When I think back to GP design milestones, it’s pretty obvious, really: the first rear-engined F1 Cooper. Not so much from a technical point of view even though it was after my own heart from that aspect because it was so simple and so effective compared to the other more complex cars of the time but because it brought with it probably the single most significant change in grand prix cars. Nobody went on building front-engined cars much after that. There was that Aston Martin and the Scarab; I suppose the last was the Ferguson P99 4WD with its weird offset drive-line like the Lotus 16.

Who else can lay claim to such an impact? And I’m including pre-war cars like Auto Unions because they were such bad examples of rear-engined cars. They were done so badly and in such a complicated way that they threw away the advantages. They had the fuel right in the tail, the mass change on the axle must have been horrendous from full to empty and they had lots of fuel in those days the weight distribution wasn’t wonderful; all sorts of things. They just did it badly, like people did aerodynamics and four-wheel-drive badly at first. The real pioneers were Charles and John Cooper, first with the 500 F3 cars, and then having the bottle as a small concern to go ahead and do a grand prix car.

I nearly picked the Lotus 25 because Chapman was my hero as a kid and it was a huge step forward the monocoque, the low frontal area and the reclining driving position, which I cribbed much later. Drivers had got more and more upright again as they fitted more fuel in behind them, and with high wings it was all just too easy. When I did the lay-down Brabham I thought “hold on a minute, this isn’t new, Chapman did this”. People can drive with their lower spine at 35 degrees to the horizontal, cranking the head and shoulders up. Then when I did the very low ’88 McLaren, the MP4/4 that won all the races, I used the same driving position. There’s no embarrassment in this business in thinking “that’s good, I’ll use that”. Sometimes you have to.

Really, the Cooper was more significant, more forward-looking even than the Lotus 25 because it meant a fundamental change in packaging, weight distribution, frontal area, in philosophy. And it was an ultra-simple car as well, easy to run, easy to work on. I always tried to build my GP cars, both at Brabham and McLaren, to be as simple and easy to work on as possible, and therefore get reliability, and the Cooper was such a good car from that angle. And that Climax was a very under-rated engine because it was built by a very small company. So the whole package was pretty radical. John probably hasn’t had the credit he should have overall.

All sorts of things appeal to me about it: firstly that it was a great little family business, two bright guys; and then the giant-killing aspect. It was the same at Brabham; we had a tiny budget relative to McLaren or Ferrari, and we won not just races but championships too. I just loved that aspect. And these guys did two tides back-to-back. From a nostalgic point of view it’s one of the racing cars that sticks in my mind from the period when I began to follow Grand Prix racing my first GP was 1959, East London in South Africa.