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DAVID: You kind of get into this mindset,
when you’re in competition for so long
and you’re doing well...
There were times I’d catch myself and go,
“That’s not who I am.
You’re so like your father.”
There’d be something in the back saying,
“Is this really who you are?”
["BLACK EYED BRUISER" PLAYING]
♪ If you see me Walking down the street ♪
♪ Better get out my way ♪
♪ I'm a real king hitter ♪
♪ Always have my say ♪
♪ If you're looking For a heavy time ♪
♪ Best you don't come around ♪
♪ Or else you'll get Your heavy ♪
♪ Six feet of solid ground ♪
♪ I don't like trouble ♪
♪ But if trouble Is the name of your game ♪
♪ You know where You can find me, boy ♪
♪ Everybody knows my name ♪
♪ I'm the black eyed ♪
♪ The black eyed ♪
♪ The black eyed bruiser ♪
-[MEN CHANTING] -[VOICE ECHOING]
MIKE: I’m standing now in the showroom of a car dealer,
at Greenacre in Sydney.
And I suppose it’s very much like any car dealer showroom.
Except for all these trophies behind me.
He is a man who, in his time, created history.
Now, he thinks he’s coming here tonight
for a sporting interview with his son.
And it’s right here that I’m going to surprise them.
[MACHINE BEEPING]
CHAPLAIN: We are here to honor, celebrate and give thanks
for the life of Sir John Arthur Brabham,
known as Jack.
In one way or another, Sir Jack’s life
has affected us all.
From those here who knew him personally
and called him Grandpa, or Dad, or husband...
to those here who shared a lifelong friendship with Jack,
to those of us here who knew him from a distance
and marveled at his many achievements.
CHAPLAIN: But we’ll also hear about Sir Jack the man,
the husband, father and grandfather.
What made him tick. What was really important
to him.
[RAIN PATTERING]
[PHONE DINGS]
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
Any of you boys been in a billy-cart derby before?
ALL: Yes!
NARRATOR: Jack was like any boy of his age,
obsessed with billy-carts.
TONY: You could either have a steering wheel
or you could have a rope.
And what wheels you got, well, that was up to the gods.
PRESENTER: What do you say, Noah?
It was a great race and the best man did win.
NARRATOR: He left school at fifteen
to work as an apprentice in an engineer shop.
MAN: We happened to get bits and pieces
and improvised with them.
Cut and shuck and weld, and do all sorts of things.
Yeah, he was from an age
when you had a wide variety of skills.
The kind of industrial equivalent
of the hunter-gatherer.
MAN: You could see there was no doubt,
he was very earnest
and he was going to be a good engineer, good boy.
TV NARRATOR: Even away in the little-known interior,
amongst the primitive natives,
there are townships where agents of Hitler
wait and plan for the downfall of a country
that has sheltered them and given them security.
ALL: ♪ Waltzing Matilda Waltzing Matilda ♪
NARRATOR: The war interrupted Jack’s sleepy existence,
tinkering with bikes and cars.
Every young man of fighting age
finally had a reason for adventure.
MAN: ...the cause of liberty and freedom.
TONY: War had started, of course,
when he was a teenager.
NARRATOR: Jack entered the RAAF midway through the war.
He was a mechanic on RAAF Bowfighters,
called the "Whispering Death,"
because twin radial engines were so quiet
that they would come in low and then strafe the Japanese
before they even knew what was hitting them.
[EXPLOSION]
NARRATOR: But Jack had missed out on becoming
a hero on the front line.
MAN: ...the victim, Australia’s manhood.
NARRATOR: He was part of a generation of young men
who needed some kind of arena to prove themselves
as worthy as the heroes who had returned home,
victorious in combat.
Eerie, isn’t it?
You know what this reminds me of? A theater.
An empty theater right now.
But it has its audience, its cast, its drama,
its comedy, and sometimes its tragedy too.
The spectacle here is a moving play
on an asphalt stage with all the props.
Producers and directors in the wings,
the music, extras, comedians, good guys and bad guys,
and the stars...
NARRATOR: And it was on a road trip up north
that a friend took Jack to his first-ever Speedway.
What he would have seen was motorized chaos.
There were no roll-cages, seat belts.
The helmets were made of cork.
A lot of blokes didn’t even bother using goggles.
MAN: The driver died of severe head injuries.
MAN: Oh, Jack? Yes, the first time I met him
was, uh, in '48.
He, uh... was only a kid then
and he came up with the Speedway car.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY: Can you imagine driving down a dirt road
and then having to turn left into the corner
without hitting the brakes, but with your foot flat
to the floor at the same time?
Well, this is what Speedway drivers did.
I mean, all you can see now of a racing driver
is a little bit of the top of their head,
sort of slightly bobbing around.
In Speedway, it’s mechanicalized warfare
of the most purest kind.
It’s wild, it’s big.
JACK: And that was my biggest surprise on the first night,
was every other motor car was throwing dirt in my face.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID: My mum came from a very, sort of, basic background.
They met and Jack was racing in midgets.
MIKE: The lady who watched, waited and worried,
your wife, Betty.
[TV STATIC]
What was this bloke's name again?
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
Sorry, Jack, mate, I won’t let you down.
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
In the very early 1950s,
Jack took his Speedway racing car
to a local hill-climb.
In his little, titchy self-built Speedway car,
he blew them all into the weeds.
PRESENTER: Hairpin bends at high speeds
call for steel wrists and iron nerves.
Sport is somewhere where drive, dedication,
bravery... that’s what we celebrate.
PRESENTER: It’s a great course for the spectators too.
You know, someone who’s fucking brilliant at what they do
and we can cheer them on.
The organizers actually disqualified his car
because it wasn’t fitted with front wheel brakes...
PRESENTER: Hold everything, he’s going over!
[LAUGHS] ...and therefore didn’t qualify for their purposes.
PRESENTER: Not this time.
So, Jack responded typically
by fitting front wheel brakes, taking it back there
and doing it again.
RON: Oh, it’s a Brabham '67.
It’s a long while since I’ve seen one of these.
[RAIN PATTERING]
NARRATOR: Ron Tauranac was racing
RALT open wheelers,
which he’d built with his brother
in their parent’s garage.
It was clear they saw something in each other.
Kindred spirits.
Well, he was a very good friend of mine and we got on very well.
I’ve never been a very social person either.
I realize it was a mistake now.
But I needed someone to train me.
TONY: Ron and Jack were, in some ways,
two peas in a pod.
Neither of them talked much
but they could just look at what each other were doing
-and say, “Wow.” -Ron designed the cars
and Dad tested them.
It was an incredible partnership.
Jack had his two-liter Cooper Bristol.
DOUG: And he fitted a bigger engine
to give it more "oomph"
and he ended up corresponding with John and Charles Cooper
of the Cooper Car Company.
NARRATOR: By the end of 1954,
Jack had experienced everything that Speedway
and Hill-Climb had to offer.
And while he may not have yet had his sights set
on challenging the European legends
of motorsport,
the hobbyist from Hurstville knew he’d be foolish
if he didn’t pursue his clear talent
behind the wheel.
DOUG: And Jack realized that to progress
in the motor-racing world,
he really needed to be in Britain.
PRESENTER: When he hears the booming tones of Big Ben,
no English-speaking visitor feels a real stranger in London.
The chimes from Westminster penetrate to the four corners
of the globe.
And Big Ben has become everyone's town clock.
DOUG: When Jack first came to the UK in 1955,
he kissed his wife goodbye
and his child goodbye,
and found himself surrounded by, really, a fast-developing hotbed
of motor-racing development.
MAN: We, as loyal citizens, must also do our part.
DOUG: British motor racing had been nowhere before the war.
TV NARRATOR: Silence...
DOUG: Conditions were so bad
that there were worse shortages here
than there had ever been at any time.
And a number of people just got so fed up
with this turgid, gray, post-war Britain...
