Matt Bishop: 'Tony Brise was set to be F1's next superstar before tragic plane crash'

Brise’s path to F1 had not been smoothed by wealth or a famous name. He was born in 1952 in Erith, then a working-class town south-east of London, to a family that ran a poultry business, and his route into racing was therefore neither gilded nor assured. But talent has a way of cutting through circumstance. He shone in the Formula Ford of the early 1970s – that hard and egalitarian battleground in which the best rose not through political connections, engineering sorcery, or even parental wealth, but via the unarguable logic of fast lap times. In 1973 he moved up to Formula 3, where he continued to impress with a blend of raw speed and technical acuity, and he duly won two of the three British F3 championships that year.

His impressive progress in Formula Atlantic in 1974 confirmed what paddock cognoscenti everywhere were now beginning to whisper: that the curly-haired young man with the quick smile and quicker hands was the real deal. The following year, 1975, he dominated Formula Atlantic, winning eight races, and he did so with a poise and an authority that belied his age.

Such performances do not usually go unnoticed, and they did not. When Frank Williams — passionate patron, enthusiastic talent-spotter, and a man never slow to back his instinct — needed a one-off replacement for Jacques Laffite for the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix (because that weekend Laffite would be racing in, and indeed winning, a Formula 2 race at Nürburgring), he handed Brise his F1 debut. It was a baptism of fire. The race was chaotic, infamous for Rolf Stommelen’s crash in an Embassy-Hill that killed four bystanders and triggered an early red flag. But Brise drove competently, he stayed out of trouble, and he finished seventh. Laffite was back in the Williams for the next grand prix, Monaco, but Brise had taken his chance well.

Moreover, Graham Hill had been watching, not racing, nursing an injury sustained in practice for the previous grand prix, at Kyalami; and Hill had liked what he had seen. A month later, at Zolder, he put Brise in one of his cars.

Now, it must be said that the 1975 Embassy-Hill GH1 was not, by any charitable assessment, a competitive F1 car. It was essentially a reworked Lola, aerodynamically outclassed, twitchy under braking, and no match for the leading designs of the era. Brise knew it. Hill certainly knew it. But F1 prodigy often reveals itself most powerfully in the margins, when the machine is mediocre but the man transcends that mediocrity. And so it proved at Zolder in 1975, for Brise qualified a sensational seventh, 15 places and 3.35sec ahead of his Embassy-Hill team-mate François Migault, and he ran as high as sixth before a spin then a broken piston halted his charge.

Two weeks later, at Anderstorp, he qualified 17th, nine places and 1.72sec ahead of his new Embassy-Hill team-mate Vern Schuppan, and he raced brilliantly to sixth, scoring his first F1 world championship point in only his third grand prix. A further fortnight on came the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, where he qualified seventh, 10 places and 1.07sec ahead of yet another new Embassy-Hill team-mate, Alan Jones, and he finished where he had qualified: seventh. And at Paul Ricard, two weeks after that, he qualified 12th, six places and 1.81sec ahead of Jones, and he finished seventh again.

Not surprisingly, senior insiders were taking note. Discreet questions were being asked in paddock motorhomes. Important men, a few of whom would later guide F1 world champions to their crowns, were murmuring that Brise “had it” — the ‘it’ being that indefinable quality that distinguishes the good from those who might become great. The owners of a couple of the bigger teams were said to be eyeing him carefully. Retired F1 mechanics still speak of him fondly when the subject arises, usually unprompted, often with that wistful smile that belongs uniquely to memories of youth and what might have been. They recall the ease with which he slotted himself into the Embassy-Hill team, his light touch with banter, his ability to lift morale, and his seriousness when it was time for helmets to be donned.

“It was obvious that Tony was a bit special. He would have been a superstar.”

Perhaps that is the hardest part to reconcile, half a century on: the sense that Embassy-Hill in late 1975 was teetering on the cusp of something seriously good. Hill’s hard work and charisma were attracting fresh sponsorship interest; Smallman’s GH2 car, which the team had been testing at Ricard that ill-fated day, looked poised to bring them closer to the vicinity of genuine competitiveness; and Brise was brilliant.

Had fate drawn a different line in the fog above Arkley Golf Course — had the plane flown a few feet higher, had the fog cleared, or had Hill opted for a diversion — then perhaps Brise would have become the next great British driver of the late 1970s. Perhaps he would have found his way into a bigger and better F1 team. Perhaps he would have challenged James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Mario Andretti, Jody Scheckter, and — yes — Alan Jones, whom he had serially vanquished in the same car in 1975 and who became F1 world champion for Williams in 1980. Perhaps he would have pushed Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, and Nigel Mansell to even greater heights, for he was only a year older than our Nige. Such conjecture is, of course, the playground of sentiment, but it is not sentiment alone that fuels it. It is the testimony of those who saw him race, of those who worked with him, and of those who knew that he was, without doubt, going to make it. An all-time great who raced him, Andretti, later said, “Jeez, that guy Brise, he was something special.” And the man who gave him his F1 break, Williams, used the same word — ‘special’ — when he said, “It was obvious that Tony was a bit special. He was ahead of the game, never flustered, and very talented. He would have been a superstar.”

It is a mark of the peculiar cruelty of motor sport that its tragedies so often befall those on the threshold of their brightest chapters. But it is also a mark of its peculiar beauty that those same figures, although only briefly with us, leave something behind: a trace, a taste, and a hint of what might have been. Brise left that. So on this, the week of his tragedy’s 50th anniversary, it feels not only appropriate but also necessary to remember both Hill and Brise not as victims of aviation misfortune but as men whose lives – vivid, ambitious, competitive, and glorious – contributed richly to the sport we love.

Finally, as is the case with all anniversaries, the mind turns to the arithmetic of time. Fifty years. Half a century. Tony Brise was 23 when the darkness swallowed him. Today he would be only 73 – old enough to have become a sage of the F1 paddock, but young enough still to be found chatting merrily in F1 hospitality units, telling stories about those harum-scarum days when he was bold and quick. We can picture him, eyes bright, laughter easy, a man who lived, raced, won, and survived. But that picture can only ever be a vision – or a spectre – for the fog rolled in, the night conspired otherwise, and all that remains is the painful memory of what was lost, and the soft, persistent whisper of what might have been, echoing, like a fading Cosworth engine note, into the dusk of an F1 world that has kept turning long after he was gone.