MOTORSPORT FLASHBACK
“The most significant person in the history of the racing car”
Brabham’s better half
In July, news emerged from Queensland that Ron Tauranac had passed away at the age of 95. His was hardly a household name but he is, in my view, the most significant person in the history of the racing car. That may sound like an outrageous statement when names like Enzo Ferrari and Colin Chapman are likely to be flung back but this column has never been about making controversial statements just for a headline. So here’s why I make it.
Tauranac, an old-school engineer, built a Cooper-based 500cc Formula 3 (F3) car with his brother in Australia in the late 1940s during the craze of fitting a motorcycle engine to the back of a simple frame. Combining his and brother Austin’s initials, the car was dubbed ‘Ralt’. A short run of customer cars had some of the machining carried out by their new friend Jack Brabham, who they’d met while hill climbing.
Few would have picked that the combination would finish the year as world champions
The pair soon discovered they both spoke racing car at a level that few could comprehend. Brabham headed off to England and, already in his 30s, hardly set the world on fire. Indeed, had his association with both Cooper and Coventry Climax not developed, quite possibly he would have returned to Australia and the world would never have heard of Ronald Tauranac.
DANGLING THE CARROT
Tauranac and Brabham, both famously men of few words, maintained contact via letters as Jack struggled with the Cooper gearbox in Formula 2 (F2). Ron’s redesign was a major revision Cooper was happy to adopt at a time when getting the best out of Brabham very much set the course for this production racing car manufacturer. Cooper was the best known of these small manufacturers but at the start of 1959 the Cooper/ Brabham combination might have been considered, at best, an outside contender for even a race win in Formula 1 (F1). Few would have picked the combination would finish the year as world champions.
Despite that success, Brabham was acutely aware of his employer’s engineering limitations, especially as Lotus’s star was on the rise in both F1 and the lucrative Formula Junior market, and companies like Lola were also lurking. Brabham saw an opportunity to break into full-scale racing car production but the man he needed to make it happen was in Australia with a wife and child.
Brabham dangled a carrot and, despite being 35 — an age when ambitious ‘can-do’ blokes like Ron Tauranac were setting themselves up for the security of their family, he accepted his mate’s offer of an air ticket and returned to England. His family had left there for Australia in 1928 when he was three years old. When he arrived at Heathrow in April 1960, he wasn’t there just to build cars that would be contenders. Ron didn’t travel to the other end of the planet and give up everything he’d worked towards simply to be a contender. However, it was one thing to be regarded as an ingenious racing car engineer in a dusty far-flung colony, quite another in the hot tub of European motor racing.
It is important to note that Cooper knew nothing of Tauranac’s arrival. Brabham had kept quiet about the letters backwards and forwards, and that the guidelines for Cooper’s new wishbone suspension had been designed in Sydney. Keeping a low profile suited Ronald Sidney Tauranac perfectly. Unlike Colin Chapman, whose magnetic personality sprinkled stardust wherever he went, the most exotic thing about the Australian was his French Huguenot surname. Brabham and Tauranac became partners in Motor Racing Developments (MRD) and Ron set about designing their first car for Formula Junior. His wife and daughter soon joined him, and if they had any idea of the impact their husband/father would have on the world of motor racing over the next 30 or so years, they were among the very few.
ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES
That first car, the BT1, broke cover in 1961. It was completely unremarkable. Brabham and Tauranac didn’t do ‘remarkable’ — their ethos was evolution not revolution. Engineering first principles were strictly adhered to. The success of Jim Clark and the charisma of Colin Chapman were a big part of Lotus’s success in the production
racing market, but if Jack Brabham was unglamorous in comparison with Stirling Moss or Clark he was still gilded with movie-star charisma next to his business partner.
Denny Hulme helped turn the first mass production car, the BT2, into a winner in 1962 as Tauranac penned his first F1 car — the Brabham BT3. Dan Gurney gave the BT combination its first F1 win while MRD’S third Junior brought in 20 orders for 1963 as Ron’s simple-but-effective designs proved themselves across Europe, and then North America and down under.
Kiwi Bill Stone raced Brabhams in New Zealand before heading off to do F3 in the late 1960s and told me before his untimely death in 2012, “The great thing about Brabhams is that they didn’t need to be set up — you just drove them. That made me think I was pretty good at setting up a car. Then I bought that Mclaren M4A and I discovered I knew nothing!”