[CROWD CHANTING]
...that effectively they said, “Oh, to hell with it.
Let’s go motor racing and have some fun.”
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
DOUG: The British manner of going motor racing,
was to start building racing cars,
striving to surpass the dominant Ferrari
and Maserati.
NARRATOR: En route to England, Jack made the pilgrimage
to Ferrari.
And they closed the door in his face.
He knew he probably appeared to them like a chancer
from Down Under,
but the experience stung him deeply
and he loved overtaking Ferrari for the rest of his career.
Have you heard from Jack lately?
Yes, we’ve heard a couple of times.
I rang him up after Silverstone
and we get a letter occasionally.
MIKE: Then comes your first race at Goodwood.
But you come to an embarrassing halt
three laps from the finish.
What happened?
I’m afraid I ran out of petrol.
[LAUGHTER]
NARRATOR: But Jack was quickly progressing.
In his first year in England, he secured a seat
in the Bristol Team at Le Mans,
where 83 spectators were killed.
GRAYSON: I mean, when we look at sport,
we’re living vicariously through the sports stars
we’re following.
We want to see a crash
because we can go through the whole drama of the crash,
but we’re not going to die.
We can enjoy it, you know, we want to rubberneck it
and we want to see that the ragged edge is there.
ANNOUNCER: Drivers sprint for their cars
at the start of the Ireland...
NARRATOR: Jack then took Betty to
the follow-up Sports Car Enduro
in Northern Ireland.
ANNOUNCER: Stirling Moss, in a Mercedes,
is one of the first away
on the seven-and-a-half-mile Dunlop Circuit.
NARRATOR: He’d only been in the UK for six months
and he was already wheel to wheel
with the immortals of racing.
ANNOUNCER: Caught in a trial,
Fangio Mercedes, Hawthorn Jaguar.
NARRATOR: But it had been a tough race for Jack.
ANNOUNCER: At this spot, in a few ghastly seconds,
two drivers lost their lives.
NARRATOR: He and his co-driver,
Jim Meyers,
had tossed a coin to see who would start.
His co-driver won the toss and was incinerated
within the first few laps.
ANDREW: I have seen death too often to believe in death.
It is not an ending, but a withdrawal.
As one who is finishing a long journey stills the motor,
turns off the lights,
steps from the car and walks up the path
to the home that awaits him.
JOHN: He was fantastic from the start.
A little wild, but everyone could see
that he had it.
MIKE: One of the greatest names in motor racing, from England.
This Is Your Life has flown in John Cooper
of the famous Cooper Cars.
[APPLAUSE]
DOUG: As John Cooper said to me,
“We didn't really employ Jack Brabham.
He just appeared in the factory one day and became a fixture."
He’s a brilliant engineer and he could set a car up
for a race.
He’d just pitch in and get on with something.
MIKE: Is it true that Jack was also a practical joker?
JOHN: Oh, yeah.
He could make you anything from a pair of pliers
to a guided missile.
TOM: He’s just such a natural engineer.
He looks at things and understands so quickly
what’s wrong with them or what’s right with them.
HUGHIE: He was one of the only F1 drivers that probably knew
everything about the race car,
from the chassis to the engine to the setting up.
He knew all the parts.
Well, Jack Brabham was a remarkable man.
In a funny sort of way, Jack never looked like
a racing driver.
I mean, Stirling Moss looked like a racing driver,
Jim Clark looked like a racing driver.
But it was fairly obvious, fairly early on,
that he was a goer.
And it wasn’t really until the Cooper Car Company
picked him up
that Jack’s feet really hit the ground.
[ENGINES REVVING]
PAUL: This is a "start/finish" line,
the beginning and the end.
Doesn’t make any difference whether it’s painted on asphalt
or drawn in dirt with a stick,
it's become a symbol of our civilization.
Sometimes I think that a line is drawn
and then some people get off on a corner
and figure out what the hell they’re going to do with it.
[SERENE MUSIC PLAYING]
PAUL: The place is Europe.
Or it can be Canada, South Africa, the United States.
But more than glamorous names and places,
it is a state of mind,
an expression of the ultimate in racing,
the Formula One World Driving Championships.
The Grand Prix.
This is the top.
ANNOUNCER: There’s a strong British contingent
at the start of the Monaco Grand Prix.
Monaco... very small circuit
and, in the fifties, very big cars.
ANNOUNCER: Moss and Brooks in Van Walls,
and Collins and Hawthorn in Ferrari.
TONY: Jack turns up in this tiny, tiny Cooper...
MAN: Here’s Mike Hawthorn’s Ferrari.
TONY: They’d never heard of this guy Jack Brabham,
running third in the Monaco Grand Prix.
ANNOUNCER: Everyone expects a rip-roaring finish.
MIKE: The Australian’s spectacular cornering
gave the crowds a thrill.
TONY: And he runs out of petrol.
He pushes it all the way to the end
and made a star out of the driver,
Jack Brabham.
He was so lethargic in so many different ways.
And then he got into a racing car.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham in complete command.
Everybody was astounded at his Speedway style.
MICHAEL: Coopers in those days were world champions
that took on the might of these big teams,
and my father and him just got on so well.
Jack became a huge friend of John Cooper's and vice versa.
One of his biggest assets, however, um...
Oh, I’ve forgotten his name. Uh, his engineer...
Ron Tauranac.
Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely guy.
RON: When I was building racing cars, in England...
I would design the ultimate racing car
and then backtrack it
so I could build something that was just good enough
to beat the opposition.
GREG: So, what was the best car that you ever made...
-in your mind? -The one I’m going to do next.
DOUG: A lot of the modifications that Jack wanted made
had been communicated to him
by his pen pal back in Australia,
the engineer Ron Tauranac.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac
just were like that.
Ron Tauranac and Jack made a formidable team.
By remote control effectively, from twelve thousand miles away,
Ron Tauranac was having very sound engineering ideas
that he was communicating to Jack.
He would come up with some rough sketches,
he'd air-mail it over to Australia,
Ron would have a look at it,
be on the phone, he’d then do all the drawings.
The drawings would then come back.
John was finding some way
of smuggling all these modifications past his dad
without his dad noticing.
That was the great thing.
DAVID: And he’d make the rear suspension,
or the gearbox and the mounting and everything.
I mean, it was almost like a secret society
with the two of them.
And it was that, sort of, cheerful, in-house
“Let’s do this, let’s try this,”
and the sheer enthusiasm for going racing
that enabled Cooper to establish what became known
as the "Rear Engine Revolution."
[FANFARE]
STIRLING: My name is Stirling Moss
and I drove all types of cars in all types of races.
[WHIMSICAL MUSIC PLAYING]
PRESENTER: What is it that makes a man
spend countless hours making toy racing cars?
For the modeler is none other than Stirling Moss,
possibly the world’s greatest racing driver.
Here at his father’s pig farm, in Turing, Hertfordshire,
let’s watch him relaxing with a miniature track.
Rival in this grim struggle, is his wife, Katie.
MIKE: You say, that man is my ultimate goal.
Beat him and I’ve achieved something.
STIRLING: Well, I wish you every success
and please give your family all the best as well.
Cheerio.
NARRATOR: The logical favorite of the 1959 season, Moss,
no doubt had his eye on taking out the championship.
But, on his travels, Jack had taken a protege
under this wing for Cooper.
The young Bruce McLaren.
PRESENTER: For many years, motor racing has been
a popular sport in New Zealand,
attracting drivers with a taste for thrills
and mechanics with a taste for tinkering.
DOUG: Jack was so impressed by young Bruce
that effectively he became his mentor.
PRESENTER: After his wobbly efforts, Bruce decides
to stick to car racing.
He says it's safer.
Jack was the person who made things happen for Bruce.
And in 1959, he joined Jack
to start racing regularly at Grand Prix level.
[GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: The first race was Monaco.
It was the crown jewel of the Grand Prix circuit
and seen as a rite of passage for drivers.
