The two Brians
Sampson’s rst open-wheeler experience came in the mid-1960s with an El n Catalina that was quickly on-sold to Brian Bowe, John Bowe’s father, but in 1971 it became serious when he bought an El n 600 to promote the dry-sumped Toyota 1100cc F3 engine sold by Motor Improvements. He also painted the car in amboyant STP-inspired colours and changed its name brie y.
“I’d been to the Indy 500 and at rst called it an STP Special. I rang Garrie Cooper and said do you mind if I call it that. He said, ‘No, everyone knows it’s an El n.’ It had red, white and blue stripes because I’d seen the cars over there and thought they looked so much better.”
The El n was quite successful, but Brian admits he didn’t know much about how the chassis worked and did little with it. He also
had an operation for hemorrhoids and didn’t want to sit in the car again, so he sold it to Bob Minogue.
Brian Shead was a forklift mechanic and Motor Improvements F3 engine customer, and Sampson couldn’t believe how much better Shead’s homemade Cheetah handled. It made him think about a replacement car and team structure.
“Sheady had sold a second chassis to a guy for hillclimbing and he came around one night and said, ‘If you give me an order for one I’ll give up work and build cars’, so I said yes. That was the start of it. Peter Roach and Peter Macrow then bought cars and it all went from there.”
For the following decade, the two Brians dominated F3 and then F2 racing around Australia in what seemed a marriage made in heaven – two top-line drivers, one providing the chassis and the other the engines. Between them they seemed to win every state-based series around, though only Shead claimed a national title – the 1979 Australian Formula 2 Championship, using a Celica-based 1600 engine developed by Sampson. There was plenty of competition and respect between the two, and perhaps a little suspicion also about who had the best equipment: “He had little things done to his cars that were different, so Sheady was a little step forward on things. He used to drill all the bolts through to lighten them and things like that,” says Sampson, who insists their MI engines were identical. “But Sheady was good. We used to drive different; we even geared our cars different. He kept records of everything, and I didn’t because I was busy doing other things. He was more dedicated to his car. And he won a championship, and I didn’t.”
Through a range of Cheetahs, Sampson went from a simple spaceframe chassis to a semimonocoque to a full mono and then ground effects before progressing to Formula Paci c and then Formula Holden, by which time he was in his 50s.
“I couldn’t drive like the guys that won. They were fantastic drivers. You could beat some of them, but people like Al e and John Bowe were better drivers than me.”