The forgettable final car of a former F1 giant that gave Damon Hill his start

In 2021 David Brabham was asked if the family name might return to Formula 1. It’s an enquiry he’s accustomed to fielding, since the team founded by his father was one of the giants of F1 before it fizzled out in ignominy. The answer is usually “no” – and with good reason, since it took many years, much expense and a great deal of legal wrangling to regain the rights to use the Brabham name in motor racing. This time, though, he opened the door just a crack.

“Never say never,” he replied. “If something in Formula 1 came up… It can’t be anything – it’s got to look right and have the right backing, because I’ve been in F1 without the right backing and I’m not going to do that again. So it would have to have significant funding to sway us.”

David’s determination not to have the family name sullied again is founded upon first-hand experience. As the Brabham F1 team was passed around like a tray of cakes to a succession of ‘owners’ with big dreams but shallow pockets, David was persuaded to drive for it in a bid to rebuild some credibility – or at least attract sponsors. It nearly destroyed his career.

The death of Elio de Angelis in 1986 was the beginning of the end of Bernie Ecclestone-era Brabham: technical director Gordon Murray lost his enthusiasm for F1 and only regained it when Ron Dennis offered him a healthy stipend to move to McLaren; BMW pulled out at the end of 1987; and Ecclestone had his eyes fixed on the bigger picture of Formula 1’s TV revenues, a much more lucrative business than running a team. Bernie shuttered Brabham’s F1 activities at short notice for the 1988 season and put it up for sale.

The identity of the next owner is a matter of conjecture and court injunctions as a consortium involving golfer Greg Norman and Williams team manager (and future GP Racing contributor) Peter Windsor was trumped by slot machine magnate Walter Brun. Or was it Swiss financier Joachim Luthi?

Even the relaunched team’s drivers didn’t know: Martin Brundle signed his contract in the presence of Ecclestone and Luthi but, come the team’s pre-season presentation (in a shopping mall near Zurich), Brundle and Stefano Modena were bamboozled to be introduced as Brun drivers. But hadn’t Brun’s EuroBrun team just slimmed down to a single entry, for Gregor Foitek, owing to lack of money?

Joachim Luthi was operating a ponzi scheme and left Brabham in a shaky state

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Luthi, it transpired, was operating an enormous ponzi scheme, hence his supposed aversion to publicity (though he did appear in the Brazilian GP paddock with a sex worker on each arm). By mid-season Brabham was in limbo again as Luthi fled to the US to avoid charges and his empire unravelled.

Team manager Herbie Blash – Ecclestone’s eyes and ears on the factory floor – kept the lights on by arranging sponsorship from the Japanese credit card company Nippon Shinpan, and Brabham limped on to the end of the 1989 season. Yet more suitors came and went over the winter since the team’s ownership was entangled in Luthi’s complex and opaque web of holding companies.

David Brabham had won the British F3 championship and was expecting to contest the 1990 F3000 season with Dennis Nursey’s Middlebridge Racing when Nursey informed him Middlebridge would be going into F1 – as owner of Brabham. The deal had been done as the cars were already on their way to Phoenix for the first round of the season.

A better-funded team would have been able to swallow the cost of building new tubs but, instead, Brabham had to resort to cutting away part of the bulkhead – weakening the structure. The extent to which this reduced the BT60’s rigidity and compromised performance is difficult to quantify

A month later Nursey told David he wouldn’t be entering F3000 after all, leaving David no option but to accept a proposal to replace Gregor Foitek at Brabham from the San Marino GP onwards. But the season was a disaster: there was still no money, the Brabham-in-a-Brabham failed to entice sponsors, and the promised transverse gearbox for the new Sergio Rinland-designed BT59 didn’t arrive until mid-season, by which time Judd was withholding engines until it was paid upfront.

A solution was at hand in the form of ‘free’ engines from Yamaha. The Japanese motorcycle and musical instrument manufacturer had big ambitions to build a road-going supercar, to be given credibility through a Formula 1 engine project, but its 1988 season with Zakspeed had been embarrassingly poor. Nevertheless Brabham was desperate and Blash, finding a proposal letter from Yamaha in the factory slushpile, flew to Japan on Christmas Eve ’89 to do the deal.

At Blash’s suggestion Yamaha’s engineers began to draw a new V12 whose development would be aided by testing the extant V8 engine in a cut-and-shut BT58. Ecclestone, no longer the owner but keen to look after ‘his’ people, arranged track time for the BT58Y in Japan with Ukyo Katayama at the wheel after an initial run with David Brabham at Silverstone. For eight weeks over the summer of 1990, out of the public eye, Katayama tirelessly lapped the Sugo circuit as Yamaha chased better power and driveability – and improved reliability.