Explaining Monte Carlo as a racing track is, uh...
ANNOUNCER: The Monaco Grand Prix
is known as "The Race of a Thousand Corners."
It’s a very, very difficult circuit.
You know, 21 corners, 78 laps,
constantly coming at you, so narrow...
You were off before the starting flag even fell.
ANNOUNCER: And they're off!
A hundred laps of a two-mile circuit
through the Monte Carlo streets.
A testing race for cars and drivers.
With speed, you stop having to be conscious.
You have to rely on instinct.
ANNOUNCER: Just watch Moss's beautiful control
as he takes a double bend.
You are not driving at five-tenths.
You’re driving at nine-tenths and sometimes ten-tenths.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham is in second place now.
TONY: Cooper finally had an engine
that was as good as everyone else's.
But the radiators were blowing hot air
straight onto his feet.
He was burning up, the pedals were red hot.
He was scared to touch the brake.
ANNOUNCER: Stirling’s Cooper-Climax
developed transmission trouble.
Bad luck.
NARRATOR: And with Stirling gone,
Jack drove faster than he ever had before.
ANNOUNCER: Last lap and ahead of Tony Brooks' Ferrari
was Jack Brabham.
NARRATOR: Securing his first Grand Prix race win.
This was shaping up to be a promising season.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
[FIRE CRACKLING]
[ROCK MUSIC PLAYING]
Jack was someone who you couldn’t
particularly predict.
ANNOUNCER: A perfect day, a great crowd at Aintree
for the British Grand Prix.
All you would predict
is that he would do the unpredictable.
ANNOUNCER: Jack Brabham was driving a Cooper-Climax.
TONY: So the British Grand Prix.
He wasn’t necessarily the fastest driver out there,
I think everyone agreed that Stirling Moss was that.
Jack certainly was as competent as any driver out there.
TONY: Stirling Moss, as always, went out flat-out.
ANNOUNCER: Stirling Moss drove his BRM superbly.
TONY: Jack started swinging the back out,
for no other reason than to even up the tire wear.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham shot ahead, determined to keep
the number 12 out in front.
Stirling Moss battled into second place.
Stirling Moss had to stop and change his tires.
ANNOUNCER: A delay fatal to his winning chance.
Jack kept going and managed to win the race.
ANNOUNCER: Jack Brabham won,
covering the 225 miles
at an average of just under 90 miles an hour.
DOUG: One of the most extraordinary things
about Jack Brabham
was how unselfish he could be.
Jack, what a great sport you were.
How that time in New Zealand,
you lent me your spare back axle.
He supported and mentored people who would likely become rivals.
I’ve known Jack for a long time
and he’s helped me, well, 100 percent in my racing.
MIKE: You win the Monaco and British Grand Prix.
Moss wins the Portuguese and Italian.
Tony Brooks takes the French and German.
TONY: Jack was one of three people who could win
the World Championship,
and there was just one race to go.
And strangely, it was in America
where they had never had a Grand Prix before
and, really, it was a second-rate track.
ANNOUNCER: The US Grand Prix attracts the world’s
best auto-racing drivers.
MIKE: It’s December 12, 1959, when you line up on the grid.
TONY: As always, Stirling Moss went flying out of the gate.
ANNOUNCER: The bumpy track was more than just a rumor.
But he over-cooked it.
Yeah, it was something funny with the gearbox.
ANNOUNCER: ...and Australia’s Jack Brabham
and New Zealander Bruce McLaren in the lead.
TONY: Jack led most of the race
with Bruce McLaren tucked in behind him.
MIKE: The championship is in your grasp,
and then two corners from the end,
it happens again, didn’t it, Jack?
He ran out of fuel.
I run out of petrol. [LAUGHS]
He’s 800 meters from the finish.
MIKE: You decide to finish, by pushing your car
uphill to the finishing line.
TONY: Bruce was about to stop behind him
and Jack said, “No, get on with it.
If you win, I win the Championship.”
MIKE: You crossed the line, surrounded by a police escort
and screaming fans.
DOUG: Jack and the little Coopers
had beaten Ferrari and Maserati
and put them squarely in their place.
TONY: First Australian to be World Champion.
The first man in a rear-engine car
to be World Champion.
He was a pretty happy boy.
[TV STATIC]
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Jack had well and truly arrived.
He’d been anointed into the "Realm of Champions"
and 1960 was now a chance to further establish himself
among the heroes of motorsport.
MAN: Fangio and Ferrari, Moss and Farina.
TONY: At the end of the day, to go fast,
you need some serious gonads between your legs.
[ENGINES REVVING]
Men like drama, don’t they?
You know, they love to do everything at its most risky.
[PROPELLERS WHIRRING]
So, they start the 1960 season
with the 1959 car.
Charlie Cooper, the old man, says,
“No, I don’t want to spend money when we’re winning.”
NARRATOR: But Jack knew they’d have to innovate
to stay ahead of Ferrari and Lotus.
And he and John Cooper, and Bruce McLaren
all worked on this new car, the Cooper Lowline.
NARRATOR: Jack’s instincts were right,
with Bruce winning Argentina and Jack picking up a win
at the Dutch Grand Prix.
MAN: What are your thoughts when you’re driving
a fast car like this, Jack?
JACK: Well, Vic,
it’s very exciting driving a motor car like this.
GRAYSON: Empirically, what a car is,
it’s a vehicle with an engine and four wheels
that carries passengers.
But, of course, it's an incredibly potent symbol.
A car isn’t just this thing they drive around in.
It is them.
MARK: When the helmet does go on,
and you’re in fighter pilot mode,
and man and machine on the limit going into combat,
you’re very much at one with the car.
Spa was a particularly difficult one.
ANNOUNCER: Stirling Moss and Jack Brabham, number two.
Ditches, barbed wire fences beside the track.
Basically, every hazard you could build
into a racetrack
was there at Spa.
PRESENTER: It’s rare for anything to go wrong so early,
but a triple crash came here.
Two drivers die in the race.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham, now faster than Moss...
And the race kept going and Jack won.
PRESENTER: Brabham, however, roared away to victory
in the second heat...
NARRATOR: Despite the tragedy, Jack kept his focus razor sharp
for his next outing at Reims.
ANNOUNCER: From the very first lap,
it’s an all-out battle
between the British and Italian machines.
NARRATOR: With the lead exchanging
in impossibly tight slipstream battles.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham’s Cooper and Phil Hill’s Ferrari
battle desperately to get a...
For men, the traffic is the last Serengeti.
It’s where they’re in conflict with others.
They’re chasing...
They’re having to negotiate through the forest
of the streets.
You know, so all the kind of ancient, primal, instincts,
you can play it out in a car.
ANNOUNCER: It’s Jack Brabham who gets the upper hand,
streaking ahead for his third consecutive Grand Prix victory.
NARRATOR: And after Reims, Jack made it five in a row...
ANNOUNCER: Brabham’s Cooper-Climax well in front.
NARRATOR: ...with wins at the British and Portuguese
Grand Prix.
ANNOUNCER: One more for an overcrowded mantelpiece.
NARRATOR: He’d done it.
Back to back World Championships.
MIKE: Moss, Hawthorn, Collins...
Jack, you faced an impressive rollcall
of racing greats.
[CROWD CHEERING]
[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
In 1961 he branched out.
Ron Tauranac joined him in England.
He gave me a thousand pounds
to move the family to England
for a year’s trial.
Although he’d won back to back World Championships
in Cooper cars,
some rival car constructors
were actually building more sophisticated cars,
with greater performance potential
than Cooper, really, could shake a stick at.
PRESENTER: ...to design each year as perfect and advanced
a piece of engineering as science can devise.
I just always concerned with what I was doing
and staying ahead of the terrible opposition.
JOHN: This is where we build our racing cars.
And there are literally hundreds of component parts
that go to building a racing car.
