AUTOSPORT's last interview with Jack Brabham

Five years ago I had the privilege of interviewing Jack Brabham at his home on the Gold Coast in the build-up to the Australian Grand Prix.

Then 83, he still cut a formidable figure, meaning even those unaware of his feats in motorsport would be able to detect that this was a man of singular determination and force of will capable of greatness in his pomp.

Time had taken its toll, but Brabham remained the competitor of old. Had you given him the gift of a 30-year-old body, he would likely have jumped straight back into a grand prix car and shown the modern generation a thing or two.

"I'm sure I could have made as good a fist of driving those cars as anyone," he said. "Good drivers can drive anything and can adapt to anything and that has never changed. I'd have really enjoyed making the money that they make now!"

This was said neither with contempt for the skills of modern drivers, nor with any arrogance. Instead, he stated it with the confidence of a driver who had been competitive in F1 in front-engined machinery in the 1950s, won the first world championship for a rear-engined car and still been capable of victories in bewinged machinery.

As you would expect from a man who cut his racing teeth on the rough and ready surfaces of midget racing in his native Australia, adapting came naturally to him.

"It was a matter of having a good feel and knowing about what you are driving," he said of that process. "Those early days were quite important. There wasn't any go-karting in my day, so the midgets were the first place for racing."

Brabham reckoned Moss was the better driver © LAT

Yet the first man to win the world championship in a rear-engined car - and the only one to win in his own make of car - doesn't quite get regarded in the same class as Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart or Jim Clark. One of racing's great all-rounders is too often overlooked.

Brabham suspected that it came partly from not cultivating the media in his heyday. He didn't have a chip on his shoulder about it (for the record, he rated Fangio and Moss as the best drivers); he simply responded to a question in his straight-talking Aussie way.

"I didn't spend the time talking to the journalists," said Brabham. "I was working on the cars instead of talking. That hurt us as far as publicity is concerned."

That might have been the case, but to a 21st century journalist Brabham's memories were fascinating. His story is unlike any other in the history of F1.

During his 16-year F1 career, Brabham shared the grid with everyone from Fangio and Moss to Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti. Career longevity can be a curse - just look at Graham Hill - but Brabham did not fade in his racing dotage. It was fascinating to listen to the great man reflect on his career and understand the determination that underpinned his achievements.

In 1970, his final season, he defied the naysayers with a series of performances that he believed should have earned him another title. Ever the competitor, he reflected on it as if it were only a few months ago that a swansong crown was lost. It was the sign of a true competitive spirit that continued to burn even in his eighties.

"I was driving as well in 1970 as I did at any time," said Brabham. "I should have won the championship. One of the things that stumped me was the British Grand Prix. I ran out of fuel on the last lap because one of the mechanics [for years believed to be Ron Dennis, but now exonerated] had started it up on full rich and didn't put it back.

"In Spain I spun on oil in the first few laps and had trouble restarting the car. I pegged Jackie [Stewart] back and with 10 laps to go passed him, when the crankshaft broke. We found it had a problem that Ford didn't pick up in their crack-testing. They rebuilt it for nothing, but that didn't get me my race back."

The 1970 F1 title could have gone to Brabham too © LAT

Had those two grands prix gone Brabham's way, he would have needed only a couple more points to nick a title won posthumously by Jochen Rindt, who had agreed to drive for Brabham in 1970, only to be released when Lotus came up with a better financial offer.

Mechanical problems haunt Brabham, who considered himself to be a 50/50 split of driver and engineer, and who also missed out on the '67 crown to team-mate Denny Hulme through an ill-timed engine failure.

So it's conceivable that Brabham could have retired as a five-time champion. Considering he started his F1 career in front-engined, low-grip machines, was at the vanguard of the transition to rear engines with Cooper, and then won his final grand prix in a wing car, his adaptability is astonishing.

"It was a matter of having good feel," said Brabham. "I enjoyed being involved in the development of the rear-engined car. Colin Chapman used to tell me that the engine had to be in the front. In 1960 Lotus got the message and from then on they were rear-engined. Cooper really changed the face of motor racing.

"Wings were interesting. The cars were suddenly a lot faster and dangerous because of the way they were mounted at first. There were some nasty accidents. I nearly had one myself in South Africa [in 1969]. It was in the fast left-hander at Turn 3. To do a good time, you had to get through there flat and I was going through there flat for the first time in the race.

"The wheels just touched the outside kerb; normally no problem, except that it dislodged the rear wing. The strut hit the tyre and the tyre pulled the wing straight off. I just managed to scramble around the outside of the corner and get back to the pits. It was like having both rear wheels taken off!"

