Jack Brabham was an Australian Formula One driver who excelled in the 1960s-1970s competing with the likes of Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme.
And like other F1 drivers of the time he had his own team. Mc Laren did. So did Stewart. And of course Brabham.
A team he had formed with designer Ron Tauranac in 1960, five years after he started racing.
Precisely in 1960, the year after his first F1 world championship in 1959. He was 40 years old, something unusual if we compare it with the modern times of the highest category of motorsport, a record held by Sebastian Vettel since 2010 when he won the F1 World Championship at just 23 years old.
Brabham would repeat the honor of being crowned champion in 1960.
The Brabham BT3 (these were the initials of the new car where the initials represented the first letter of the surname of both owners) debuted in the German Grand Prix. And the satisfactions began to arrive immediately.
The fourth place obtained in the second race with the BT3 made him the first driver to score points with a single-seater he had built himself.
He won three world championships. In 1959, 1960 and 1966 and finished runner-up in 1967.
A new era.
Brabham and Tauranac realized that the days of the front engine with small cars were numbered in F1.
Lotus and Ferrari anticipated by proposing in 1961 the mid-engine car much more powerful than Brabham's Cooper.
And the time for change arrives. The big teams are investing a lot of money in their cars with the financial support of multinational companies.
F1 business is coming in leaps and bounds.
After the poor 1961 season Brabham joins with Racing Organisation and starts to drive the cars manufactured by Motor Racing Developments, a company whose main objective was not to manufacture F1 cars but to sell the single-seaters to those competing in the lower categories.
This delayed the initial project while the other teams were already prepared.
This situation went on for a couple of years until the FIA authorized to double the maximum capacity of the Formula 1 engine to 3 liters for the 1966 season.
The rebirth of Brabham.
In fact 1966 was not only the year of his sporting "renaissance" that allowed him to win a new title. It was also the first time that a driver became world champion three times with a car of his own manufacture.
From then on, he began a slow and gradual decline, being surpassed by drivers such as the Austrian Jochen Rindt in 1968 and by the Belgian Jacky Ickx in 1969.
The year 1970 marked his last season in Formula 1.
The same year in which Jochen Rindt lost his life during the Italian Grand Prix practices, after a maneuver made to face the famous "Parabolica" curve, three races before the end of the season, and which made him the -until today- only F1 driver to win the title "post mortem".
Retirement.
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After his retirement he definitively broke with motorsport by selling his shares to the partner Tauranac and returned to Australia where he lived until his death in 2014 at the age of 88.
Shortly after his retirement, the team was bought by Bernie Ecclestone, who later became the "strong man" of F1, becoming responsible for managing the commercial aspects of the category for two decades (1970-1990).
In 1992, shortly after being acquired by the Middlebridge Group, a Japanese engine company, the Brabham team went bankrupt as it was unable to pay its loans.
But that is another story.
Photos and screenshots are from the:
[Official site Brabham.co.uk] (http://www.brabham.co.uk/gallery)
[National Museum Australia.](https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/jack-brabham-wins-first-world-championship)
Thanks to all the r2cornell team for supporting and curating my content.