DOUG: It’s a brutal comparison
but Cooper have been described
as a bunch of blacksmiths meeting in Chapman
and Lotus a bunch of technologists.
May your success continue, and good luck for 1961.
Thank you, Vic.
[ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING]
PAUL: I’ve been up to Frisco for the Sprints,
out to Charlotte to see the Stocks,
into the Glen for the Grand Prix,
Indy for the Drag and for the "Big One."
I paid 200 million dollars
to sit with 40 million fans.
I’ve eaten twenty tons of hot dogs
and drunk a Rose Bowl full of pop.
I’m this year’s spectator, "Race Fan USA."
PRESENTER: When the balloons go up beside the track
at Indianapolis,
spectators know it’s time
for the start of the world’s most chancy motor race.
DAVID: In 1961, at Indianapolis,
Jack went there with his Formula One Cooper-Climax,
which absolutely outraged and upset the ultra-conservative
American Speedway fraternity.
Brabham, what is the nature of the fuel used?
NARRATOR: The Indy regulators came
to watch the comically small car
with its engine in the wrong spot.
They had the engine in the back,
which was complete anathema to them.
But, the second thing, it was painted green!
And at Indianapolis, green cars were killer cars.
'Cause they’re a threat to my territory,
to my very being
that is my shiny,
you know, phallus that I’m driving along in.
PRESENTER: The big thrill wasn’t long in coming.
A six-car pileup.
NARRATOR: But within a couple of years,
all Indy 500 cars were rear-engined.
He showed that Formula One technology
could work at Indianapolis.
JOHN: After Jack won the World Championship,
he told me he had an invite to go and see Mr. Ferrari.
So he flew down to Italy
and was interviewed by Mr. Ferrari.
And he said he had quite a good offer.
But he went home and thought about it.
He said, "I turned it down."
He said, “Because, the only reason that Colin
and Bruce and myself
went racing was to beat Ferrari,
and I couldn’t possibly join them.”
NARRATOR: Enzo Ferrari once told John Cooper
that he'd never build a rear-engine race car.
But, in '61, he did and it was a killer.
DAVID: During the heart of that season,
Ferrari just ran riot
with their V6-engined, shark-nosed cars.
Right, cue him.
So, I’ve flown back from Rome to bring you
these special pictures
direct from the racetrack at Monza.
NARRATOR: One of the few highlights
was when Jack was leading at Monza.
Congratulations, Phil.
What sort of a race did you have?
Peter, this was a real tough one.
NARRATOR: But as on so many occasions that season,
he broke down.
PHIL: This Monza track has got some steep bankings.
It’s got fast straights, hairpins, the lot.
PRESENTER: Then in the second lap,
approaching the curve
on the inner section of the road circuit,
it happened.
Hold it. Hold it, Mike.
We’ve got the pictures on "three" in the wrong order.
Can you check them? It should be Phil Hill first,
then the banking, then the checkered...
[EXPLOSIONS]
[SCREAMING]
PRESENTER: von Trips' Ferrari,
after touching Clark's Lotus,
had crashed through a fence and rebounded.
Wolfgang von Trips lay dead
and death came to 13 spectators
in this appalling crash.
MAN: All right. Magi, sorry.
Just give me a minute, I'll fix it.
Jolly good. Let's go again then.
[ENGINES REVVING]
MAN: Do you think the combination
of Brabham and Cooper
is going to bring you
the World Championship hat-trick this year?
PRESENTER: It was the Ferraris who triumphed once more.
NARRATOR: And after back to back championship wins,
Jack had well and truly fallen back to earth.
DOUG: By the end of the 1961 season,
Jack fully appreciated
that many of the things that he wanted to do
would be impossible
against the increasing conservatism of Charlie Cooper.
RON: When I went to England, I worked for Jack's company
during normal working hours.
And overnight,
I spent the time designing our first Formula One car.
They were building a Formula Junior car
for a private customer.
RON: Which was really mine,
I wasn't paid for that at all. I just drew it in a night.
And the opportunity was there to go independent.
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
PRESENTER: Surrounded by English countryside
is the racing car factory of Jack Brabham.
JACK: Well, I came over, principally, in the first place,
to go motor racing.
And after motor racing for quite a few years,
the interest in the mechanical side of it
has always been very great.
And the obvious answer was to eventually build our own cars.
DOUG: A friend of theirs pointed out
that the French pronunciation of MRD, merde,
was very rude.
In French, MRD means merde,
which is covered all over in shit.
...and said, you know, you have the perfect name.
The perfect marketing brand.
[SLOW PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
No. Why would it be Brabham Racing Developments
when it-- when I was designing the cars
and was responsible for the build of them?
[TAPE WHIRRING]
You know, we should have had a neutral name,
or I should have been involved in it.
BERNIE: I think in the end, I mean,
both of them wanted to win
and were doing whatever they thought was necessary to win.
DOUG: Motor Racing Developments
thereafter produced Brabham racing cars.
And Brabham racing cars became the thing to have
for Formula Two racing, Formula Three racing,
and went on to the most tremendous customer success.
When you're married to Jackie Oliver,
who's a pretty quick man in the Grand Prix Circuit,
do you ever talk about the danger at all?
We don't really talk about it to our husbands
because we know they're gonna go on racing.
You have to let a boy or a man do want they wanna do.
One wife next to me started screaming and yelling,
so I sat there and I got scared.
I never was afraid before.
The best thing one can do is make sure you're really,
well, financially secure.
I don't think it was easy for my mom.
If I look back and think, the thing that really shaped her
was the danger of Grand Prix racing in the '60s.
She was very nervous.
Because men are stupid enough to take risks.
You know, men are addicted to risks.
Women are sensible, you know.
They don't, uh, wanna die.
Betty was the most nervous person
in the team.
I mean, she was a nervous wreck, really.
She was tough. [LAUGHS]
Wow, was she tough.
I don't know how she went and watched Jack every weekend.
To go there and pretty much every weekend
someone was gonna die
made them a different breed of people.
They went to a lot of funerals. Very good friends of theirs.
You know, from within the paddock,
all the drivers.
And I think that probably shaped her more than anything,
was that fear of Jack going out there
and not coming back again.
HUGHIE: But I think that's probably
what was the bottom line,
was that she now had three kids, and, you know,
the last thing you wanna do
is have her husband get wiped out in a race car.
-RON: Ready to go? -MAN: Yes.
Okay. Let me-- let me do my thing, you--
We try it my way,
-then you say no, okay? -MAN: But...
Well, of course, uh,
I have to say the duo of...
Ron and Jack was very interesting.
Ron always came across as someone
who was preoccupied,
intense.
Jack came across as somebody
who was always preoccupied,
intense.
-RON: Okay? Guys. -MAN: That was good.
Okay. Guys, guys, guys, you gotta be professional.
Okay? And that means not frigging walking around...
-MAN: Yes. -...distracting me
when I'm trying to focus.
You know? So, you know...
MAN: All right.
They were both pretty grumpy guys.
And they were very conscious
of making every minute of every day pay.
You are not the flavor of this month this moment,
clunking down there.
He didn't suffer fools gladly.
DOUG: In fact, we all respected them for it.
You know? That was a funny thing.
Two senior people screwing up my TV.
Take your shoes off. [CHUCKLES]
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
WOMAN: Thirteenth, Monaco Grand Prix,
they want you one day earlier this year, Mr. Brabham.
Roger phoned, can he catch a lift?
Seventeenth, you're due at Zandvoort.
On the 25th, you present a Formula Three car
to the best pupil driver for BP in London.
You'll have to make a speech,
witty and not more than 10 minutes.
Tickets on reservation for your flight to Australia...
DAVID: The whole Brabham Formula One program
was formalized when Dan Gurney joined in 1963.
ANNOUNCER: Still out in front, Dan "The Man" Gurney.
NARRATOR: Early into the 1963 program,
Jack's hopes of another championship
were already looking unlikely.
