After being parked for more than 20 years, Brabham will return to top flight motor racing in a bold new team guise.
Announced from the United Kingdom today, David Brabham, the youngest son of triple world champion Sir Jack Brabham, is determined for the Brabham name to return as a winning constructor.
At first targetting WEC and LMP2 before stepping out to the outright prototype class, LMP1 in four years, Brabham has a return to grand prix racing firmly in its sights.
The bold, innovative and fresh new venture is a result of eight years of toil by Brabham, a former grand prix driver and highly decorated sports car racer with the outright win at the 2009 Le Mans 24 Hour as a career pinnacle.
Speedcafe editor-in-chief Gordon Lomas tackled Brabham about the project which has energised the global motor racing community.
SPEEDCAFE: When did the idea first come about?
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DAVID BRABHAM: You’ve got to go back to when I first thought of an idea … what can I do with the name Brabham?
That goes back to 2006. I wasn’t sure at that time what it would be. But I was sure with the history and the heritage the name has there was something we can do.
The journey since has taken us down many roads. One getting the name back so we could do something with it which obviously took about seven years.
We came up with two or three different ideas until we came up with this one which we’ve been working on for about a year now.
The last four or five months, it has just really started to ramp up where everything has started to slot into place.
We started talking to potential partners who would like to be involved and that started going well.
It’s the right time for this type of model. Certainly for us at Brabham because we’ve always wanted to get back and become a race team with the name Brabham.
But I have to admit that being in the industry for 31 years seeing how tough it is for race teams to survive, I thought now I’ve got responsibility of the name Brabham, do I want to go down that route like everybody else?
The answer to that was no. I needed a more sustainable model.
One that made sense. One that is current in the world thinking of what people want and desire in terms of information and how they want it.
I’ve got a good team of people around me that collectively we’ve come up with this concept and idea.
SPEEDCAFE: How long will the crowd-funding effort be in place for and is there a target amount of money?
BRABHAM: 40 days. This is asking people to become part of the journey.
The campaign is to launch the name as a world class racing team.
Crowd-funding is there to help kick start it where everyone can become part of the team.
It’s to rebuild the house that Jack built and it’s a step-by-step process.
We haven’t got the funds to go forward. Part of the campaign of attracting money is through crowd-funding and it gives us great opportunity and a platform from a crowd of people straight away.
If we can build a community first then going up and getting investment and sponsorship all of a sudden becomes a lot easier.
So we are kind of doing it in reverse to how you would normally do it.
Our first target is 250,000 pounds. If we were to reach that it gets us through the next stage, building a community and putting a prospectus together and going out and finding investment.
The people who have come in early and become a part of it – we are going to be developing these online portals for people to be able to look and see what we are doing.
We will show people every step of the way how we are building it.
SPEEDCAFE: Is the project reliant on the revenue generated initially with the crowd-funding?
BRABHAM: Well it all depends on how much you receive in crowd-funding.
When you start looking at crowd-funding projects around the world for all different things a lot of people end up getting a lot more than what they are asking for because they love the idea and they want to get involved.
What we are doing with our crowd-funding campaign is not just a sense of; ‘okay you’ve helped us here is a t-shirt’.
You are buying in advance the gateway of information that we are going to provide through the race team that you can be involved in.
So whether you are a fan, driver or engineer, they are the type of market we are tapping into.
And this is not just any team. It is one of the famous and respected names in the sport.
SPEEDCAFE: So I take it the end-game is F1. How realistic is that?
BRABHAM: F1 is a dream. We’ve all got to have dreams and start working towards them.
This is a step-by-step process. The goal at the moment is to win the World Endurance Championship and Le Mans.
If we were to achieve that, it would be something pretty special.
It would be another great cap to wear for the Brabham heritage.
As this starts to develop and we see how successful this is, F1 starts to become a bit closer.
SPEEDCAFE: Are you at a point yet where you know where you will be based. Have you got a location for a team headquarters sorted?
BRABHAM: Where I live in England now, we are in the motorsport valley.
There is a reason why I moved to this location because this is the area I need to be in.
But the exact location, no, we haven’t decided that. It will be part of the journey.
SPEEDCAFE: Is this project also a way of helping Sam (David’s son) and Matthew’s (nephew) career progress?
BRABHAM: Obviously they are Brabham brand ambassadors and as this project gains a lot of momentum and exposure those two will benefit from that exposure as well.
Whether they become drivers at the team in the future, who knows.
It would obviously be from a family point of view a nice thing. Does it work for the team? That’s a different deal.
SPEEDCAFE: As a constructor, could you in this day and age engineer and build everything in-house as it was back in the 1960’s when the Brabham team was originally established?
BRABHAM: Things have moved on since those days. We will have a team of engineers but we will also be asking the global engineers out there that we are interested in design.
We have got some collaborative software that we are going to be using in the future where people can tap in and help design the first Brabham LMP1 car.
When you start working on a program like that, you’ve got to be working nearly two years in advance to make sure that when you get the car up and running its done properly.
When we get into manufacturing a race car its going to be done properly.
Long term planning and then start building it from there.
SPEEDCAFE: It was mentioned before that the timing is right for this project. Without getting ahead of anything, there are several F1 team on shaky ground, does that mean the project has really come at an opportune time?
BRABHAM: I think so. Yeah definitely. If this is a successful model, which I believe it will be, it creates a lot of opportunities.
This has been the amazing thing of what we’ve come up with because if you go down the same route like everybody else, and I’m not saying its wrong, what I am saying is it gives you quite a lot of restrictions of what you can do.
We are just going racing a different way and we are going to win a different way.
SPEEDCAFE: Down the track, would it be realistic to run a Le Mans Prototype program and an F1 program together or would you finish one and start another?
BRABHAM: Well I can’t answer that one. Until we get closer to that point only then will we really know.
It is part of the journey. You start off in life and you don’t know what direction you are going to go.
But life always provides a path somewhere and this journey is about many paths lying ahead of us.
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