International news

Brabham back on track
Legendary team to return… in sports car racing | By Gary Watkins

Ambitious plans to relaunch Brabham have been unveiled by David Brabham, youngest son of three-time world champion and team founder Sir Jack Brabham.

Project Brabham has been launched with the aspiration of putting an LMP2 car on the grid of the World Endurance Championship in 2015, 23 seasons after the demise of the Brabham Formula 1 team. Former Le Mans 24 Hours winner Brabham, 49, has a four-year plan to become an LMP1 constructor and hasn’t ruled out an eventual return to F1.

Brabham is aiming to secure the funds to realise his ambitions with a mixture of crowd-funding, conventional investment, commercial sponsorship and sponsored drivers for the pro-am P2 class. Eighty percent of the first funding target of £250,000, which will be used to sustain the search for investment, had been hit through public subscription within four weeks of the launch.

He explained that he was looking for a first-year investment of approximately £8 million to set up and run the team for a full season and to put in place a marketing structure and digital platforms.

“That’s a big initial outlay,” he said, “but if we look at the numbers we have been getting already and the partners we are talking to, this has the potential.”

Brabham revealed that he had been motivated to pursue the crowd-funding route by a desire to do things differently.

“We are going racing with an open platform to give fans the opportunity to engage in what we do,” he said. “There is such an amazing learning environment within a race team and we want to share that with people who want to extend their learning experiences.”

The plan is to field a solo entry in next year’s WEC, although Brabham is not committing to being ready for the start of the season at Silverstone in April. No decision has been made on which chassis/engine combination the team would race.

“The aim is to be out there next year, the earlier the better,” he said. “We want to make sure that we put down firm foundations. This is a long-term programme and I don’t want to rush into it and go off half-cocked, and then not be able to recover.”

Brabham, who has competed at Le Mans on 18 occasions, said that sports car racing and the WEC were a natural fit for his nascent team.

“We are putting together a global platform,” he said. “Racing in a world championship is important and LMP2 allows us the opportunity to go out and buy a car and get all the systems up and running over a period of two or three years.”

Brabham has yet to reveal whether he would continue his driving career with the team, though he said his priority would be “wearing the team principal’s hat”.

The venture follows a long battle to secure the Brabham trademarks, which took seven years between 2005 and 2012. A German organisation, which lodged an unsuccessful F1 entry for the 2010 season, had registered the Brabham and Brabham Racing names.

British F3 set for axe

The British Formula 3 Championship looks certain to come to an end after a continuous history of more than 60 years.

The series is almost certain to be cancelled after attracting grids as small as five cars during this year’s seven-date championship.

Plans to combine with the German F3 series, to create a feeder to the European championship, were vetoed by the FIA. A proposal for teams from each to commit to racing in both series was rejected by the Germans.

Series promoter Stéphane Ratel said: “It is not looking good. When you get only five cars, no one has any confidence in the series and it becomes very difficult to revive.”

British F3 started as a 500cc formula in 1951, adopted Formula Junior regulations for 1959 and then the first F3 rulebook in 1964. A single British F3 series dates back to 1979, when the two national championships were merged.

WEC heads for the ’Ring

The Nürburgring will host a long-distance world championship race next season for the first time since 1991.

The World Endurance Championship will visit the German track on August 30. The fixture replaces Interlagos on an otherwise unchanged schedule, because the Brazilian venue was unavailable at that time due to the planned construction of a new pit complex.

WEC boss Gérard Neveu wanted to reduce the three-month gap between the Le Mans 24 Hours and the second leg of the championship, at the same time as coming under pressure from Porsche and Audi to have a race in Germany.

The Nürburgring was on the first world sports car series calendar in 1953 and was a fixture on the schedule, with the exception of ’85, from ’56 to ’91.

Plans for the WEC to run to a winter calendar climaxing with the Le Mans 24 Hours in June have been shelved until 2017 at the earliest.

Chrysler drops out of GTs

Dodge will not return to the Le Mans 24 Hours next year after Chrysler pulled the plug on its GT racing programme.

Less than 48 hours after it secured the United SportsCar Championship GT Le Mans crown with Kuno Wittmer, Chrysler announced that it was ending its campaign with the Viper SRT GTS-R after two and a half seasons.

The latest racing Viper, developed by Riley Technologies in America, first appeared during the 2012 American Le Mans Series and made what turned out to be a one-off appearance at the Le Mans 24 Hours the following season. This year’s Le Mans campaign was axed in March, on financial grounds.

In brief

BMW has taken the lid off plans to replace its existing Z4 GT3 racer with a twin-turbo M6. The new car will begin testing early in 2015 and the first customer cars will be delivered in time for the 2016 season.

Obituary
David Venables

Respected motor racing historian David Venables has died aged 82. An RAF reconnaissance pilot in WWII, he took up a legal career that led him to the post of Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court. But alongside that Venables employed his huge racing knowledge to write many books, of which The Racing Fifteen-hundreds is an acknowledged prime source on voiturette racing. He also wrote racing histories of Alfa Romeo, Bugatti and Bentley. As well as contributing articles to many magazines, he was also long-time assistant editor of the VSCC Bulletin.