ANNOUNCER: Behind, number six, Jack Brabham.
They would lead races, and the engine would fail.
PRESENTER: ...with fuel trouble five laps from the end.
Very bad luck.
NARRATOR: The days of being single-mindedly focused
on the track
must have seemed like a luxury now to Jack.
He had cars to build and payroll to meet.
He was racing against, you know, the Jimmy Clarks,
you know, the Stirling Mosses,
but, you know, unlike them,
he had other business ventures going on as well.
NARRATOR: He was also being outclassed in the field
by Dan Gurney.
ANNOUNCER: Dan Gurney, driving a Brabham-Climax, number 9,
was on his tail until engine trouble.
NARRATOR: By the end of 1963,
Dan was starting to sense
that Jack didn't want to spend the money needed to compete
with the likes of Lotus and Ferrari.
ANNOUNCER: Jim Clark wins at over 107 miles an hour.
Jack Brabham, he was very tight with money.
Because his interest was in...
the cost of the car, the maintenance.
They'd work long hours, late nights and early mornings.
MAN: Here, Jack has gathered a team of experts
to bring a car first over the finishing line.
NARRATOR: Finally, it all came together
at the French Grand Prix.
ANNOUNCER: Jim Clark and Dan Gurney in hot pursuit.
NARRATOR: Gurney had bagged a win for Brabham Racing.
And that was the Brabham marque's
first World Championship-qualifying
Grand Prix success.
NARRATOR: But Jack still couldn't break his drought.
PRESENTER: Jack Brabham, racing ace and designer too,
in a Brabham, of course.
NARRATOR: It had been four years since he had won an F1 race
and the aura around him as a champion
was quickly fading.
PRESENTER: In the third lap, Dan Gurney was in real trouble.
NARRATOR: Gurney's patience was wearing thin
with Jack's reluctance to spend money.
PRESENTER: He'd just broken the lap record
when he had to drive into the pitch
with his transistor ignition on fire.
NARRATOR: Things with Ron were also starting to fall apart.
All the journalists believed that he was responsible
for the design and build of the cars.
Which was my responsibility, actually.
NARRATOR: Gurney won again at the season-ending
Mexico Grand Prix,
but it seemed too little, too late.
JACK: Hello, I'm Jack Brabham.
NARRATOR: Dan was now the only one winning anything.
But no one seemed to be celebrating his achievements.
They didn't celebrate at all, never.
They really were like a bunch of Trappist monks.
I never saw Jack really let his hair down at any time.
He wasn't really that sort of bloke.
He probably just went away quietly and counted his money,
and took it to Switzerland...
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
Flew to Monaco with Jack in 1968.
We flew to Nice via Geneva
and Jack disappeared for a couple of hours.
I reckon he'd been to the bank,
put it like that.
I mean, everybody cheats in Formula One.
MAN: Did you ever cheat?
I-- Never caught.
"It's only wrong if you get caught," that's what Jack said.
"It's only wrong if you get caught."
MAN: Did Brabham ever cheat?
Never caught.
[HORSE WHINNYING]
The wrong word is "cheat."
People do whatever they can to get an advantage.
That's the only way you will achieve
maximum results,
if you're really running on the edge of the rules.
MAN: And on the track, boy, did Black Jack,
the most competitive of all Australian sportsmen,
mean business.
Yet such was the skill level of them all in those days
that Black Jack was involved in very, very few accidents.
Some will tell us that he just used to cause them.
DOUG: 'Cause another thing you've got to appreciate
was that Black Jack, or Blackie, could be as mean as rat shit.
JACKIE: I've had more marks in my crash helmet
from Jack Brabham than I have in any accident.
DOUG: If it came to elbows-out driving,
Jack was the man.
JACKIE: He knew exactly when to just
go off the racetrack a tiny bit.
Rivals retired their cars with holes through the radiator.
And there was always stones and gravel which...
He winked at me when he told me that. He said,
"You know what I used to do, don't you, Tony?"
I don't believe it. Even if it's true. [CHUCKLES]
[RETRO MUSIC PLAYING]
PRESENTER: The checkered flag down across your bonnet,
and no cars ahead of you.
That's the best sight in the world to a racing driver.
I mean sports, what's glorious about sports
is that it's ritualized war.
NARRATOR: Jack was desperately looking for solutions
to get back on top for 1965.
GRAYSON: We still want that gritty, reckless,
stoic hero.
Because then that-- he's kind of carrying with him...
that bit in us that we wish we could be like that.
Jack didn't particularly like the Coventry Climax
V-8 engine
to which they were wedded.
NARRATOR: So he turned his attention to Formula Two
and enlisted Honda.
Yes, well, Honda had sent an engine over
for Formula Two with four young engineers.
Everything was started from zero,
so we had to learn everything.
NARRATOR: The Brabham Honda outing was yet another failure.
They ran the engine up for us,
but it was no good for a race car
because we didn't have that many revs available.
He irritated so much.
NARRATOR: And 1965 was another one of those years,
with not a single win for the team.
Dan was very much like my dad, you know.
He wanted to start his own team.
NARRATOR: Gurney finally left at the end of the season
to start his own team.
And Jack's old protege Bruce McLaren did the same,
leaving Cooper's to start McLaren Racing.
MAN: Fangio was 47 when he retired
with five Grand Prix World titles behind him.
Have you any set retirement plans?
I think there must have been some comments in the press
about the age of Jack as a driver.
MAN: You are 40 now,
and I suppose you must have given some thought
to how long you can keep going, and stay at the front.
RON: And his wife, Betty, used that as an argument
to stop racing
and to have more influence on the children
and get back to Australia.
Didn't seem to bother him.
He wanted to race.
That was it.
I haven't got any different plans,
but I certainly don't intend to retire at the moment.
Well, yeah, I think the mythologizing--
I mean, I think we all--
We are human beings, we love a story.
You know? That's what-- that's central
to how we construct ourselves,
is narrative.
It's the most powerful and most ancient form of culture.
And so, you need heroes, you got to have them.
NARRATOR: And if Jack could beat out Gurney and McLaren
in the following season, and become the first driver
to win a championship in a car bearing his own name,
he knew he'd not only become a hero again,
he'd become a legend.
For 1966 and the new three-liter formula.
Coventry Climax announced that they would not be building
a suitable engine.
So we had to produce a Formula One car in a hurry.
DOUG: And few people were willing to supply them
because they'd be making a rod for their own backs.
Jack was racing in America and he heard about these.
JOHN: He saw opportunity in 1966, I guess,
that wasn't obvious to anybody else.
DOUG: The new engine that he chose
was an American prototype production V-8.
He told Repco about them.
RON: Repco agreed to support Jack.
TONY: Phil Irving was charged with drawing
the Repco Brabham race engine.
BERNIE: Drivers and teams were delighted
because they thought it would be not very competitive.
No Formula One engine had ever been built in Australia.
JACKIE: Who would have gone to Australia
to get a motor-racing engine for Formula One?
JOHN: Betty cooked me a steak for lunch at home with Jack
and we shook hands on a deal.
And the idea was that I was gonna work on the Repco engines.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING]
DOUG: And Ron Tauranac engineered that
into BT19 and BT20 cars.
JOHN: There was no test bed,
so they would just get put in the cars
and Jack and Danny had to drive them a bit slowly
for the first few laps.
They were very practical...
The Repco engine was constantly failing.
...and they had all the reliability.
One particular practice we went to,
one of the valve seats fell out.
And this Australian-developed engine
was regarded initially as very much the underdog
in Formula One competition.
TONY: They've only got literally one engine.
It breaks down in its first race.
It breaks down in its second race.
HUGHIE: There was a moment there before we went to Reims
where Jack said, "Do you think we should
carry on with this thing?"
GEOFF: They had my dad, Bruce McLaren, and Dan Gurney
all building their own cars,
taking on the might of Lotus and Ferrari.
