15 replies to this topic

[Cheater]

Another terrific historical video on YouTube.
 
Repco Brabham - The Fantastic Year
 

[Tex]

Thanks, Greg!

[TSR]

The secret of two years of success for the Brabham team was... lack of money. Jack had to find a suitable engine for the new 3-liter formula and did not have the funds to buy an engine from either Ferrari, Maserati, or the monstrous BRM 16-cylinder or bet on an unknown, the new Cosworth that would appear a year later.

He approached Repco in Australia and sent them an American Oldsmobile "small-block" 3.5-liter and asked them if they could, for the sake of Australian national pride, build something competitive with it. The Olds V8 had already been used in sports car racing in the USA and was cheap.

Repco used the small aluminum GM block and made new single-cam cylinder heads for it, but while torque figures were adequate, power was nearly 25% less than competitive Italian engines fitted in the Ferrari and Cooper cars.

 

Ron Tauranac suggested using the lighter, smaller F2 chassis for the Repco engine, mated to a brand new magnesium transmission built by Mike Hewland, called the "HD-5".

 

The new BT19 car was almost 100 lbs lighter than the Ferrari and 135 lbs lighter than the Cooper-Maserati, that represented most of the opposition until BRM loaned some engines to Lotus.

And what happened was clear: the lightweight car was not very fast but very efficient and reliable, and the Brabham-Hulme combination ended winning mostly after the opposition ran into various ills.

 

The following BT20 was an improved machine, even lighter.

 

But for 1968, Repco developed twin-cam heads and they proved unreliable and there was no real gain in power, so for 1969, Jack joined the Cosworth DFV brigade. From 1968 through 1970, Jack should, with a tiny bit more luck, have won three more world championships. Some mistakes were made including one by himself at Monaco in sight of the win, when in the very last lap and while comfortably leading from Rindt, Jack lost it and had this little ride up the wall:

 

 

Incredibly, Jack recovered and drove to the finish line on three wheels, saving a second placing...

 

 

[Russell Sheldon]

The day I fell in love with Love's BT20...

I grew up in a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, which is about ten kilometres from the local Killarney motor racing circuit. As a teenager I cycled to the circuit to watch the motor races, especially when my hero, John Love, raced in the national Formula One rounds.

Racing Scalextric slot cars was the craze in the mid-1960s and together with my friends, I raced practically every day after school. At least once a month we would organize a 'championship' event, by combining our track pieces and building large circuits on the garage floor of my parent's home. Our ‘big’ events usually coincided with a national motor race at Killarney, so we would race slot cars on the Friday afternoon and cycle down to Killarney for the real motor races the next day.

Our next door neighbour, who worked for Sanyo, was a motor racing fan and would always came to watch us racing in the garage. On 6 January 1968, a date I will never forget, the Cape South Easter National Motor Race was to be held at Killarney and, as had become customary, we organised our slot car race, the Milnerton Grand Prix, the day before. Our neighbour generously offered the main prize, a Sanyo transistor radio; oh boy, were we excited!

You can imagine our absolute astonishment when just before prize-giving, a Team Gunston transporter pulled up in front of the garage. Out stepped John Love. Our neighbour had arranged for him to present the prize. It was after practice for the Cape South Easter and he even opened the transporter to show us his Brabham Repco BT20. We were overwhelmed. Although I was fourteen-years-old at the time, I will never forget that day.

[Cheater]

Great post, Russell!

[TSR]

Love bought the ex-Jack Brabham BT20, the first one built (chassis #BT20-01-66) that he used at the end of 1966 and early 1967 before the new car was ready. Love prepared the car mostly himself (he was a great mechanic and amateur race engineer) and raced it successfully in South Africa. He was a terrific driver, well worth the "world-class" word used today. Other South African drivers also drove the car at the end of 1968 to early 1971: Piet De Klerk, Dave Puzey,  Bruce Van Der Merwe and Jack Holme. Bruce was Sarel Van Der Merwe's father. Sarel made himself famous in the USA by winning the Daytona 24-Hours in the first March-Porsche GTP.

 

The Brabham car was eventually sold to Charles Vogele, who sold it to Tom Wheatcroft for his Donington Museum collection. It was sold by Donington in 2010 and is now currently for sale by its current owner. It is a true F1 world-champion machine, with a very reliable and user-friendly engine, but the price is a bit dear... 

 

As you can see on the picture, the car was updated to wider (and later) six-spoke Brabham rear wheels designed for the new Firestone tires developed exclusively for the Lotus Type 49, and available in 1968 to all who were getting lower prices for them as long as there were advert stickers on the car. I wish those tires would still be available today, I dearly could use some... and the Avons are too short, require raising the chassis and that deranges the suspension geometry.

 

Russell, great post!

[Tex]

I always liked the lines of the BT20 more than the BT24; I especially liked the flowing exhaust, offset by the inward facing injector stacks.

[TSR]

Rich,

 

Those exhausts were built by a fellow called "Lukey" and are actually stamped with his name on the megaphones... 

 

Here is Bryan Warmack's version of the Lukey exhausts:

 

 

[Tex]

That's obviously a slot car; did Bryan race it? Those rear tires just don't look much good for racing.

