Tony Brooks, six-times grand prix winner and 1959 world championship runner-up, has passed away at the age of 90.
The extraordinary story of his performance in the non-championship 1955 Syracuse Grand Prix in Sicily, Italy, quickly earned him a place among the British motorsport stars of the day such as Stirling Moss and Mike Hawthorn.
Brooks, a dentist, was working on a patient when his telephone rang with the offer of a drive in the race for the Connaught team. They only arrived at the street circuit in time for final practice, so Brooks explored the track on a scooter, before experiencing both the track and his B Type machine for the first time.
Remarkably, Brooks grabbed a place on the front row of the grid, then saw off the local favourites in Ferraris and Maseratis to take victory by more than 50 seconds. With that, he had scored the first ‘away win’ for a British car and driver for more than three decades.
He had already made his Le Mans 24 Hours debut for Aston Martin earlier that year, in an event marred by Pierre Levegh’s terrible crash in which he and over 80 spectators died. Fatalities were a regular occurrence in the fifties: Peter Collins, Stuart Lewis-Evans, Luigi Musso and Jean Behra all lost their lives in grands prix during Brooks’ career.
He survived a couple of serious crashes of his own. A stuck throttle on Brooks’ world championship grand prix debut at Silverstone in 1956 sent him into the barriers at Abbey, breaking his jaw. The following year he crashed at Le Mans, and lay trapped under his car until it was knocked off him by Umberto Maglioli’s passing Porsche.
Still recovering from the effects of that crash, he handed his Vanwall to Moss halfway through their home race at Aintree. Moss brought it home first, the pair sharing victory, Brooks taking his maiden success in a championship round.
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