he raced with the venerable BT19 to second behind Clark, with Hulme third in a BT20.

The BT24 finally made its debut in round four, at Spa, with Brabham at the wheel, but its new engine succumbed to oil pump failure. Thereafter, with the 740 engine debugged, the team rediscovered its mojo and Hulme finished six of the last seven rounds on the podium in his BT24 - including a decisive win at the Nürburgring, where Clark qualified 9.4 seconds faster but retired from the lead when his suspension collapsed. Brabham won in France and Canada and was second in Italy.

Thanks to superior reliability and consistency, and an abstruse points system (each driver dropped his worst result from the first six and final five rounds), Hulme and Brabham beat four-time race winner Clark into third place overall. Their two wins and two retirements apiece trumped his four wins and four retirements.

Lotus would have the last laugh, though. Once the teething troubles of car and engine were sorted, the 49 went on to dominate 1968 and establish itself as one of F1's engineering milestones. Repco's next-generation engine, with multivalve heads, was unreliable and not powerful enough, and the company withdrew.

RACE RECORD
Starts: 29
Wins: 3
Poles: 0
Fastest laps: 1
Other podiums: 9
Drivers' championship points: 79
Constructors' points: 49

SPECIFICATION
Chassis: Steel spaceframe
Suspension: Double wishbones, coil-over shock absorbers (f), double wishbones with upper radius rods, coil-over shock absorbers (r)
Engine: Repco 740 90-degree V8
Engine capacity: 2994cc
Power: 330bhp@8,800rpm
Gearbox: Hewland DG300 five-speed manual
Tyres: Dunlop
Weight: 508kg
Notable drivers: Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme