Like Father, Like Son, Only Faster

In 1961, funk hit the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In the form of a funny little lightweight contraption that the sports car crowd of Europe thought was a racing machine.

The Indy Establishment like to have died laughing. Match this spindly little toy with the registered monsters of the Speedway, the 750-horsepower Novis, the loutish front-engine Offies? “Tell me,” they asked the Aussie Jack Brabham, who showed up in it, “Do you have to have a monocle to drive it?” They could hardly smother a laugh. “Where are the pedals?” they asked innocently. “Do you drive it--or does your little boy?” “Do you race in this--or play polo?” they wanted to know.

The car, if that’s what it was, was quite a specimen. Barely 900 pounds, with just a little over 190-horsepower, it had--get this--an engine in the back. Indy thought this was quaint. They hoped it could make the parade lap.

Well, Jack Brabham’s Cooper-Climax made the parade lap all right. And 200 others. It didn’t win the race. It just revolutionized it.

Brabham just blew off the flower of Indy racing in the corners. He gave ground in the straights in his little underpowered insect of a racer, but the brutish Indy cars had to go through the corners like a drunk trying to pick his way through furniture in the dark so as not to wake his wife.

Brabham went through the whole race at full throttle. He had qualified the car at 145.1 m.p.h. and he turned the whole 200 laps at 134.1, which would have won the race two years earlier.

Within two years, every car in the race was a replica of sorts of Jack Brabham’s. The only front-engine cars at Indy today are in the museum along with the Marmon Wasp of Ray Harroun. Brabham’s bravery--and skill--had changed the face of Indy racing forever.

This weekend at Riverside, in the Times Grand Prix of Endurance, a 500-kilometer test of steel and rubber--and flesh and blood--another Brabham is bringing another revolutionary development to the art of road racing.

This Brabham, Geoffrey, son of Jack, is trying to put Japanese engineering in the forefront of American racing.

No one is laughing. Geoff Brabham will be at the wheel of a 3.0-liter 300ZX Nissan engine loaded into a Lola chassis for Brabham and co-driver Elliott Forbes-Robinson to shoot at the $143,500 prize money for the 500-kilometer race.

Geoff Brabham is a chip off the old stock block, another in the long line of sons of famous men who have excelled in this sport of their fathers. It’s a list which will include Michael, son of Mario Andretti; Al, son of Al Unser; Pancho, son of Duane Carter; Gary son of Tony Bettenhausen; Billy, son of Billy Vukovich, and Johnny, son of Johnnie Parsons. And Geoffrey, son of Sir Jack Brabham.

What is it that puts this second generation of chauffeurs behind the wheel of a 200-m.p.h. racing machine? Didn’t Daddy do that precisely because he wanted his kids to have a better way to go?

Geoff Brabham thinks he has the answer.

“It’s because of the longevity of the drivers today,” he feels. “The sport is safer now and you have drivers persevering at the sport well into their late 40’s or even 50’s, till they’re grandfathers.

“If you’re 8 or 9 years old when your father quits driving, as it used to be, it doesn’t seep into your awareness what he does for a living. When your father drives that extra 5 years or more, now you’re 14 or 15, and you’re in the pits and you smell the gasoline and hear the roar and get caught up in the action and excitement. All of a sudden, you can’t conceive of any other way of life. It’s in your blood. Everything else seems boring to you.”

Geoff also has a theory as to why Formula One drivers’ sons are less conspicuous. “They don’t drive as long because of the nature of their sport. The travel gets them down, not the racing. One week, they’re in Brazil. The next week, they’re back in Europe. The next week, they’re in Africa. They burn out on airplanes, not race cars. They quit when their children are too young to hang around the pits and get infected.”

Geoff Brabham was an exception. Even though his father, knighted by the Queen, was three times world champion on the royal roads of Europe, Geoff opted for American racing.

But, like his father, he prefers the innovative. His experimental Nissan, which he put on the front row at Riverside last year but which spent most of the rest of the season crashing, won the Miami Grand Prix last month and would have won at Portland last year except for running out of gas on the last lap.

And, while he will try to put his Nissan in the GTP winners’ circle at the Times’ race Sunday, he will try to put a Honda into Victory Lane at Indy next month.

No one hoots at a Brabham any more. Since Sir Jack finished his electrifying ninth in ’61 in what everyone considered a windup toy, a Brabham could probably show up in a rickshaw and scare everybody in the grid to death. The thing to do when a Brabham shows up in an off-beat racer on a track is not to make fun of it. It’s to buy it.