Jack Brabham’s first car to be auctioned

Auction house RM Sotheby’s is auctioning a unique car: this is the Cooper-Bristol T40 in which Jack Brabham, the future three-time world champion, started his first Formula 1 race.

But this is not the only peculiarity of the whole: it was the British company Cooper that was the first to produce rear-engined racing cars for the World Championship. In the case of the car with which Brabham took part in the British Grand Prix in 1955, it was a 2-litre 6-cylinder Bristol engine.

Unfortunately, the efforts of the Cooper Car Company team and Brabham at that time were unsuccessful: the Australian debutant only showed the 25th fastest time in qualifying, losing about 27 seconds to the pole holder (Stirling Moss) at the Aintree circuit, and in the race he retired from the race due to engine overheating.

The 1955 British Grand Prix was the only Formula One race in which Jack Brabham started in this car, but he subsequently competed in more than one non-World Championship race.

When he returned to his native Australia in 1955 with this T40, he won the Grand Prix in the so-called Formula Libre, held on the circuit in the town of Port Wakefield in the south of the continent.

To finance his return to Europe, where his successful Formula One career eventually began, Brabham sold the car in 1956, which passed through many owners over the decades, undergoing several restorations and ending up back in Britain in a private collection in the 1990s.

The car is in working order and has been at the start of historic vehicle races in Spa, Monaco and Goodwood on more than one occasion. Recently it underwent a new restoration, which was carried out by the specialized French company Intermat Developpement: the engine and the braking system were completely repaired and restored. The T40 comes with an official FIA historical technical data sheet, valid until summer 2025.

The starting price of the rarity is 350 thousand euros.