[TSR]

Rich,

 

I think that Bryan built it from a Lancer Brabham body just for the fun of it. It might have been driven; I doubt that it was raced.

[Tex]

... just for the fun of it...

 

[Russell Sheldon]

Wow! Beautiful job by Bryan. I think that it is a BT-19, though. 
 
The BT20 was similar to the BT19, with virtually identical suspension, but the geometry was revised to suit 15-inch wheels fore and aft. Front and rear track were 1-inch wider and the wheelbase was 1.5-inches longer. The radiator intake was bigger and it had a two-piece engine cover, open at the back, rather than the 1-piece cover used on the BT19.

 

Great write-up on Love and BT-20-F1-66, Philippe! Two BT20 chassis were produced, chassis F1-1-66 (actually the second chassis completed), was first used by Jack Brabham at the 1966 US Grand Prix. Brabham of course won the 1966 World Drivers’ Championship - the first and to date only title won by a driver with a car bearing his own name.
 
Jack Brabham started the 1967 Grand Prix season with F1-1-66, before replacing it with the new BT24. After finishing second in the International Trophy race at Silverstone with the BT20, Brabham sold F1-1-66 to Performance Engineering Company (PECO), for Rhodesian John Love to campaign in the South African National Championship series.  
 
Commencing with the Natal Winter Trophy on 9th July 1967, until the Cape South Easter Trophy meeting on 6th January 1968, Love drove the BT20 in eight South African National Championship events, winning the 1967 title in the process.
 
At the 1967 Rhodesian Grand Prix, held at Kumalo on 3 December, Rhodesia's Winston Tobacco Company, marketers of Gunston cigarettes, changed the commercial face of Grand Prix racing forever, when they announced the formation of Team Gunston.
 

 
John Love's Brabham Repco BT20 and the LDS Repco of team mate Sam Tingle, "both fine ambassadors of Rhodesian motorsport", were revealed in the resplendent orange, brown and gold colours of the Gunston cigarette brand. Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was the world’s foremost tobacco producing country at the time and the Winston Tobacco Company was looking for innovative ways to advertise their cigarettes in the lucrative South African market. 

 

Team Gunston again made history at the South African Grand Prix on 1 January 1968, having the first F1 cars entered in a World Championship Grand Prix fully-liveried in tobacco sponsorship. This opened the door for other tobacco companies and Imperial Tobacco soon signed up Lotus, who raced as Gold Leaf Team Lotus from midway through the 1968 Tasman Series. 
 
In South Africa, where Gunston cigarettes were the main rival to United Tobacco Company's Lucky Strike brand, Lucky Strike entered motor sport in 1970 when they sponsored Dave Charlton in the SA F1 series. This saw the start of the "tobacco wars" in South African motor sport, which raged on for almost a decade.
 

 
Battle of the brands: Ian Scheckter (Tyrrell 007) leads Dave Charlton (McLaren M23) in the 1975 South African Grand Prix.
 
The United Tobacco Company (UTC), owned by South Africa's Rupert family, also controlled Rothmans International, the world’s fourth largest multinational tobacco company. Its most popular brands included Lexington, Embassy, Dunhill, Peter Stuyvesant, Pall Mall, Rothmans and St. Moritz.
 
UTC became British American Tobacco in 1997, when they acquired Rothmans International. BAT continued to invest in motor sport, buying out Tyrrell in 1997 and renaming the team British American Racing (BAR) in 1998. The Rupert family still holds a majority shareholding in BAT.
 
At the launch of their new car, BAR unveiled separate liveries for their cars; Villeneuve's car painted in a Lucky Strike livery and Zonta's carrying a blue and yellow 555 livery. The FIA deemed the dual liveries illegal under F1 regulations which state that a team's cars must carry largely identical liveries and to get around the ban, BAR ran one side of their cars painted in the white and red of BAT's Lucky Strike brand, and the other side in blue and yellow to advertise 555!
 
Tobacco companies were the mainstay of F1 sponsorship for more than three decades, until countries began to place a ban on cigarette advertising. In fact only as recently as the 2010 Barcelona Grand Prix, due to pressure from the anti-tobacco lobbyists who accused Marlboro of subliminal advertising, Ferrari stopped using the ‘bar-code’ stripes on their cars.

[TSR]

Russell,

Smoking story! Thanks for reminding us of a great time of racing in SA.

Do you also remember Paddy Driver? He also drove for Team Gunston. I met him when he was racing bikes in the 1960s, even raced with him in several events of the Continental Circus with my Rickman-G50... and then met him again once in California in the early 1970s during a visit at the Dan Gurney stables in Santa Ana. 

[Russell Sheldon]

I do indeed, Philippe. A real racer!

 

Paddy's son, Robert, maintains a Facebook page on his dad.

 

Here's a picture of Paddy in the Team Gunston Lotus 72E, leading Emerson Fittipaldi's McLaren M23 in the 1974 South African Grand Prix:-

 

 

Kind regards,

 

Russell

[Mbloes]

Russell, is that a photo of your garage layout in the first post?

[Cheater]

Not yet, P. He just retired...