That was one of Brabham's lucky escapes. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about his long career was that he emerged from it intact, apart from the damage to his hearing. He didn't spend one night in hospital during his racing career - that only came in 1999, three decades after his retirement, when he was tapped into a spin while racing a McLaren-BRM M5A at the Goodwood Revival and crashed heavily.

"In seven years on the speedways, where they used to turn the cars over every night, I never did," said Brabham.

A big accident in the 1959 Portuguese GP almost cost Brabham his first crown © LAT

"In Europe we lost so many people - it was terrible. In the Belgian Grand Prix in 1960, I won the race, got up on the podium and was told that two people [Chris Bristow and Alan Stacey] had died. That took the shine off it. It was happening so often that it was something we had to live with."

That's not to say that he didn't have his near-misses, notably at Monsanto Park in Portugal during his 1959 campaign, when local driver Mario Cabral triggered a massive crash.

"It may not be the luckiest, but it was a big escape," said Brabham. "Stirling and I were tussling for the lead and the backmarker didn't see me as we were lapping him. As soon as Stirling went past he tried to tuck in behind.

"The contact chucked me off the track. I went over the straw bales and up through the air. I could see that there was a big drop with trees at the bottom and that's where I thought I was going.

"But two things saved me. One was I hit a telegraph post that stopped me going into the ravine, and the other was that I didn't have a seatbelt. So the car hit the telegraph post and I was thrown out and landed on the road, while my car landed upside down and destroyed itself."

He referred to it as "a bit of luck", an understatement if ever there was one, especially as fellow Cooper driver Masten Gregory came close to running him over!

That was the closest Brabham came to losing the 1959 championship, the first for Cooper. The Aussie was part of the furniture in Charles Cooper's domain; had he not fallen in with him and his son, John, Brabham's story might never have been told. When he first tried his luck in Europe, it was the Coopers who rescued him from some unwise car purchases.

After starring in Australia in his Cooper-Bristol, dubbed the 'Redex Special' in deference to the fuel-additive company, Brabham sold the car when he came to Britain in 1955.

"I made a big mistake when I didn't take my Cooper-Bristol with me," he admitted. "Unfortunately, Peter Whitehead [a respected amateur driver] talked me into selling it before I left and buying his Cooper-Alta. It was an absolute dog. I couldn't believe what I had done. I was really lucky to get through that first year."

Cooper gave Brabham his F1 debut at Aintree in 1955 © LAT

Brabham salvaged some pride in the second half of the year after the Coopers allowed him to build his own car based on the Bobtail Cooper sportscar in their workshops. It was the start of a relationship that would take both to the top of the racing world.

"Being able to get in tow with Coopers helped a lot," Brabham said. "I got on very well with John Cooper and he let me work in the workshop when I got there, which gave me a job.

"When the Cooper-Alta was such a disaster he let me build my own car there. I got the chassis tubes and stretched them to make another chassis and put a Bristol engine in the back of it. I went home and won the Australian Grand Prix in that car, sold it and it gave me enough money to come back to Europe in 1956.

"Then I made my second mistake, buying a Maserati 250F from BRM. That was another disaster as it was worn out. Fortunately, I got a Cooper works contract and that saved me."

Although Moss claimed the first world championship GP victory for a rear-engined F1 car in 1958, driving for Rob Walker's team, it was Brabham who won the first title. It was also Brabham who solved the biggest design stumbling block: he found a suitable gearbox that would work reliably with a rear-engined car by modifying a batch of Citroen gearbox casings before they were cast.

It's unthinkable in the modern era for a driver to have such an influence on the building of a car, not to mention impossible. But the matter-of-fact way in which he described hitting upon the solution to a weakness that would have cost him the world championship is typical of the man.

"We started off with a Citroen gearbox but that had a very weak case that wasn't strong enough," he said. "I went to the factory and talked to them about making a gearbox for us. They said yes, but it would take two years.

Brabham developed a close relationship with the Coopers © LAT

"While I was there, I asked if I could have a look around the workshop and they took me down to the foundry. They were just about to start casting new cases for Citroen and they had a big line of cores ready for pouring. I talked the chap into letting me modify some of those cores.

"Luckily, I knew something about casting from my Australian experiences and he let me modify 25 cases by putting ribs in. In three weeks, we had them on the floor at Coopers and we got 22 out of the 25 as good ones.

"If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have won the world championship in 1959."

