How Brabham overcame tedious battles to get an F1 title-winner and Indy pioneer built

On the plane home from Argentina, Jack Brabham was busy frantically plotting, in cahoots with his friend and comrade John Cooper. Complacency is the work of the devil in motorsport and, just two months after pushing his frumpy little back-to-front car over the line at Sebring to become an unlikely (and exhausted) world champion, Brabham knew he and Cooper needed to work fast if they were to stand any hope of retaining their hard-won crowns in 1960.

By the time they landed in London, the concept of the car you see here had been sketched out. The Cooper T53, aka the Lowline, was the fully justified result of good old-fashioned competitive paranoia.

The trigger was another funny-looking thing that Brabham compared to a biscuit tin. But in Buenos Aires at the opening world championship grand prix of the new decade, the boxy, inelegant (and also mid-engined) Lotus 18 had startled the world champions with its pace and obvious potential. The Scot called Ireland hadn’t won the race, but had led it convincingly before a broken gear linkage and subsequent spin dropped Innes to an eventual sixth.

Brabham’s team-mate Bruce McLaren, the then youngest F1 race winner at the dramatic Sebring 1959 finale, had inherited his second consecutive grand prix victory as Jack’s title defence struggled to get into gear, but the writing was on the wall. The company that had turned Formula 1 inside out and on its head in the space of a few months would play second fiddle in this still emerging mid-engined revolution, without a dose of direct action.

Following a sweltering non-points race in Cordoba from which Brabham returned empty handed, that flight home would prove pivotal. As Brabham wrote in his autobiography, “I told [John] ‘we’ve really got to do something or we’ll be left for dead this year,’ and we began planning a new car right there on the airliner.”

But back at base in Surbiton, they faced predictable obstruction. Old man Charlie Cooper was conservative (and tight) at the best of times.

Sketched on a plane home, the boxy T53 was a reaction to the competition

Photo by: James Mann

“Why change it when we’re winnin’?” was his response, especially when the supposed threat was posed by that jumped-up “Flash ’Arry” Colin Chapman. But Brabham was insistent. They landed at Heathrow on 17 March. On 14 May the Lowline raced for the first time, at Silverstone.

The car is credited to Cooper’s long-time designer and engineer, Owen Maddock. Heavy of beard and an accomplished jazz musician (a natural combination), Maddock is something of a forgotten figure, despite his obvious contribution to the most fundamental and astonishing transformation F1 would ever experience.

Compare a 1958 front-engined big-beast Vanwall, the first constructors’ champion, to the far less imposing ‘English Beetle’ Cooper T51 that would succeed it: on the face of it, Maddock should be venerated as much as Chapman, Gordon Murray or Adrian Newey. That he isn’t might be partly buried in the reality that the Lowline was the product of collaboration, cajoled into existence by Brabham more than anyone. And instead of a revolutionary with the gift of intuitive foresight, Maddock has been portrayed since as a man stuck in his ways as much as the ‘Old Man’ he worked for when it came to embracing fresh thinking.

What Brabham did credit Maddock with was the new five-speed transaxle gearbox which Jack claimed was the designer’s most significant contribution

The sleek, purposeful and, yes, lower T53, with its slimmed-down body and longer, more elegant nose to chase better top speeds, was a clear visual step on from its predecessor. The pedals, steering gear and radiator were brought forward to allow the driver to lie further back in what is now considered classic style. The chassis was a basic four-tube frame. On this point, here was the main crux of the technical opposition Brabham faced from Maddock, who dug in his heels to keep the curved tubing he believed in.

“I knew that straight tubes could provide a stiffer, lighter structure, but no way would Owen accept that and our argument went on for ages with Charlie consistently backing ‘The Beard’,” recalled Brabham, on a design that allowed the 2.5-litre Coventry Climax FPF engine
to be dropped an inch lower in the chassis. 