THIS MONTH’S MYTH BUSTER
Tauranac-designed Brabhams dominated grids in F2, F3, North America’s Formula B, and the Antipodean versions that we called ‘the National Formula’. In 1966 Brabham won the world championship driving his Repco V8-powered BT19 and this month’s myth buster is that he did not become the first, and so far only, man to win the title in a car he designed himself. His name was on the nose but the designer was the ‘T’ in ‘BT’, the brilliant, cantankerous, demanding, humble Tauranac.
Denny Hulme’s 1967 world championship–winning cars — the BT20 and BT24 — were beautiful in their design efficiency and effectiveness but, despite those successes, it was in the production car market that the money was made. The 1966 BT21 became a template for space-frame racing car architecture for years to come — the fact that it was so widely copied being a tribute to the original.
Along the way were a couple of sports car designs, but Tauranac was always an open-wheeler man at heart and stuck with single-seaters from about 1966.
RALT RESURGENCE
At the end of 1970 Jack retired and headed home. Ron purchased his share in the company but at the end of 1971 accepted an offer from Bernard Ecclestone, who retained the name and the BT initials on all future models. Although not yet 50 Tauranac briefly attempted retirement. However, his wife Norma, concerned that her mercurial husband might be too volatile a mixture in her social life, found a nearby industrial building for sale and bought it — as in: “There’s a building, get out of the house and go build your racing cars”.
Tauranac was quickly engaged by Trojan and designed his only Formula 5000 followed by a standard Cosworth kit car. Australian Larry Perkins was a young man in a hurry to make F1. He asked Ron if he’d take a look at his GRD F3 car and make some recommendations for improvement. The engineering guru took one look and decided there was so much wrong with it that it would be easier to start again. So was born the next-generation Ralt in the factory
Tauranac-designed Brabhams dominated grids in F2, F3, North America’s Formula B, and the Antipodean versions that we called ‘the National Formula’
Tauranac’s wife had bought to keep him from getting under her feet.
The Ralt RT1 was a typical Tauranac design — simple, effective, and super successful. Perkins was European F3 champion in 1975 and the RT1 was still the weapon of choice three years later in F3. As a Formula Atlantic, it was still winning in the early ’80s. RTS 3, 4, and 5 virtually wiped out the opposition in F3, Atlantic, and Super Vee in the early ’80s, while Tauranac’s F2 designs won the European championship in 1981, 1983, and 1984. The next generation of cars for the second half of that decade also found great success despite the emergence of Reynard and Swift.
FULL FROTH MODE
In the early ’90s Tauranac accepted an offer to sell Ralt and made another attempt at retirement but his services remained much in demand, especially by Honda where his close association dated back to 1965. In addition to the countless drivers who made their names in Brabhams and Ralts were the legion of young designers and mechanics who came under his influence. His blowups were legendary and there was a time when it was reckoned ‘about six weeks’ was as long as anyone lasted in the design office. Stories of his regular lectures to newly employed mechanics on the correct way to wash their hands are folklore, and he wasn’t selective about who was on the receiving end. All three of Brabham’s sons raced Ralts in
England, meaning Jack was often back in the factory. One day the mechanics heard Ron in full froth mode and were surprised to see the recipient was his former business partner. His sin was having used the bench grinder incorrectly! Jack apparently slunk away wordlessly. Obviously this was nothing new to him.
After retiring to Australia, Ron was a frequent visitor to classic car race meetings. One year we met the owner of an early Brabham that had in fact been a works rather than a customer car. We started chatting and it was clear our new friend had had a frustrating Friday in the scrutineering bay when one of the officials found something allegedly non-standard. His explanation that the car had been Jack’s own personal car, and was therefore both ‘non-standard’ and absolutely correct, fell on deaf scrutineering ears. Our man found Tauranac, explained the situation, and was delighted when the offer was made to accompany him back to the ‘white coat’.
“He was politeness personified. He quietly explained that the car never left the workshop in the same configuration twice.
“‘Yeah, and what would you know?’ asked the belligerent official.
“I was expecting Hiroshima at that point but he simply smiled and said ‘I designed it’, winked at me, and walked off.
“I turned to the official and said, ‘You’ve heard of BT? Well he’s the T.’ He reluctantly passed my car.”
In the early ’90s Tauranac accepted an offer to sell Ralt and made another attempt at retirement but his services remained much in demand, especially by Honda