Brabham was also a major player in convincing team patriarch Charles Cooper to build the famous 'Lowline' Cooper T53 that Brabham drove to a second consecutive title in 1960. Although team-mate Bruce McLaren, also a major contributor in the development of the Coopers, had won the opening Argentinian GP, it was clear that the rest, Lotus in particular, were going to leave them behind.

"John Cooper and I travelled back on the plane together and we spent the whole time making drawings," said Brabham. "When we got back we knew what we had to do and we got stuck into that car.

"What we did was modify the suspension, and we finished up with four coil springs around the car rather than the leaf springs and it really worked out well. The '59 car was really oversteery and the '60 model was more like a modern racing car."

Brabham dominated in the Lowline, which also featured straight chassis tubes (much to Cooper designer Owen Maddock's chagrin) in place of the curved design of the T51. He took five straight mid-season victories, including the French Grand Prix at Reims, a win he cites as his greatest. But the writing was on the wall...

In 1961, his final season with Cooper, Brabham was already starting to put together Motor Racing Developments with Ron Tauranac. That season was a difficult one, with the move to 1.5-litre rules leaving Ferrari to clean up against the Climax-engined teams.

The 1961 season proved tough. Brabham leads from pole at Watkins Glen but would retire © LAT

"That was due to the rule changes," said Brabham. "We had everything going for us in 1960 and we'd have continued winning races if they hadn't changed to 1500cc."

That year, he also shocked the Indianapolis 500 establishment by taking on the race in a Cooper. Characteristically, Brabham saw it as the one that got away as, despite prodigious speed through the corners making up for a power deficit, he was put on the back foot by the rate at which he got through his tyres and finished ninth.

"If Dunlop had only got off their behind and given us some decent tyres for Indy, we could have won that because the car was very good," said Brabham. "The car was much faster than the others around the corners, even on the tyres that we had. Imagine if we'd had some decent tyres..."

Brabham believed it was inevitable that the Surbiton constructor, with Charles Cooper's aversion to investing, would not continue to cut it at the top level of F1. So it panned out, with Cooper winning only three more world championship grands prix after Brabham had left.

"Charlie Cooper didn't like spending money and I had the feeling that we were just not going to go on winning races like we did in 1959 and '60. He kept saying to me, 'Why change it when you're winning?'"

This chapter of his career was over. There were easier paths open to Brabham than creating his own team, but for a man driven by the desire to beat Ferrari, the idea of joining the Scuderia didn't appeal. He had already talked about, and rejected, the possibility.

During the interview, Brabham's glee at putting one over Maranello was abundantly clear. He also talked about his win in the 1960 French GP for a 'Race of My Life' article in AUTOSPORT, the main thrust of which was beating the Ferraris. In that context, his decision not to head to Italy is no surprise.

Brabham loved to beat Ferrari © LAT

"I did get invited to go down and see Enzo Ferrari, which must have been in 1960 when we beat them," recalled Brabham. "But that wasn't what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was to build cars that were capable of beating Ferrari. And that's what we did."

Brabham put what he had learned with Cooper to good use with his own team. Not that it was easy. Although Brabham's lower-formula single-seaters were instantly successful, it wasn't until 1964 that one won a world championship race, with Dan Gurney in France.

"None of them patted me on the back but I did it regardless," said Brabham of the reaction to him starting up his own operation.

"I couldn't do it on my own. I was lucky enough to have a very good team of people around me and Ron Tauranac was a big part of that. I worked with him in Australia and it was a very successful partnership. I was running the team and working with the mechanics and was able to be involved in the engineering side on the track.

"When I started building my own cars, the only engine available was the V8 Climax. We had so much trouble with it, it was a nightmare. When we heard that the formula was going to change to three-litre [for 1966], that really spurred me on. I went out to Australia and had a meeting with Repco. They agreed to build an engine for me."

The Repco, based on an Oldsmobile block, pushed out a little over 300bhp. There were some outrageous power figures being bandied around for some rival engines, but the Repco propelled Brabham to victory in the French GP at Reims. Three more wins in the Tauranac-designed BT19 made him the only driver to win the world championship in his own make of car.

It was the crowning glory of an amazing career. Typically, Brabham was quick to underline that this was a team effort. While others built themselves up, Brabham was a little more realistic, and perhaps in that characteristic lies part of the blame for his talents being sometimes undervalued.

But what is remarkable about Brabham is that it doesn't matter that, in terms of pure pace, he was not quite on the same level as a Moss or a Stewart. What Brabham did is unequalled in history, winning the world championship in a car of his own.

When greats like him are lost, it seems trite to reflect that we won't ever see their like again. But in the case of 'Black Jack' - a nickname he wasn't fond of - it's absolutely true.