Still, the driver eventually got his way, as he did on coil spring suspension over the dated leaf springs the Old Man obstinately stood by. In the wasted energy of these rows is
the seed of Brabham’s eventual decision to go his own way beyond Cooper and begin building his own cars on his own terms, and under his own name.

What Brabham did credit Maddock with was the new five-speed transaxle gearbox which Jack claimed was the designer’s most significant contribution. The Cooper-Knight C5S – produced by specialist Jack Knight in Battersea – would prove bulletproof across the 1960 season. But John Cooper had to ‘lose’ the paperwork to get it made until it was too late for his baulking father to block its build on the account of cost. 

The pedals, steering gear and radiator were brought forward to allow the driver to lie further back

Photo by: James Mann

Consider too that the Old Man was initially against a second chassis being made until the T53 was proven. That’s why the second was hidden away from the old Hollyfield Road works
at a newly established base on Langley Road. F1 is hard enough without such shenanigans.

Legend has it the T53’s first test run was early one morning after an all-nighter – up the A3 bypass between the Hook and Tolworth roundabouts.

“I was about to repeat that circuit when I saw a police car going the other way,” wrote Jack. “It stopped and turned around.” Brabham sprinted back to the Hollyfield Road works where the shutters quickly came down; Plod eventually gave up on its unanswered enquiries.

The car was then transported to Silverstone for a proper test, in which the Old Man’s doubts were banished. The car lopped a full six seconds off Cooper’s best previous times… although Charlie was canny. Two of those seconds could be attributed to a new track surface, he reasoned, two more to lower silhouette Dunlop tyres. But that still left two more seconds of speed in the car itself. Suddenly the T53 made perfect sense.

Meanwhile the Lotus threat had been confirmed at Goodwood’s Easter meeting. There, Stirling Moss in Rob Walker’s Cooper T51 found himself defeated in the Glover Trophy by Ireland – who then pulled a famous double by repeating the trick in the Formula 2 Lavant Cup. That pulled Moss and Walker up short.

Both were fond of John and Charlie Cooper, but Moss – so often loyal to a fault – told Walker with a heavy heart to place an order for a Lotus 18. It was a decision that hurt sensitive John Cooper deeply, although it should also be added that Moss was aware he wouldn’t be able to lay his hands on a new T53 owing to a fuel sponsor clash. Cooper was with Esso, Moss and Walker with BP. 

Years later, Stirling would reflect on the contrast he experienced and explain to this writer the reality behind his hard-nosed decision: “The Coopers were much nicer to drive. They were everything that was fun about motor racing; the Lotus was not. It was far more delicate and unforgiving. But if a driver was of sufficient ability the 18 was quicker, at the expense of fun – although it’s always enjoyable to win!”

Brabham wasn't given cause to regret pushing for the T53

Photo by: Motorsport Images

To compound the sense of a changing tide, Ireland won again at the Silverstone International Trophy, on a muted weekend when Harry Schell was thrown from his Cooper in practice and killed. In the race, Moss’s T51 retired with a broken wishbone, while Brabham was second on the Lowline’s debut having been forced to stop with a sticking throttle.

By Monaco, Walker had taken delivery of his Type 18 and Moss justified his switch with an immediate victory – the first for a Lotus in a world championship-counting grand prix. Brabham in his Lowline had actually passed Stirling in the early going, only to uncharacteristically spin and hit the wall at Ste Devote. McLaren survived two spins to finish second and, combined with his points from Argentina, found himself leading the world championship at this stage. His team leader had yet to score – but all that was about to change.

The Dutch GP at Zandvoort followed only a week later, so Brabham’s T53 was hastily despatched to Langley Road for repairs and trailered back across the channel to the circuit in the sand dunes. At one point along the way it became unhitched, unbeknown to the crew in the truck, but trundled without damage into a field…  Jack repaid the work and made good on such fortune by claiming the Lowline’s first victory.

