Brabham made its last world championship Formula 1 start in the 1992 Hungarian Grand Prix. Future world champion Damon Hill scraped his BT60B onto the back row of the grid and finished last, four laps down, before financial issues forced the team into obscurity.
The Brabham family, of course, raced on, but that seemed the end of the road for the constructor that Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac had founded three decades earlier. David Brabham, son of Jack, was busy carving out his own racing career in the 1990s, one that would yield two Le Mans 24 Hours class wins and outright success with Peugeot, plus titles in the All-Japan GT Championship and American Le Mans Series. But he never forgot about the team he had briefly raced for in F1 in 1990, a time he says brings “painful memories”.
“That’s when it started to go wrong I think,” says Brabham. “Middlebridge had bought Brabham and wanted me to drive in the F1 team. The year before, they had a great little car and some great results for a little team. It all sounded really good, but when I arrived there was a big global financial crisis and the money dried up.
PLUS: How unreliability blunted Brabham’s first F1 winner
“We weren’t sure if we were going to get to the next race until someone paid for engines – it was a bit of a nightmare.”
It was more than a decade before David started to think about the Brabham name once more. “When I got to about 40 I thought I probably had about 10 years left of driving and wondered what I was going to do in terms of the future,” says the 56-year-old. “I thought we’ve got this iconic racing name but we didn’t do anything with it. We had a great opportunity so I had a chat to my father.”
Jack Brabham had some trademarks but there were a few gaps, and David soon found himself in a fight for the rights to his own name: “We decided to strengthen up the protection of the name Brabham and discovered somebody had registered before us – not long before us – the name Brabham and Brabham Racing in Europe, so I entered into a legal battle to get the name back under family control.”
Brabham made its last world championship Formula 1 start in the 1992 Hungarian Grand Prix
Photo by: Motorsport Images
Seven years later, on Christmas Day 2012, the name was transferred back to the family. Then it was: “I’ve got it, now what do I do with it?!”
Project Brabham, a crowdsourcing programme aimed at competing in the World Endurance…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Autosport.com – Formula 1 – Stories…