Motoring News
Today, 19 May 2014Three-time world champion Sir Jack Brabham dies
The first and only man to win the Formula 1 world title in a car bearing his own name has passed away at the age of 88
Sir Jack Brabham, the only man to win the Formula 1 World Championship in a car bearing his own name, has died at the age of 88. He passed away on Monday morning at his home in Gold Coast, Australia.John Arthur Brabham, known as Jack, was born in Hurstville, just outside of Sydney, Australia, on 2 April 1926. He was immersed in motoring and engineering from an early age, leaving school at 15 to work at a garage and study mechanical engineering.After a spell in the Royal Australian Air Force, Brabham started racing in 1948, driving a Midget car that he'd built for a friend. He was successful and, after climbing Australia's racing ladder, he moved to Europe to race in 1955.Brabham quickly befriended John Cooper of Cooper Cars, and made his Formula 1 debut in the British Grand Prix behind the wheel of a Cooper T40, retiring with engine problems.By 1958 he was a full-time grand prix driver with Cooper, and the following year he won the Monaco Grand Prix, following it up with a win in the British GP at Aintree. He clinched his first world title in dramatic circumstances when he ran out of fuel on the final lap of the United States GP but pushed his car across the finish line for fourth place, good enough for the crown. A back-to-back run of five victories ensured a successful title def
read moreRemembering Britain's failed car companies - picture special
The history of British car making is littered with success, glory, incompetence and failure. We look at those marques that have fallen by the wayside
Car making is hard. Profitable car making is a whole lot harder, and for proof you only need run a wistful eye over the defunct marques named below.Some were born close to the dawn of the car, when bicycle makers and blacksmiths saw money in the new-fangled horseless carriage. Dozens of opportunists founded car companies, many of them clever engineers, savvy businessmen and sometimes both. Car making at the start of the 20th century was like internet entrepreneurialism at the end of it: plenty jumped into the pool, but only the fittest survived in a market that many didn’t understand. But other car makers have gone despite early successes. Recessions killed many and bundled others into doomed liaisons. Misreadings of the market, the complacency that came with selling sub-standard cars to Britain’s colonies, destabilising government policies, failure to spot the competition and poor management all contributed to the demise of car makers. But what annihilated great chunks of the British car industry from the 1960s through to the century’s end was a poisonous mix of politics – from communist-agitated unionism to catastrophic government meddling and cost-obsessed management who couldn’t see that building a genuinely better car might build a better business. All
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