He qualified in the middle of the front row, led Moss away and then caught a kerb stone which flicked back into the blue Lotus’s path, causing a puncture. “Stirling seemed to think I’d done it on purpose,” wrote the wry and doughty Aussie.

In Oporto Jack made it five wins in a row, despite getting caught out by the slippery tramlines that also put paid to the victory hopes of impressive motorcycle king John Surtees

From Zandvoort on, the complexion of what appeared to be a promising season of Lotus vs Cooper cut and thrust quickly paled – via one of the most unspeakably tragic weekends in F1’s history, at fearsome old Spa-Francorchamps. First, Moss was lucky to survive with two broken legs, pelvis and back when his Lotus lost a wheel through hub failure in practice. Almost simultaneously as everyone was distracted by helping Moss, privateer Mike Taylor was also severely hurt when the steering column weld failed on his 18, sending him crashing into trees.

Yet worse was to come in the race when Yeoman Credit Cooper driver Chris Bristow crashed and died, followed later by the loss of works Lotus driver Alan Stacey, who is thought to have hit a bird. Brabham’s subsequent victory was all too obviously a joyless one. But this was F1 back then. It happened, it was brutal, and racing and the world simply kept turning.

At Reims for the French GP, Brabham made it a Lowline hat-trick in emphatic fashion, on a weekend that highlighted the rapid rate of progress from the British teams. A year earlier Tony Brooks had set pole in his front-engined Ferrari in 2m19.4s. Now Brabham flew around the fast road course in 2m16.8s.

T53 won its first Grand Prix at Zandvoort, and went on to claim the next four on the trot

Photo by: David Phipps

In the race he survived a potential T-boning when Phil Hill ended his duel with Brabham by locking up his Ferrari under braking into the Thillois hairpin. The American sailed up the inside, narrowly missing the Cooper (luckily Jack had seen him coming), and shot up the escape road. Olivier Gendebien – better known as a Ferrari Le Mans hero, but also a decent F1 driver – and Yeoman Credit team-mate Henry Taylor were second and fourth, with McLaren between them in third, to record a high watermark 1-2-3-4 for Cooper. Lotus? Who?

The run continued at Silverstone when Brabham clinched the British GP, but only after BRM’s first mid-engined F1, the P48, found its groove in the hands of Graham Hill. The future two-time world champion was on course to win his home GP (a feat he’d never achieve), having charged back to lead after stalling at the start – only to fall off under pressure from Brabham at Copse.

Then in Oporto Jack made it five wins in a row, despite getting caught out by the slippery tramlines that also put paid to the victory hopes of impressive motorcycle king John Surtees, continuing his transition to four wheels with Lotus. Just eight weeks after his Spa smash, Moss was somehow back for this one, to pick up another lost what-might-have-been world championship campaign.

By now, Brabham was virtually a two-time consecutive world champion – a status confirmed when the British teams chose to boycott the Italian GP because of the Italians’ insistence on using Monza’s wall-of-death high banking. Even in 1960, that was deemed inordinately dangerous and woefully outdated.

Cooper and the rest of the British contingent returned for the final championship round, the only US GP to be held at Riverside, California. Moss’s victory in Walker’s Lotus counted as little more than a consolation, with Brabham delayed by a brief fire caused by a fuel leak. Despite singed electrics, he soldiered on, hunched over the wheel in his signature style that harked back to Jack’s dirt oval days back home. The final standings left him five clear of team-mate McLaren – who was a gaping 16 ahead of Ireland and a so-long-absent Moss. 

The 1960 season is remembered as one that lost its puff too soon, at least in terms of a battle for the world championship, tarnished by the awful events at Spa – a weekend that might well be judged beyond comprehension in our more sensitive age. Yet Cooper’s achievement, with a quickly devised car that perfected all that the company had learned through its roots in the 500cc junior category and its breakthrough F1 seasons of 1958 and ’59, is all too easily overlooked. 

