How pragmatic principles made Tauranac a design legend

When David Brabham revived the marque that carries the name of his father, Sir Jack, he knew it was important to honour the other half of the double act that drove Brabham to success in Formula 1 and beyond in the 1960s. That's why his track-day machine launched in 2018 maintains the BT prefix to its type number. He rightly recognised the contribution of Ron Tauranac, who died last week at the age of 95.

"It was vital to retain the BT on the BT62 because without Ron, dad would never have been so successful and the name wouldn't be what it is today," says Brabham.

"The family is hugely grateful for Ron's contribution to the Brabham marque. With the BT62 and moving forward with subsequent cars, it is a way of carrying on his legacy as much as Jack's."

Sir Jack's place in the motorsport history books is enshrined by his 1966 F1 world championship victory that to this day makes him the only driver to win title in a car bearing his own name. Yet Tauranac — the T in BT, of course - was just as important in that success and the one that followed for Brabham with Denny Hulme in 1967.

Not only did he design the F1 cars, but he was a partner in the company, Motor Racing Developments, that built both the grand prix machinery and a line of successful junior single-seaters.

The success of Brabham as a marque and as a team was borne of their relationship. It was a very different one to that other driver/engine partnership that helped define F1 in the 1960s, that between Lotus found Colin Chapman and Jim Clark, but it was successful nonetheless.

Not only did Tauranac-designed Brabhams win two world titles, and finish second in the points with Jacky Ickx in 1969, but MRD built more than 500 racing cars that notched up success across a variety of formulae. These cars are just as important to the Brabham story as the Repco-powered F1 machines that Brabham and Hulme raced during their championship-winning campaigns.

Brabham had known exactly who he wanted to team up with when he decided that he could do at least as good a job as Cooper in building customer racing cars. He'd first met Tauranac in 1951 when they'd been rivals on the New South Wales hillclimb scene, Brabham in a converted midget he'd raced on speedway ovals and his future business partner in the first car to carry a name that would become familiar to motor racing aficionados worldwide after he launched the Ralt marque in 1974.

"As he was getting more influential at Cooper, dad would have the ideas and send sketches back to Ron in Australia. They essentially won two championships together before they started Brabham" David Brabham

They stayed in touch after Brabham left to further his career, more so than the world knew at the time. It is generally accepted that Tauranac had an arm's length involvement in the championship triumphs of Brabham as a driver in 1959 and '60 with Cooper.

Brabham drove the pace of development at the British team and regularly consulted his old friend and bounced ideas off him, but David suggests that Tauranac's hand in development of the Cooper-Climax T51 and particularly the lowline T53 (below) for 1960 ran much deeper.

"Dad told me that as he was getting more influential at Cooper, he would have the ideas and send sketches back to Ron in Australia," explains Brabs. "Ron would get them and do the drawings.

"He'd then send them back to England, and dad would build what he'd drawn. That's how it worked: they essentially won two championships together before they started Brabham. Ron was working in the background and no one really knew."

Tauranac was still very much in the background when Brabham brought him and his family over to the UK for 1960 to begin work on what would become the MRD BT1 Formula Junior car. (The Brabham name was invoked after the launch of the car at the suggestion of Swiss journalist Jabby Crombac.) He had to be, because Jack was still driving for Cooper.

Cooper got wind of Brabham's intentions, precipitating a parting of the ways between team and driver. That gave Tauranac an extra job: he had to design an F1 car for his friend and business partner to drive in 1962.

Brabham and Tauranac were most definitely a double act, with the utmost respect for each other.

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"Jack was brighter than you could imagine, though not in an academic way," says John Judd Sr, who joined Brabham as the team's engine man in 1966 and helped design the Repco V8s in Australia for the 1967 and '68 seasons.

"He made a fair contribution to the engineering of the cars. Ron laid them out and did all the suspension geometry, but he'd always listen to Jack and implement his ideas when they seemed to be good ones."

There were some frank exchanges between the two, however. Tauranac was always forthright in his opinions.

"Ron had a very distinct personality: whatever Ron thought, Ron said," explains Judd. "That can be a bit of a problem at times, which is probably why Jack kept him out of some of the F1 decisions. He wasn't someone you'd want to take into an important meeting where a bit of subtlety and charm was required."

Tauranac wasn't an innovator in the mould of Chapman. Rather he was a pragmatic engineer, who believed in sound engineering principles. Legend has it that Coventry-Climax boss Walter Hassan got a curt reply when he asked if Brabham would be following the lead set by Lotus with its title-winning type 25 by producing a monocoque car for 1963. "A monocoque is a load of cock," was Tauranac's reputed reply.

His perseverance with spaceframe construction and the aerodynamic freedom it gave him would continue to yield Brabham grand prix victories into 1969.