PRESENTER: Jack Brabham approving the Brabham Repco...
We both said, no, no, we gotta keep going.
PRESENTER: Jack Brabham's car is proving
to be greater than anticipated.
It beats the Ferraris.
PRESENTER: It was victory for Brabham.
His average speed was also the fastest ever seen...
Hang on, this engine that no one is taking seriously,
it has beaten the Ferraris.
ANNOUNCER: It's also the first time that a driver
has ever won a world title event
in a car of his own construction.
And all of a sudden, we were King Kong
and away we went.
ANNOUNCER: Jack Brabham driving a Repco Brabham.
DOUG: And they just won race after race, after race,
driven by Jack Brabham and by Denny Hulme.
RON: Well, I didn't think about it.
We just carried on with the next one.
ANNOUNCER: The fastest European race since the war.
A very proud moment in all of our lives.
DOUG: They were very, very competent people
producing beautifully well-made machines.
[THUNDER RUMBLES]
Is that rain?
[ROCK MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY: Jack has won three races in a row.
with an engine people were laughing at
at the start of the year.
If that's not enough, he's got a Honda engine
in his Formula Two car.
ANNOUNCER: Jack Brabham, powered by a Japanese Honda engine.
TONY: He's worked really closely with them,
and suddenly they have a world beater.
[NOBUHIKO LAUGHS]
ANNOUNCER: Jack Brabham and his teammate
are one-two in the overall points standing.
TONY: So after all those dark years,
they are so close to winning the championship.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham in his Repco Brabham number 3.
The Australian won the drivers' world title in '59 and '60.
Nürburgring is known as the Green Hell.
ANNOUNCER: The German Grand Prix,
fourteen miles of ups and downs over the grueling Nürburgring.
The most difficult, most challenging,
most prestigious, most historic racetrack in the world.
GEOFF: You can go off into the forest
and they're not gonna find you for weeks.
And it's raining.
It is extremely dangerous.
ANNOUNCER: Fastest lap in practice,
number one, world champion Jim Clark.
NARRATOR: This was the biggest race of Jack's life.
[SOLDIERS SINGING]
NARRATOR: To win at Nürburg,
guaranteeing motorsport immortality.
No sooner has the race started then there's tragedy.
TONY: Jacky Ickx and John Taylor collide.
So, we have a car on fire.
John Taylor is in a Brabham car.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham still leading,
driving a Repco Brabham.
It was an era where drivers would drive
straight past a burning car
where someone literally was being immolated.
If there was an accident, they drove harder,
because they knew others would be backing off.
ANNOUNCER: On Brabham's tail, John Surtees' Cooper-Maserati
number seven.
TONY: Most teams would've collapsed
during that long season of lack of success.
ANNOUNCER: The Australian won the drivers' world title
in '59 and '60.
TONY: And they are a hair's breadth away
from winning the World Championship,
which would make Jack a three-time world champion.
ANNOUNCER: Brabham, on his way to victory.
[ROCK MUSIC PLAYING]
ANNOUNCER: Jack Brabham, ex-world champ,
proves he's not too old at forty
by this superbly confident win.
DOUG: And for the very first time
in motor racing history,
we had a world champion driver
who'd won the World Championship
in a car bearing his own name.
WOMAN: ...a state funeral for a three-time world champion.
Motor racing great Sir Jack Brabham
has been remembered as a legend, on and off the track,
at his state funeral today.
His life could have come straight from the pages
of the Boys' Own adventure books of his day.
Jack passed away on Monday morning, May the 19th,
in their home here on the Gold Coast.
He was 88 years of age.
Right.
Um, uh...
I don't think any, uh, world champion-- no, no sport...
I don't think any multiple world champion sportsman
ever achieves what they achieve
without inflicting some collateral family damage.
Oh, I think, um...
you know, Jack was old school.
Um...
In some way, a likable rouge.
In many ways...
he and I had a lot of conflict.
There were certain things where he went,
"You know what, Jack? You're out of order."
You know? I fell out with him several times.
I think my dad ended up sacrificing quite a lot,
particularly, I think, from a family point of view.
He went over on his own
and left his family behind for a year at a time,
but I would never do that.
He didn't have time at that particular point
to really take too much interest in what we were doing.
DAVID: He was either at a racetrack
or he was in his workshop.
And he'd come home to eat, sleep, and off he'd go again.
"He had an enormous amount of grit and determination,
and never gave up,
which was demonstrated in 1959,
when he pushed his car across the line
to win his first Formula One World Championship."
I've lost the train of thought now.
Go back to the question.
Tonight, we are celebrating 70 years
of amazing history and heritage,
and paying homage to it.
[FIRE CRACKLING]
ANNOUNCER: Jack goes down the main straight
at close to 140 miles an hour.
Jim Clark barely three seconds behind him.
I was one when my dad won his third World Championship,
and he retired when I was five.
So I don't remember any of his '60s period of racing.
MAN: It's another one of those many happy occasions...
DAVID: I was surrounded by lots of trophies,
but they were objects. I really didn't understand
what they were, and yeah, you know, Dad was away a lot.
He retired, although at the end of 1970,
we went back to Australia,
he started up three businesses, and he started up racing again
in touring cars.
GEOFF: What he was doing required that he spend
eighteen hours a day doing what he was doing.
So, he was always in and out of the house.
More out than in, to be honest with you.
Yeah, I mean, I just got on and did my own thing,
and was quite happy doing that.
But anyone I met,
the first thing out of their mouth,
"Oh, that's Jack Brabham's son."
You know, "That's Jack Brabham's son."
And that's the bit I found difficult to cope with.
In terms of "Who am I?"
If I'm Jack's son, who am I?
So, when I look back, I think, yeah, he was away,
but did it affect me? It's difficult to say.
PRESENTER: Racing writers have called him
"The Shy Champion."
TONY: I've been an author for decades
and I've probably now read every single word
ever written about Jack Brabham.
PRESENTER: The quietly spoken gentleman of the circuits...
TONY: And yet, he's almost impossible to read.
PRESENTER: The name of Brabham ranks
now with Fangio and Ferrari.
TONY: It's so easy to talk about
the extraordinary things that he's done,
but in terms of getting into his mind,
that's a much, much more difficult proposition.
MAN: So, Ron, where you're drawing
is between your face and this lens, okay?
-My face? -This area around here, please,
Oh, because I can't see the lens.
That's right. If you just work around here,
-we'll be all right. -Yeah. So...
MAN: Around about here, where my hand is.
-Yeah, okay. -MAN: Okay?
I don't know what the hell to draw.
Ugh, it all slips down. So...
MAN: That's all right, that's all right.
Remember, it's hand-drawn.
Yeah, but it's just a mess though.
See, this is really-- just slips down
as soon as I put any pressure on it.
MAN: Well, thankfully, you're not designing the next...
the next big Formula One revolution.
Unfortunately.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
I don't really know quite how truly friendly
Ron and Jack Brabham were.
He took ideas from me, and so forth,
and I got equipment from him and help on machining from him.
MAN: So, it was very much a mutual respect?
That's right.
He had more respect for money than I did.
DOUG: Ron Tauranac, I always recall
as one of the most competitive race engineers I've ever met.
It was very difficult to decide who was actually
steering the ship because, obviously,
Jack had very firm views on how to set up a car,
and they would spend endless amounts of time
debating this or, you could say, even arguing about it.
GEOFF: Another myth is that people talk about
genes being passed down the family.
Uh, that's not true.
Racing is a disease.
DAVID: Growing up on the farm, I loved to speed.
You know, I would drive every vehicle,
every motorbike, every tractor, flat out, sideways,
always trying to find that extra limit.
Went to a workshop, saw a go-kart sitting there,
never seen a racing go-kart in my life.
Didn't even know people raced them.
The mechanic was there, working on the kart,
and I said, "Do people race these things, do they?"
And he sort of looked at me and said, "Are you adopted?"
