Remembering Jack Brabham: From Brabham to Bernie

“A voice asked, ‘Who’s that?’”

“‘No, who’s that?’ I replied.”

“‘I’m Bernie Ecclestone and I’ve bought the company.’”

“I must admit that I laughed at that.

“Then the voice started asking questions and I said, ‘I don’t know who you are. Why should I answer?’

“Our conversation was that brief.

“The next morning I spoke to [team owner] Ron Tauranac about it and he went into a process of denial. But two days later Bernie turned up – we had to find a box for him to stand on – and he confirmed that what he’d told me was true.

“Ron was looking rather sheepish in the background. Some of us had worked for him for nearly 10 years and yet known nothing about any of this. We were sold as chattel really.”

Goozée, a public-school boy mad-keen on motor racing, had joined Brabham in his summer holiday of 1963 and, bar a short and unfulfilling spell at Bruce McLaren Racing in early 1968, worked his way up its ranks.

“My father had spent a lot of money on my education and would only let me leave school if Brabham offered me an apprenticeship,” he says. “They agreed to, and I joined full-time in December.

“Apprenticeship was a very loose term. I wasn’t given tutelage in the normal sense. Assigned to Denny Hulme, who was running his own Formula 2 car, I was his general factotum.

“But at the same time I was being taught the fundamental skills of sheet-metal work, welding and a general mechanical regimen. My skills were developed and I’d been raised from the basic level – making the tea, sweeping the floor – by 1966-’67.”

Upon his return from McLaren – “I followed Denny, Best Man at my wedding, there” – Goozée worked principally on the Formula 1 side of Brabham’s production arm: Motor Racing Developments.

“Building a rolling chassis from a bare chassis supplied unpainted by Arch Motors in London was usually the responsibility of one person,” he says, “though sometimes there might be help depending on how busy we were.

“A chassis took the best part of six weeks to complete.”

He also attended the European rounds in support of new senior mechanic Ron Dennis, direct from Cooper Car Co.

This was a difficult time for Brabham Racing Organisation. Its F1 title-winning teams of 1966 and ’67 had been asset-stripped and engine supplier Repco had bitten off more than it could chew with a four-valve conversion of its successful V8.

“Those engines simply wouldn’t last,” says Goozée, “and we worked a colossal number of all-nighters.

“At the Dutch GP we had to remove the cylinder heads because the pistons were too tall; they would have hit the valves. So we had to ‘chop’ their tops off using a chisel, a file and emery cloth. It was crude.”

At the preceding Belgian GP team boss/driver Jack Brabham had had to dash home and heat-treat new heads overnight in his wife’s oven.

Betty was not amused.

New signing Jochen Rindt qualified on pole for the French and Canadian GPs, but good results were too few and too far between: the reigning champion constructor mustered just 10 points and slipped to eighth in the standings.

Its Repco adventure was over.

Brabham bowed to the inevitable and joined the queue for Cosworth’s DFV – and Jacky Ickx replaced Rindt, bound for Lotus – for 1969.

The precocious Belgian didn’t click with his new team-mate/leader – there were almost 20 years and a language barrier between them – and his performances improved after Jack was sidelined by a broken ankle: third in France, second in Britain and first in Germany.

Ickx also won that year’s Canadian GP and Oulton Park’s International Gold Cup.

Brabham, meanwhile, was coming under increasing familial pressure to hang up his helmet. But second, fourth and third places in the closing rounds – plus Ickx’s move to Ferrari for 1970 – persuaded him to tackle one more season: his 23^rd as a professional racing driver.

Again Betty was not amused.

“I don’t think Jack wanted to drive as long as he did,” says Goozée. “He was approaching 44. But 1970 was to be our first season with a monocoque F1 car. Having driven our semi-monocoque Indycar, he was aware of the potential. That’s what attracted him.

“And his would have been a very good season indeed had he not crashed at the last corner of the last lap while leading at Monaco, and had I not run him out of fuel [by mistakenly leaving the injection set at ‘full rich’] at Brands Hatch.”

That last-lap British GP defeat by Rindt was a sickener and Brabham was losing heart.

A puncture while testing at Zandvoort prior to the Dutch GP had left him dangling from his harness and wrapped scarily tightly in catch-fencing. And during the race itself he witnessed Piers Courage’s fatal accident.

He had already lost good friend Bruce McLaren that year, and ‘good bloke’ Rindt would be killed during practice at Monza in September.

Even Jack’s father, a staunch supporter, reckoned it was time to stop.

“Although Jack was very important in my personal growth, I didn’t think about his leaving’s consequences,” says Goozée. “We all went to Brands Hatch for a ‘Farewell to Jack’ tribute and I don’t remember him coming to the workshop after that.

“Ron Tauranac took full control.

“Jack was just Jack. A very internal man, he was absorbed in his own world and thoughts. You could work with him all day and barely have a conversation.

“Graham Hill’s arrival [in 1971], therefore, was a breath of fresh air. Always laughing and joking, he was Jack’s antithesis.

“But he was always fussing and fiddling, too, and sometimes what he wanted contradicted what Ron [Tauranac] thought was required and there would be stern words.

“I am very fond of Ron, but a lot of people didn’t like his manner. He was naturally confrontational, and the great sadness is that we probably didn’t benefit fully from his brilliance because of it.

“I don’t think he wanted to run the team. It just sort of happened. He and Jack were never great friends but worked well together.

“And after a year without him Ron had had enough.”

At which point, an October night in 1971, the ‘phone rang and that box was sought.

Goozée: “I think Ron was embarrassed by it all and did everything he could to then persuade us that Bernie was a terrible man who would drive us into the ground.

“Ron was supposed to stay on as a consultant, but it was never going to work.

“In fact, I got on well with Bernie. He immediately hired contractors to paint our shabby workshop and our general lifestyle improved greatly under him.

“He was a different man then to the man he is now. He was still running his dealership in Bexleyheath and we didn’t see a lot of him.”

But, typically astutely, Ecclestone had seen something in the trendy young South African in the drawing office.

Goozée: “Bernie knew that Gordon Murray, who didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together and was even designing furniture for his cottage in Godalming, was someone who would maximise any opportunity.

“Gordon’s mind, like Colin Chapman’s, was constantly thinking outside of the box and his Toblerone-shaped BT42 [of 1973] was completely different to anything else on the grid. But it turned out to be very good.

“His BT44 was even better and Brabham was in the ascendancy when I left on 24 September 1974.”

Goozée joined newly formed, Dorset-based Penske Racing for purely geographical reasons.

“I was the best-paid employee at Brabham – £60 a week – whereas Penske was at the cheap end of the F1 pitlane and couldn’t match that,” he says. “But that’s not what mattered.

“And, as it happened, it proved a fortuitous move.”

Goozée became MD of Penske Cars in 1983 and ran this super-successful outfit until its closure in 2009.

“But for Brabham, however, we would not be having this conversation,” he says. “I had been hovering outside their door on my bicycle when someone said, ‘Come on in and be useful!’”

Images courtesy of LAT