"Ron was pretty damn good," says Judd. "He was very good at building cost-effective racing cars that were quick and also safe. The engineering integrity was always there: Ron's cars were always properly put together."

Ickx's 1969 German GP victory aboard the Cosworth-engined BT26A on the Nurburbrging-Nordschleife is testament to that.

"He built a car strong enough to fly," says the Belgian, who finished runner-up in the championship that year. "At the Nurburgring, if I remember, there were 17 places where the car was leaving the ground. There were jumps where the car was 60cm in the air."

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Brabham — team and driver — might have won another world championship the following year with Tauranac's monocoque BT33. Jack lost victories at the last gasp at both Monaco and Brand Hatch, respectively the result of a lock-up and the want of another pint or so of fuel, to Jochen Rindt, who went on to win the title posthumously.

"Ron was always hungry for pace. If he came up with something, he'd be getting a hacksaw or the welding gear out almost before he'd finished explaining it" Jonathan Palmer

Tauranac took over Brabham after Jack's retirement and return to Australia. But running an F1 team wasn't his bag. He once described himself as "hopeless" at finding sponsors and dressing up in a suit was anathema to him. He accepted an offer for the team from Bernie Ecclestone, even when the man who would go onto become F1's ringmaster dropped the price at the eleventh hour.

Tauranac subsequently worked as a consultant. He linked up with Frank Williams on the Politoys FX3 F1 car built for 1973 (below), which morphed into the Iso-Marlboro FX3B for the following season. He also designed a Formula 5000 car for Trojan.

Then fellow Aussie Larry Perkins arrived at Tauranac's door, wanting help sorting his GRD Formula 3 car. The engineer thought he could do a better, and the Ralt name was revived for the company that followed.

Ralt Engineering products helped a whole generation of drivers on the road to F1. Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Rubens Barrichello were among them, as was David Brabham, British champion and Macau Grand Prix winner in 1989 with a Ralt RT33. In fact all three of Sir Brabham's sons, Geoff, Gary and David, all raced Ralts at some point in the formative stages of their careers.

The Ralt operation based in Weybridge, Surrey was about building cars not racing them. That included producing an F1 car for Theodore, the TR1 in which Keke Rosberg claimed a famous wet-weather victory in the non-championship 1978 Silverstone International Trophy.

Ralt did, however, start running cars when Honda came knocking in 1980. The first chassis powered by the Japanese's manufacturer's Formula 2 V6 raced at the end of the year and the works team went on to enjoy phenomenal success in the dying days of the category in the 1980s, winning a trio of titles and a total of 20 races up to the end of 1984.

The motorsport arena had changed, but Tauranac hadn't. He was still the no-nonsense engineer who cared more for making his cars go faster than anything else.

"He was the last person to get involved in pleasantries," says Jonathan Palmer, who won the British F3 title in an Ralt RT3 in 1981 with the embryonic West Surrey Racing squad before joining the works F2 team to drive the RH6/82 the following year. "He was the most direct and blunt person I've ever come across.

"Ron was always hungry for pace. If he came up with something, he'd be getting a hacksaw or the welding gear out almost before he'd finished explaining it. And he'd do the job himself if he couldn't find Alan Howell [Ralt's long-time chief mechanic] quickly enough.

"He was a very objective person, who dealt in numbers and facts. He was brilliant for cutting out the crap and distilling everything down to simple facts."

Palmer explains that his relationship with Tauranac evolved over the course of his two season with Ralt in F2, probably because they were kindred spirits. Perhaps Tauranac saw something of his old mate Brabham in his young charge.

"We used to have some full-on confrontations, if not rows, initially," he explains. "Over time he came to respect my judgement because I was a technical kind of driver with an analytical approach. By the end of our time together he'd send me a blank set-up sheet and tell me to instruct the guys what I wanted."

It was probably no coincidence that Ralt's most successful team in British F3 was WSR, which evolved out of the West Surrey Engineering operation that Palmer put together for '81. Team boss Dick Bennetts, then as now, had an unsurpassed attention to detail and was always keen to try to improve on Tauranac's designs, or at least get to the bottom of any flaws.

"When you went to the Ralt factory the trophies weren't up on display. They were used to hold the doors open" David Brabham

"With Ron you always had a good debate about everything, probably made a bit more intense with me being a Kiwi and him an Aussie," says Bennetts, who claimed five F3 titles with Ralt machinery between 1981 and '91, including with Hakkinen in 1990 (below). "If we found a problem with one of his cars, he wouldn't believe us at first. By he could be corrected and was always appreciative."

Tauranc was an engineer through and through who cared little for the glitz and glamour of motorsport.

"When you went to the Ralt factory the trophies weren't up on display," says Brabham. "They were used to hold the doors open. That was so Ron."