Art of the Formula 1 Race Car: The Missing Chapter

Gordon Murray arrived in England from South Africa in the middle of the bitterly cold winter of 1969. He caught a bus to Hethel, where Colin Chapman had offered him a job, but arrived to find that Lotus was laying off staff. He spent the following months living in a bedsit in a grotty outer suburb of London near Heathrow Airport until he decided to doorstep the Brabham factory in search of work. Ron Tauranac happened to be interviewing for a position in the design office, and Gordon slipped into the queue of candidates. The rest is history.

In 1970, Jack Brabham retired from racing and sold his share of the team to Tauranac, who within a year grew exhausted with the administrative burden. Yearning to return to hands-on engineering, he sold the team to Jochen Rindt's former manager. Like Murray, this man was destined to turn the sport on its head with his energy and inventiveness, albeit in the commercial rather than engineering sphere. His name was Bernard Charles Ecclestone.