That’s probably because of what followed across the rest of the decade. As F1 scaled down to 1.5-litre engines in 1961, Ferrari’s V6-powered ‘Sharknose’ 156 stole a march on the strangely complacent British teams, before Lotus and BRM forged ahead into 1962. This would be Chapman’s decade – and Cooper faded all too quickly.

Brabham pressured Hill into a mistake to secure victory at Silverstone

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Brabham spotted the drift early and soon took that decision to forge his own path, while Cooper’s remarkable exploits in pioneering F1 cars that pushed rather than pulled drivers to world championship success would eventually be overshadowed by an iconic alliance that still burns bright in our collective consciousness. Think of Charlie and John’s surname today and it’s likely first to be in association with the era-defining wonder that is the Mini.

But again the Lowline deserves more credit, and not just for what it achieved on the F1 circuits of Europe. The model also played a crucial pioneering role in a mid-engined revolution that arguably created an even greater discombobulation of shock – across the Atlantic at Indianapolis. For it was John Cooper and Jack Brabham, not Colin Chapman and Jim Clark, who first blew the doors off the Indy 500 and signalled the end of the hallowed front-engine roadster era.

In October 1960, as Brabham headed west before the US GP, he and Cooper embarked on a fact-finding mission to The Brickyard, encouraged by Indy hero Rodger Ward. The penny dropped early for Ward on mid-engined potential after his ill-advised attempt to race in the 1959 Sebring GP – in a dirt-oval midget! Striking up a friendship with Brabham that weekend, he quickly learned how much he’d underestimated F1 performance and the experience planted a seed. 

But the cat was out of the bag, long-held reverential tradition was thrown to the winds – and Chapman was watching. Lotus rather than Cooper picked up the charge

Lured by Ward’s conviction and in no small part by how much prize money the Indy 500 offered, Brabham pitched up at The Brickyard where a T53 Lowline was waiting for him. What he hadn’t expected was the Speedway insisting the two-time reigning world champion should still undergo the strict rookie orientation programme, building up his speed around the rectangular 2.5-mile ‘oval’ in a controlled and what felt like painfully slow manner.

Perplexed, Brabham eventually sent a bolt through the front-engined roadster establishment by lapping fast enough to have qualified eighth for the 1960 Indy 500. He and Cooper returned the following May, juggling transatlantic flights to keep up with the F1 schedule at Monaco and Zandvoort, to qualify and race at the Indy 500. 

Brabham and his specially adapted Kimberly Cooper Special – named after the millionaire behind the Kleenex tissue brand – finished ninth. He’d have finished higher without one of the American crew cross-threading the nut on his offside rear wheel, thereby lengthening each of Brabham’s three stops as the nut was forcefully hammered on and off. 

But the cat was out of the bag, long-held reverential tradition was thrown to the winds – and Chapman was watching. Lotus rather than Cooper picked up the charge, Jim Clark storming to a game-changing landmark at the 500 in 1965. But in an echo of F1, it had been its Surbiton rival and the pretty Lowline that had first pointed the way.

While it didn't gain as much credit, Cooper's T53 led the way for others to follow and achieve even greater glory

Photo by: James Mann

Race record

Starts: 54
Wins: 6
Poles: 3
Fastest laps: 4
Podiums: 5
Championship points: 50*

 *Only the best-placed car from each manufacturer at each round, and the best six results, counted in 1960; best five results in 1961

Specification

Chassis: Tubular steel frame
Suspension: Double wishbones with coil springs
Engine: Coventry Climax inline four cylinder
Engine capacity: 2497cc (1960), 1499cc (1961) 
Power: 230bhp @ 7000rpm (1960), 151bhp @ 7500 rpm (1961)
Gearbox: Five-speed Cooper-Knight C5S
Brakes: Steel discs
Tyres: Dunlop
Weight: 500kg
Notable drivers: Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, John Surtees

Is the T53 the most underappreciated F1 title-winner?

Photo by: James Mann