Brabham BT19

The Brabham BT19 is a Formula One racing car designed by Ron Tauranac. It was used by Australian driver JackBrabham to win his third World Championship in 1966. Only one example of the BT19 design was built, and it never raced in its original form. The car was bought by Repco in 2004 and put on display in the National Sports Museum in Melbourne, Australia.

About Brabham BT19 in brief

Summary Brabham BT19The Brabham BT19 is a Formula One racing car designed by Ron Tauranac. It was used by Australian driver JackBrabham to win his third World Championship in 1966. Only one example of the BT19 design was built, and it never raced in its original form. The car was bought by Repco in 2004 and put on display in the National Sports Museum in Melbourne, Australia, in 2008. The BT19 competed in the 1966 and 1967 Formula One World Championships and was the first car bearing its driver’s name to win a World Championship race. Car was initially conceived in 1965 for a 1. 5-litre Coventry Climax engine, but never raced. For the 1966 Formula One season the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile doubled the limit on engine capacity to 3 litres. Australian company Repco developed a new V8 engine for Brab Ham’s use in 1966, but a disagreement between BrabHam and TaurAnac over the latter’s role in the racing team left no time to develop a new car to handle it. Instead, the existing BT19 chassis was modified for the job. The design of a spaceframe was considered a conservative decision; most competitors were using the theoretically lighter and stiffer monocoque design of the Lotus 39. The BRO cars were designed and built by Motor Racing Developments Ltd (MRD) which was jointly owned by Taur anac and Jack Brabam and built cars for customers in several racing series. MRD was the largest manufacturer of single-seater racing cars in the world at the time of the 1966 World Championship.

The company’s reputation in BRO’s part of the world rested on the reputation of its cars, which were not usefully stiffer than a well-designed spaceframe and were harder to repair and repair and harder to maintain. BRO was a separate company wholly owned by Jack Br abham and had little connection with the race team between 1962 and 1965. It bought its cars from MRD but T Mauranac had little interest in this arrangement, reasoning that \”it was just a matter of a lot of effort for no real interest because I didn’t get to go racing very much\” and might as well get on with his main line business, which was selling production cars. The Brabhams were built to use the new FWMW flat-16 engine from Coventry climax. The FWMW engine proved powerful enough to propel Jim Clark’s Lotus 33 to seven wins and the drivers’ championship in 1965. For 1966, the engine capacity limit in Formula One was doubled from 1.5-litres to 3- litres. The engine would produce less power than Ferrari’s, but would be lighter, easier to fix and more fuel efficient. The new 3- Litre engines under development by competing team Ferrari had 12 cylinders. Repco delivered the first examples of the new engine to the team’s headquarters in late 1965, just weeks before the first Formula One race to the non-championship South African Grand Prix on 1 January 1966.