From A Land Down Under

DAVID BRABHAM IS REVIVING THE FAMILY BUSINESS IN A FACTORY IN SUBURBAN ADELAIDE. WE FINALLY SAMPLE HIS WARES – BY STRAPPING INTO THE 522KW BT62

- Andrew Frankel

GUESS IT MEANS DIFFERENT things to different people. To my father’s generation, Brabham was a person long before it was a racing car company. Jack Brabham, ‘Black Jack’, tough as they came both on and off the track, a no-nonsense engineer from Down Under who came to the UK and showed the Poms how it was done with back-to-back world titles.

To me, Brabham meant something else: a series of sleek and innovative grand Prix cars of the late 1970s and early ’80s showcasing the mercurial talents of designer Gordon Murray. Fan-assistance, surface cooling, hydro-pneumatic suspension… whether it worked or not, I loved the sheer inventiveness of those cars and the fact they always managed to look so – well, to my young eyes – cool.

So I wonder what Brabham will mean to the young of today? If you’re Jack’s son, David, he hopes the answer is staring you in the face right now. After years of legal battles simply to regain control of his family name and years more of fundraising and development, the first Brabham since the Formula One team slipped under the waves in 1992 is here.

Although just 70 BT62s are planned to be built (at around $2.26m if you’re in the market), it is absolutely not a Led Zeppelin one-night-only return to the stage. Brabham, David tells me, is back. Next will come to a road car including unspecified design elements of the BT62, and it’s the car that will be homologated into the GTE category to be raced at Le Mans as soon as 2021.

So the BT62 is a stepping stone to bigger things – a large, powerful and conspicuously good looking stepping stone to my eyes – but a stone nonetheless.