One of Formula 1’s truly great teams, Jack Brabham founded the team in 1962 and in 1966 became the first (and in reality, probably the only) driver to win the championship in his own car. Denny Hulme won a title for the team the following year and Nelson Piquet also won a couple of titles for a Bernie Ecclestone-run Brabham in the 1980s, but the budget eventually ran out and the team folded during the 1992 season. Since then, the Brabham name has been threatening to return – both to F1 and as an apparently stillborn, crowd-funded LMP2 project – but nothing has come of them. Until now.
Brabham Automotive has revealed the BT62, a super-expensive, slick-shod track car with a proper old-school, naturally-aspirated 5.4-litre V8 with 700bhp. The man behind the project is none other than David Brabham, son of Jack and himself an F1 driver – first with Brabham itself, then with Simtek – as well as a Le Mans 24 Hours winner.
Just 70 cars will be built to celebrate the 70th anniversary of when Jack began his racing career back in Australia. Of those 70, the first 35 will feature a special livery to commemorate each of Brabham’s 35 grand prix victories. This first one is decked out in the classic green and gold colours of the BT19, which Brabham used to win the 1966 French GP. We can’t wait to see what some of the Martini-liveried cars from the 1970s look like…
In addition to a high-performance track weapon, each of the 70 owners will also become part of a driver development programme where they’ll get to learn how to drive it properly.
It looks great and should surely have some serious performance, but Brabham is a racing name and as things stand, there’s nowhere for the BT62 to race. Maybe that’s a job for the BT63, should such a thing ever exist in the future. In the meantime, a one-on-one against Emerson Fittipaldi’s supercar might be a good start…