So, when I jumped in the go-kart for the very first time,
and Dad's watching me, he's just gone,
"Okay, where the hell's that come from?"
You know, when I drove race cars,
the speed meant nothing.
It was competing against somebody else and beating them.
That was the thrill that I got out of racing.
DAVID: He's a veteran anyway, so,
you can see the lines, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
WOMAN: David is the third of Sir Jack Brabham's sons
to follow the former Formula One world champion.
DAVID: I think the turning point for me was...
I did a race and my dad came to it,
and I won by, like, half a lap,
and that was the time he went, "This kid could go a long way."
MAN: So, do you think-- did you aspire to be like your brothers?
I aspired to beat them.
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
MAN: On November 29, 1970,
the racing greats of the world gather in your honor
for the Brands Hatch farewell meeting.
The next evening, they gather again for a farewell banquet
given in your honor at the Savoy Hotel in London.
Well, Betty, the Ford Company
presents you with a ball and chain,
and it's inscribed,
"Presented to Betty Brabham on 25th November, 1970,
who won in the end."
And here's your reply.
I've been asked what I did
to make Jack give up motor racing.
It was quite simple really. I said,
"Jack, motor racing or divorce?"
[LAUGHTER]
GEOFF: When my dad retired in 1970,
he retired and just sold everything out to Ron.
I'm surprised that he did that.
It was a little bit, I think, out of character for him
just to shut the door and walk away.
MAN: And now, Jack, here is your good friend, Ron Tauranac.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC]
RON: Well, I was at Monaco,
and I was walking along past the oceanfront
and a friend said, "Just a moment.
I'll introduce you to someone."
They introduced me to Bernie Ecclestone.
[LAUGHING]
I said I'd buy into the team.
And I said, "Well, no. I wouldn't sell a half share,
I've been in business with a friend for many years,
and I wouldn't want to do that again."
And it then came that he wanted to sell, full stop.
I said, "But I'll sell you the business."
Ron had his own ideas of what should happen,
and he didn't always, sort of, fall into line,
so I changed them.
He gave me a call and offered me...
I think it was one million less.
[EERIE MUSIC PLAYING]
Really? I don't remember.
I should have bartered but I didn't.
I just thought about it and said,
"Gee, I'm in trouble if I don't sell now.
I've arranged all these things."
So I agreed to sell.
It was agreed, he was looking for one price,
and I'd probably try and buy it for less.
Nothing's changed as far as I'm concerned.
GEOFF: And then when Bernie sold it,
things, you know, went downhill really fast
from that point to where it just totally disappeared.
TONY: We had a shed full of things
that were very sentimental to the family.
So, it was a telephone call from my mom.
"I got some bad news. The shed went up in flames."
And it's, like, "What?"
How could it go up in flames?
You know, it was just a mystery.
And anything we can't find,
we just assumed that it's down to the fire.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING]
GRAYSON: To a child, their parents
are the only ones they have.
So, therefore, you do put them on a pedestal.
You know, they are perfect because...
in order for you to survive in the family unit,
you've got to believe that they're perfect.
But if you have a very famous and successful parent,
their perfection is held up there,
not just by you but by the public as well,
and I suppose they've got further to fall.
So, if they turn out to be flawed,
you know, it might be harder to deal with.
PRESENTER: There was action aplenty
in the Formula Ford event.
David Brabham in the yellow car was about to lap Schumac
when he smashed into the back of him.
YOUNG DAVID: I'm coping pretty well.
I've still got a lot to learn,
through what Dad's telling me and that.
DAVID: When I was at the Australian Grand Prix in 1987,
my girlfriend got pregnant that year,
and I didn't qualify particularly well.
I was last, 30 something.
Just before the race, my father had a Formula One pass,
and I said, you know, "You better get me one of those
for when I'm in Formula One."
Didn't know what else to say, you know,
and he just said, "You know,
the days of you ever getting to Formula One are finished."
And he just, like, deadpan, dead serious.
And that just triggered a switch in me,
and I told him to fuck off,
and I walked off.
And I had steam coming out of my--
I was so angry,
so incredibly pissed off with him,
that I took that energy
and took it into the race car.
And turned it into... let's call it determination.
"I'm gonna fucking show you."
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
MAN: Jack Brabham, keeping an eye
on young son David.
DAVID: And I got in that car and I said,
"You tell those guys in front of me that I'm coming through.
They'd better get out of my way."
Boom, off I went, and drove ten notches higher
than I've ever driven up until that point.
MAN: Young David made a slow start
but he's come back through the pack.
Yes, actually, David is actually third now.
I went from 35th to 1st in 14 laps
and won the race in 15.
That whole experience for me was my gift
because I discovered something about the mental mindset,
and what can be created by that.
It was a magic lesson for me
because I carried that through my career.
I think as I got older, you start to understand
more about what Jack actually achieved,
and it's so big, so vast.
Probably was a negative
because I-- My attitude was
"Well, I'll never get that far, but how far could I get?"
[CHUCKLES] We actually met at--
initially we met at a racetrack.
You know, I grew up with motor sport,
so it just seemed normal.
DAVID: I had had a very successful
Formula Three season in 1989.
I'd won the British F3 Championship and the World Cup,
and I'm at home, doing my thing, and the phone rings,
and it's the Brabham Formula One team saying,
"How would you like to come out?
We want you to be in Formula One."
"What?" [CHUCKLES]
You know, it was like, "Are you serious?"
Money.
Yeah, I ended up driving for a team
that ran out of money. [CHUCKLES]
ANNOUNCER: This is his first outing
in a Formula One car.
And the preparation for his race debut
in less than two weeks will be rushed.
You turn up at the workshop,
and your car is still there with no engine in it.
"What's happening?" "No one's paid
for the engines yet."
"So, are we gonna make the race?" "Don't know."
YOUNG DAVID: The goal at the moment is to qualify
and to finish the race.
LISA: Sadly, it turned out to be a very difficult season,
and maybe it defined us, maybe it helped us as a couple.
It certainly proved that we could stick together
whether it was good, bad or ugly.
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
DAVID: It was just a mess, an absolute mess.
But then I went into sports car racing,
and really found my niche.
YOUNG DAVID: Well, I have to say,
that was an absolute blast.
You know, dicing for the lead the whole way.
[ENGINES REVVING]
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
GRAYSON: We lived a lot nearer to the edge,
you know, when we stopped evolving.
I often think about, you know, what we need out of modern life.
Sportsmen being in control of a motor vehicle,
you're in the moment.
It's that kind of dance of physics and mechanics,
and they carry it out to the nth degree,
right on the edge of the envelope of their skill.
And that is happiness.
It's the Everest of...
feeling alive, I suppose.
You just find that they are very selfish.
He's probably one of the better sportsmen.
DAVID: There was a lot of similarities between
me as a kid with my dad, and the kids with myself.
I was away a lot as well.
ANNOUNCER: ...the great race at Le Mans
and there is an Aussie there, David Brabham.
DAVID: It's just you get into this mindset that you kind of
forget about other things around you
and some of those times it was family stuff.
The most important thing is the next corner.
You get to the limit, you know, there's another limit.
Next one, next one, next one.
And there are things I know. My wife turns around
and says, "You're so like your father."
I was like, "Don't."
BERNIE: I think it's not a case of when a guy starts.
It's how long they've been having to pack their bags,
go to their hotel, leave their hotel,
go to the circuit, go testing, and they get fed up.
DAVID: Depression plays a role when you stop.
Of that there is no doubt.
You know it's the end of your career,
you know you're not as fast as you were.
I was shocked at how much of a low I went into.
They're lost, and I think it's hard for them.
They're used to people just telling them
they're the best thing since slice bread.
They are their successes.
Everybody wants a piece of you,
and suddenly the phone doesn't ring.
[THUNDER RUMBLING]
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING]
MAN: Tonight, we're welcoming back
one of the great names in motor racing.