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David retreated to sportscars for 1991, preferring a top-line drive with TWR-Jaguar to more back-of-the-grid grind in Formula 1. In came Martin Brundle and Williams test driver Mark Blundell. The new BT60, designed by Rinland and Tim Densham, Modena’s race engineer, looked promising and featured a variation on the raised-nose aerodynamic concept already used to great effect by Leyton House/March, Tyrrell and Benetton (10 years later Rinland would design the pioneering twin-keel Sauber C20), but it arrived late and was plagued with build-quality issues from the off.

Yamaha engine wasn't truly up to the job

Photo by: James Mann

Brundle and Blundell contested the first two races of 1991 in BT59s adapted to take the new Yamaha V12, then found they could barely fit in the new car. Or, rather, they could just about squeeze in, but a rapid enough egress to pass the mandatory FIA cockpit extraction test was impossible once their legs were ensconced within that neat raised-nose monocoque. Owing to a mistake in the measurements for the moulding buck, the bulkhead was incorrectly sited and neither driver could raise their knees enough to make a speedy exit.

A better-funded team would have been able to swallow the cost of building new tubs but, instead, Brabham had to resort to cutting away part of the bulkhead – weakening the structure. The extent to which this reduced the BT60’s rigidity and compromised performance is difficult to quantify but the car was still a step up from its predecessor; both drivers regularly made it through qualifying in an era in which the grid was oversubscribed, though neither scored points during the first half of the season.

Engine failures caused several retirements and Blundell had just broken in to the top 10 in Monaco when he spun off on oil dropped by Modena’s Tyrrell. That meant the indignity of pre-qualifying from Germany onwards, and the possibility of each weekend being over before practice began on Friday.

Blundell scored Brabham’s first points of the year with sixth at Spa but then failed to make it through prequalifying when his engine blew on Yamaha’s home soil, at Suzuka. Brundle ameliorated the company’s embarrassment by claiming fifth.

But Brundle almost didn’t drive that weekend. He’d refused to race again until his salary was paid and, in the event, the money had to come from Yamaha, who also agreed to buy Brabham’s Chessington factory (from Ecclestone) to build components for its forthcoming OX99 supercar. Blundell, too, was unhappy, having had two payment cheques bounce.

From November 1991 Brabham’s racing activities would be based out of Middlebridge Engineering’s facilities in Milton Keynes – but without Rinland, who left to form his own engineering consultancy. Densham was charged with designing a BT61 for 1992 but, with no money for development, this was shelved in favour of adapting the BT60 to accommodate a different engine since Yamaha no longer wished to be associated with a company that didn’t pay its bills. The noose was tightening on Middlebridge.

How, you ask, did an organisation with apparently so little money come to own an F1 team? The Middlebridge Group’s owner was the Japanese industrial magnate, Anglophile and classic car aficionado Koji Nakauchi. Middlebridge had interests in the classic car trade and had bought the rights to buy the Scimitar, a sports car originally designed by Reliant. It had even attempted to enter F1 under its own name in the mid-1980s with a year-old Benetton-BMW.

Brabham passed into Middlebridge's hands at the end of a 1991 season plagued by money troubles

Photo by: Motorsport Images

But the truth, as Brundle and Blundell began to suspect when they flew to Japan in early 1991, expecting to be collected by a chauffeur only to be met by Nakauchi himself in a tatty Rover SD1, was that the money came from elsewhere. Landhurst Leasing, to be exact – a finance company whose principals would later end up in jail.

Even before the Brabham acquisition, Middlebridge was struggling with debt repayments; Landhurst directors Ted Ball and David Ashworth, car enthusiasts both with designs on being major players in F1, would cover defaulted loans by arranging new ones on other Middlebridge assets. In return they began to demand backhanders in cash. When Ball and Ashworth were charged with corruption in 1997 the prosecuting QC jibed that “Ted Ball would have written a lease on the tyres changed after a pitstop”.

To buy Brabham, Middlebridge borrowed £1m, which required Landhurst to breach banking covenants – for which Ashworth demanded £25,000 in cash. When the hoped-for sponsorship failed to arrive, Middlebridge had no alternative but to take on more debt and pay more bribes. Hence bills went unpaid, including the factory rent – for a week in August 1990 Ecclestone padlocked the gates.

