David Brabham on translating decades of iconic racing history into the Brabham brand

The Brabham name has been synonymous in world-class motorsport for over 60 years.

A fully-fledged racing dynasty, the history began with triple Formula 1 World Champion Sir Jack Brabham and continued with Jack son’s – Geoff and David – achieving their own global success while Jack’s grandsons – Matthew and Sam – have also embarked on their own racing careers.

With recent Brabham brand activity spanning everything from video games to apparel, we caught up with David Brabham to find out more about his approach to bringing the family legacy to life through licensing.

David, it’s a genuine pleasure to connect. Before we look at brand plans around Brabham, for anyone that doesn’t know the Brabham racing dynasty, can you fill us in?
It all really started with my father, Jack Brabham, who later became Sir Jack Brabham AO OBE because of his achievements.

After the war, he left the RAAF where he was a flight mechanic and started a machining shop. An American walked in and asked him for help building a Midget to go dirt racing with. He did that – but the American’s wife didn’t like the racing and convinced her husband to stop, so my Dad picked up the reins. That’s when he started to race himself.

He was very competitive and started winning championships quite quickly. He came over to the UK in 1955, predominantly to buy a car – but he stayed for 15 years. He brought the family over and ended up at Cooper, who were racing in Formula 1 at the time. At the beginning of his time there, he was building cars because he loved the engineering aspect just as much as the driving itself.

“Our goal is to align ourselves with companies and products that provoke a positive change to our environment.”

So this is where the brand’s association with innovation comes from?
Yes, he was big on forward thinking and looking at what would work in a year’s time that could beat the opposition. He put the engine at the back of the car and changed the gearbox for better reliability. It was probably the key to him winning two Formula 1 world championships in 1959 and 1960 with Cooper.

In 1961, he went to Indianapolis with a Formula 1 car with an engine in the back. Everyone was scratching their heads thinking what is this thing, but it ran really well and within a few years everybody had their engines in the back of the car. He helped change the culture around what Americans believed about where the engine should be.

Amazing; and this was all before he launched the Brabham racing team?
Yes, that came next. So in 1961, he thought Cooper wasn’t making the progress that he wanted and so he set up on his own. He teamed up with Ron Tauranac – who had been helping him in the background with the design of the Coopers – and they started Motor Racing Developments in 1962.

In 1964 they had their first Grand Prix win with Dan Gurney and in 1966, Dad picked up his third Formula 1 World Championship. He is still the only driver to have won a World Championship with a car of his own construction.

What a feather in the cap!
Yes, it’ll most likely never happen again. They won the Championship again in 1967 and for that two-year period they completely dominated Grand Prix racing and throughout that decade they were the biggest racing car manufacturer in the world. In 1970, Dad retired – he was 44.

And did the Brabham team continue following his retirement?
Yes, he sold to his partner Ron Tauranac, who sold to Bernie Ecclestone a year later, and the team continued through the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties. They won the World Championship again in 1981 and 1983 with Nelson Piquet. Bradham were the first to come up with refuelling, carbon brakes and were the first Formula 1 team to win in the Turbo era. Their last Grand Prix win was in 1985 at Paul Ricard, and their last race was in 1992.

Bernie Ecclestone was more interested in running Formula 1 than he was running his racing team, so he eventually sold it. It kind of went off the rails after that.

“Brabham is renowned for pioneering thinking – our strapline is ‘Inspiring futures through pioneering thinking’.”

In what way?
Well, I raced for Brabham in Formula 1 in 1990 – it was my Formula 1 debut – and unfortunately the team had no money and was in disarray. It only survived for two years after that and then the Brabham Formula 1 team stopped.

This is where the story of Brabham becoming a brand kicks in, but before we dive into that, it’s worth mentioning that alongside your father’s racing history, the rest of your family also have a rich history in motorsport.
Yes, my brother Geoff started racing in 1974 and he spent most of his time racing in America, winning multiple championships and winning Le Mans 24hrs in 1993.

I had a 35-year career as a professional in motor sport as well – my world was mainly sports car racing. I also won Le Mans in different categories, including overall in 2009. I did also race in Formula 1 for a couple of years in the early Nineties. My son races, Geoff’s son races – there’s now three generations that make up this racing family.

So, at what point in this story did you start thinking about the brand potential of Brabham?
When I was 40, I sat down and thought about what I’d be doing in 10 years. I started to look into how I could translate all this iconic history around the Brabham name into a brand. I would walk down the high street and see all these brands, but I’d walk through the pit lanes and see all these racing team names, and they weren’t ‘brands’.