The continuation of the epic history of a story
that began with a young Jack Brabham racing
that midget car out there in the corner.
And Le Mans victories for David and for Geoff
help keep the Brabham name in the forefront.
And that's what we're celebrating here tonight.
When I was 40, I thought,
okay, what am I gonna do in ten years' time?
So I started to think about doing something
with the Brabham name.
I had no idea what or how,
I just felt there was an opportunity.
GEOFF: I mean, I have to be honest,
I don't know if Dad was the best businessman.
Someone in Germany said, "I own Brabham."
GEOFF: One of the foolish things that my dad did
was that he lost control of the name.
"What do you mean? That's our name.
How can you-- how can you claim that?"
He knew nothing, had no interest in marketing,
about selling himself,
about creating a brand for himself.
This is a Japanese spanner.
Not a cheap Asian spanner, but a quality hand tool.
And it's good. I know it's...
All those things were just not part of his makeup.
If it was gonna cost Dad five dollars to renew the name,
he wouldn't do it. You know, it was... [LAUGHS]
DAVID: So, my dad and I had a chat about it,
and we were gonna go to court.
Dad pulled out at the last minute,
and said, "You're on your own."
There was a bit of anger, I guess.
"How could you do this?"
It would've made life a little bit more comfortable
and easier for us and less stressful.
DAVID: So, do I go into the lion's den
or do I-- do I walk away, you know?
And I chose to walk into the lion's den,
which had felt like a lion's den for seven years.
LISA: It was financially very crippling for us as a family
and I think that, in a way, energized David as well,
It's like "Right. If you don't-- if you're not willing to fight
to get your name back, I'm gonna do it,
because I'm not letting it go.
But then it's mine, basically.
Any decisions now, once this court case is over,
subject to winning it, will be down to me."
DAVID: You've been cocooned for 30 years
as a professional sportsman, and that's all you know.
And then, all of a sudden, you go into the real world
and you don't know how it works.
So then you're hard on yourself
because you don't know how it works.
You know, the amount of times I use Google to figure out
what someone said, you know,
because it was, like, what the hell is that?
I had no idea.
And then you'd start to lose confidence.
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
DAVID: With perseverance and support from the family,
I won the court case.
DAVID: Brabham, one of most iconic names in motor sport,
is coming back.
We're coming back with a completely new model
for the way the race team is funded and run.
Be one of those to seize this opportunity.
Come join us and become the heartbeat of our race team.
DAVID: I took my wife out to the coffee shop, penniless.
And a beggar came to the table,
and I thought I've got one pound left in my pocket.
And I just pulled it out, I gave it to him.
I said, "There you go, off you go."
And off he went.
And I'm staring out the window, going, "What can I do,
what can I do, what can I do?"
[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
And I ended up selling my Le Mans-winning Rolex.
And of course we managed to have a very successful
crowd-funding campaign called Project Brabham.
DAVID: My father, Sir Jack Brabham,
started out with little more than talent and self-belief
and became the only person ever to win
a Formula One World Championship in a car he constructed.
DAVID: It was a great success.
It ultimately ended up being about 300 grand.
But 300 grand doesn't get you a race team.
You know, we had a team of people
trying to work through that,
and, of course, you've had one injection of cash,
there's no more money coming in.
So you know over a period of time
if you don't bring more cash in,
you're gonna run out of money.
Last weekend, David Brabham
drove his father's famous Cooper-Climax T51
at Sebring in Florida.
You know that when he was gonna go,
it was gonna be big news.
Driving the Cooper-Climax really gave him a thrill.
-It meant so much to him. -DAVID: One of those moments
in time
you'll never forget where you were
when you got the call, you know.
And it was my brother Geoff who called me.
I received a phone call.
Dad had passed away, and it was just a huge shock.
DAVID: He was going to be doing dialysis,
because of his kidneys.
So, he was in the routine of having to get up quite early
to get to the hospital to do the dialysis
because he couldn't do it at home.
NURSE: Okay. And now for some local.
She's come back with a cup of tea,
and he's gone in bed.
I went straight into "Right, okay,
the press are gonna be all over this soon.
We're gonna have to have a statement,
I'm gonna have to tell our PR people
that it's happened."
And you go-- you kind of go into this mode,
which, in some way, I think is a way of protecting you
from getting too involved in the loss.
GEOFF: I spent more time with him at the end of his life
than I ever did at the beginning of my life.
And I had the opportunity to probably get to know him
a little bit better, you know, just before he died
than any other time during his life.
DAVID: Certainly the last ten years of Jack's life,
our relationship was as good as it ever had been.
You kind of get older, you get bit wiser.
You-- It doesn't pay to judge other people's lives.
So, we actually had a-- had a really good end
to that relationship.
MAN: It's hopeless. See, if I couldn't say those words,
and needed to look to try and do it from memory,
I'd say something different.
It's a joy to see the BT brand being honored
with a new and exciting Brabham BT62.
I wish David all the best
as he takes Brabham into the future.
Well, you've built the model of a future,
now let's see how it handles.
DAVID: I got a call from a contact of mine,
and said, "Look, I know you've always been trying
to get the Brabham name back out there
onto the world stage.
There's a group of people I know that have got a vision as well,
and I think you guys need to meet."
So I flew down to Adelaide, and met with them.
You know, they wanted for me to get involved,
and could we produce a high-performance car.
SAM: I just wanted to get Dad's perspective.
What do you... How have you felt?
Yes, it's been just a whirlwind, to be honest with you.
I'm sure after the event, I'll sit back there and go, wow.
I'm so proud of him.
I think to see what he's come from,
from being just a racing driver who's done very well,
to the trials and tribulations
of learning about business from scratch.
...global reveal of the Brabham BT62.
The Brabham BT62.
To come out the other side as a success
and with something he truly believes in,
there's something to be said for that,
and it's a good value and moral to have as I grow up as well.
[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
"He had an enormous amount of grit and determination,
and never gave up,
which was demonstrated in 1959,
when he pushed his car across the line
to win his first Formula One World Championship."
Gonna start putting my shoes on, because I gotta head.
LISA: I'm really proud of David.
I would say I'm prouder of him for what he's done now,
post racing.
Taking on the court case and taking on Brabham,
and saying, "This has got to change,
this is what I want, this is my dream."
I'm far prouder of him doing that
because he's taken himself
absolutely out of his comfort zone.
MAN: As you can see, the car is lurking undercover
in the center of the magnificent room behind me,
but we're also surrounded by some amazing cars
from Brabham's history and heritage.
We like to think we've done what my father did
back in 1948,
backed ourselves and got it done.
And developed a car that absolutely has the right
to carry the Brabham name into the future.
I personally don't think David's actually grieved.
Realistically, I don't think he's grieved.
[SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING]
LISA: And I think part of the drive for this
does stem from his dad.
And although their relationship obviously got so much better,
this, for him, is like "This is what I did."
But also, I think it's important that David does know
that he is David.
And you have to battle with that, feeling part
of a legacy or whatever you want to call it.
Because I can't say what's going to have closure for David.
Whether it is just affirmation that "Yes, I did this,"
or "Stuff you, you told me this, that, and the other
when I was little, and I've done it."
I don't know which one it's gonna be.
I think we're on a 50/50 with that.
[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
["BLACK EYED BRUISER" PLAYING]
♪ If you see me Walking down the street ♪
♪ Better get out my way ♪
♪ I'm a real king hitter ♪
♪ Always have my say ♪
♪ If you're looking For a happy time ♪
♪ Best you don't come around ♪
♪ Or else You'll get your heavy ♪
♪ Six feet of solid ground ♪
♪ I don't like trouble ♪
♪ But if trouble Is the name of your game ♪
♪ You know where You can find me, boy ♪
♪ Everybody knows my name ♪
♪ I'm the black eyed ♪
♪ The black eyed ♪
♪ The black eyed bruiser ♪