60 Years on: Brabham Racing Organisation take first F1 win

60 Years ago to the day on June 28, the Jack Brabham led Brabham Racing Organisation broke through for its first win at the French Grand Prix in 1964, with American racer Dan Gurney behind the wheel.

The team’s first F1 win came after Brabham left the Cooper organisation in 1962, which at the time he thought was falling behind developmentally to Lotus and Ferrari.  

Dan Gurney took the Brabham Racing Organisation’s first team victory at the French Grand Prix, June 28, 1964. Image: LAT

That led him to starting his own team using machines built by Motor Racing Developments (an organisation set up by Brabham himself alongside Ron Tauranac in 1961) and ran the team out of Chessington in the UK.

Brabham himself won a non-championship race for the team at the Solitude Grand Prix near Stuttgart in 1963 in a Brabham BT3, but its breakthrough in a world championship race wouldn’t until 1964 at the Rouen-Les-Essarts circuit in Rouen, France.

On the 28th of July in 1963, Brabham (seen leading) took his first win (non-championsip) with his own team at the Solitude Grand Prix in Germany. Image: LAT

Although its first win would come courtesy of Jim Clark’s leading Lotus dropping a cylinder, Gurney had put the car on the front row for the race after he’d previously taken poles at the both Zandvoort and Spa-Francorchamps in the rounds prior. He crossed the line in the BT7 ahead of Graham Hill, with Brabham himself taking third (his third podium for his own team).

In the same season, Gurney then went on to win the teams second race in Mexico, a race which saw one of the most dramatic finishes to a season in F1 history, with three drivers, Graham Hill, John Surtees, and Jim Clark, all having a chance at winning the title.

As it happened, that win also came courtesy of Clark Lotus having an oil line failure on the penultimate lap which also lost him the championship to Surtees who finished in second courtesy of Italian Ferrari driver Lorenzo Bandini slowing down from second place to allow Surtees to pass him, which denied Hill the championship as a result.

Brabham himself wouldn’t win a race in his own machine until the fabled 1966 season, when he not only took his first win (also at the French Grand Prix on the highways around Reims) in a BT19 (his “Old Nail”), but went on to be the first driver to win a championship in a car that bared the drivers own name.

Brabham sips Champagne on the top-step to celebrate his first F1 win in his own car at the French Grand Prix, 1966. Image: LAT

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