I discovered somebody owned the Brabham name just before I started looking into getting some of the trademarks that Dad had let go. So, someone else had registered Brabham and Brabham Racing.

And that person wasn’t linked to the family in any way?
No, no link at all. We had no idea what they were doing until they launched a Brabham BT92, which was a pimped up BMW M5. For context, every Brabham that was ever built had ‘BT’ – Brabham Tauranac – and a number.

I couldn’t do anything with the Brabham name unless I owned it, so I spent seven years trying to get it back. I got it back and won the court case, so their trademarks got transferred into my name on Christmas Day 2012.

“We have model kits with a few companies including Tamiya, a few deals for die-cast cars, an agreement with Scalextric and some cars in the Forza video game franchise – plus a couple of other video games.”

The perfect Christmas present…
Yes, but at that point I had no money because that had all gone to the solicitors, so we had to start over again. I looked at the Virgin model – Virgin is the brand, it’s used as an accelerator to market for the different businesses underneath it. I wanted to do that with Brabham.

My approach was that if we wanted to do something with the brand, I had to have an understanding of what the Brabham brand is, so I had branding expert David Mitchell from dna-rB work with me to put together a brand bible. He pieced together what the Brabham brand meant to people and that was really useful as it gave us a template to be consistent moving forward.

What was the first thing you did with Brabham as a brand?
We did a brand licensing agreement with a private equity company in Adelaide where we created Brabham Automotive and the Brabham BT62, and recently the BT63 GT2 car. It was great to get that up and running,

Outside of that, our goal is to align ourselves with companies and products that provoke a positive change to our environment, like mobility. In my racing career, I was part of Energy Efficient Motorsports shouting about how we need to be more efficient. We wanted to be a leader of change rather than a victim of change, but no-one was really listening 20 years ago. Now, people are talking about this subject very differently and we want to get involved in that space with our brand.

I imagine that alignment with sustainability links nicely to the brand’s history with innovation and smart design.
Absolutely. Brabham is renowned for pioneering thinking – our strapline is ‘Inspiring futures through pioneering thinking’. The brand world is complex and challenging, with a lot out there, so it’s about how we make ourselves noticed. We use the brand as an accelerator to market, which has over 70 years of motorsport success, innovation and is well respected. We back that up with support from our experienced team to help businesses reach their goals.

From a creative standpoint, what sort of assets are there for potential licensees to play around with?
We’ve been looking at this for a while and we’re starting a merchandising range based around three different eras of Formula 1; the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties. We’ve picked three iconic Brabham F1 cars from those eras. For the sixties, we have the green and gold Brabham BT19, and there’s assets and colours based around that.

In 1978, Brabham came out with a fan car called the Brabham BT46B – it had a fan on the back which sucked the car to the ground. It only did one race, which it won. It was innovative, but it was too fast for the opposition and was going to kill the whole Championship. They say it got banned, but it didn’t – Bernie Ecclestone pulled it due to, let’s say, political manoeuvring. So that that Seventies theme has the reds and the blues.

The last theme is the Eighties one – the white and blue Brabham BT52, which won the 1983 Formula 1 World Championship.

So there’s three iconic cars, three iconic colour themes and three iconic periods for Formula 1. We’re just about to launch a merchandise range around these iconic themes.

We also have model kits with a few companies including Tamiya, a few deals for die-cast cars, an agreement with Scalextric and some cars in the Forza video game franchise – plus a couple of other video games.

It must be quite a thrill seeing your family history come alive in video games.
Yes! The age demographic for Brabham was getting older and older and older, so it’s been a fantastic way to engage the younger generation in the brand. We have the BT62 in there and lots of the historic cars, so that’s helped boost awareness for the brand.

I would imagine partners could also create some striking products using original sketches or drawings from those periods. Do you have access to that kind of archive material too?
With regards to design sketches from that period, no-one really knows where a lot of that stuff is. I think Bernie has some of it stashed away. I was given a box of original car sketches from the Sixties though, so we have those.

Great. Before I let you go, for anyone interested in chatting about potential brand collaborations, how can people reach out? And who else is on the team?
Yes, we are always happy to discuss potential projects and merchandising opportunities. People can reach us through the Brabham website at www.brabham.co.uk.

Brill – thanks again David. Speak soon.