"The car was worn out and Middlebridge weren’t going to be refreshing parts properly, but I simply thought, 'I don’t have a choice. The time has come in my career when I have to show that I can actually drive an F1 car in competition'" Damon Hill

To remain on the grid for 1992 Brabham fell back on paying drivers in BT60s adapted to accommodate Judd GV V10 engines. Belgian Eric van de Poele at least had the talent at this level to justify his backing; Akihiko Nakaya remains an open book on that front since the FIA refused to issue him with a super licence. In his place came Giovanna Amati, reasonably competent in lesser machinery but lacking the experience and ability to qualify a year-old Formula 1 car which had been no great shakes to begin with.

While van de Poele qualified 26th out of 30 entrants in the 1992 season opener and made the grid, Amati was four seconds slower and failed to make the cut. After two further failures to qualify – and promised sponsorship didn’t arrive – she was shown the door in favour of Damon Hill, who by this point was desperate to show that he was more than just a competent test driver for Williams.

“Everyone said I was mad,” he wrote in his autobiography. “They pointed out this was a dangerously underfinanced team. The car was worn out and Middlebridge weren’t going to be refreshing parts properly, but I simply thought, ‘I don’t have a choice. The time has come in my career when I have to show that I can actually drive an F1 car in competition. I’ll be getting good experience of the whole F1 procedure: going to drivers’ briefings; showing I can deal with being on track with all the big names; learning how to work with F1 engineers, the press. I have to do this.’”

Like Blundell and Brundle before him, Hill could barely accommodate himself in the BT60’s cockpit. His legs were pressed firmly against the cockpit sides, his right one almost covering the gear lever to the extent that he could only shift into four of the six available forward ratios.

BT60 cockpit was too cramped for Hill to be properly comfortable

Photo by: James Mann

“It wasn’t bad but the power curve was a bit violent,” he mused, “and then a bit like a tractor at times thanks to me being unable to use the lower gears. There was no power steering and yet, despite these handicaps, it was strangely exciting to drive a no-hope car.”

In Hungary, where Brabham fielded just one BT60, Hill finished 11th, four laps down. That was the end of the Brabham F1 story on track, but not quite the conclusion of the saga. Middlebridge had run out of assets on which to secure loans, which in turn forced Landhurst to go cap in hand to its bankers – who called in forensic accountants, whose excoriating report led to Landhurst going into receivership. A Serious Fraud Office investigation found Landhurst had lent £121m to Middlebridge, only £70m of which was potentially recoverable, and that Ball and Ashworth had squeezed Middlebridge for £420,000 in corrupt payments.

The ownership-go-round continued as wannabe purchasers, including Japanese musician Damon Kagure (who attempted to finance it with a public ‘Brabham Aid’ appeal), were frustrated at the due diligence stage: much of the company’s equipment was leased, and most of the physical assets and intellectual property had been transferred to one of Nakauchi’s companies in Japan.

There was one final scream as Brabham fell into the abyss. By late October 1992 word began to circulate that the team’s assets had been acquired and the cars sent to Galmer Engineering, the Bicester-based company which had designed and built that year’s Indy 500-winning chassis. The buyer was RM Motorsport, led by Alan Randall, a recent incomer to motor racing who had already caused ructions by ordering no fewer than nine Jaguar XJRs to contest various sportscar series as well as Le Mans – only for the promised sponsorship never to materialise. By late December Galmer had downed tools on its putative BT61 design as RM’s promised deposit failed to ring in the cash register. Only the initial deposit to the receivers had been paid and the BT60s were repossessed.

Little wonder that David Brabham’s longstanding response to those who approach him with a view to returning his family name to Formula 1 is: “Show me the money!”

Race record

Starts: 27
Wins: 0
Poles: 0
Fastest laps: 0
Podiums: 0
Championship points: 3

Specification

Chassis: Carbonfibre monocoque
Suspension: Double wishbones with pushrod-actuated inboard coil springs/dampers
Engine: Normally aspirated Yamaha OX99 72-degree V12 (1991), Judd GV 72-degree V10
Engine capacity: 3498cc
Power: 650bhp @ 13000 rpm (Yamaha), 620bhp @ 12000 rpm (Judd)
Gearbox: Six-speed manual
Brakes: Carbon discs front and rear
Tyres: Goodyear
Weight: 505kg
Notable drivers: Martin Brundle, Mark Blundell, Eric van de Poele, Damon Hill

The BT60 was a sad note for the Brabham team to end its F1 career on

Photo by: James Mann