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RETRO: Ron Tauranac on Brabham, Chapman

Friday, 30 December 2016


Mark Glendenning / Images by LAT
Ron Tauranac penned a lot of race cars, although he's perhaps best-known for his association with Brabham. He designed all of the Brabham F1 cars from the team's inception in 1962 through to its sale to Bernie Ecclestone in 1972, winning two world championships with Jack Brabham along the way.
He was also responsible for Brabham's vast fleet of Formula 2 cars in the 1960s, its BT12 IndyCar (which was later used as the platform for the Brawner Hawk that took Mario Andretti to the 1965 USAC title), and its occasional forays into sportscars.
Away from Brabham, the Australian founded Ralt, which became one of the world's biggest manufacturer of open-wheelers during the 1970s and 1980s, and later moved into consulting roles for clients as varied as Honda, Arrows, and V8 Supercar team Dick Johnson Racing.
Tauranac's cars were the antithesis of the Lotuses designed by compatriot Colin Chapman. Where Chapman prioritized performance and innovation – sometimes at the risk of fragility - Tauranac's Brabhams and Ralts were intentionally conservative, simple and reliable.
In this interview from 2003, Tauranac shared his thoughts on the evolution of race car design, the importance of keeping secrets – and what he really thought of Chapman.
Q: Like a lot of people, you started out as a driver ...
RON TAURANAC: Well, I had to build my own car to be able to drive. I had no money, it was just after the war in about '49, and we were driving out – Sunday afternoon drives used to be the fashion then - and I heard this noise, so I stopped and looked, and there were cars rushing up and down the airstrip. And I thought, 'well, I wouldn't mind doing that'.
Then I managed to run into a chap by the name of Bill Heathrow, and he had a little motorbike workshop down near Central Station [in Sydney]. He told me about the 500cc Car Club, so I went and got some Autosport magazines and read about that, and went to Mitchell Library in my lunch hours and read all I could, and ... built a car. There wasn't very much about the car technically, it was hopeless.
Q: I read that it had no shocks the first time you drove it.
RT: I had no shocks, no money ... What I did was stiffen the springs up, and then the next time up at Hawkesbury the wheel rolled under, because there was nothing to limit the travel on the swing-out axles. The eye of the spring broke, the wheel went under and it flipped me again and I landed on top of the barbed wire fence.
I then eventually found some money for some dampers, and realised that you had to limit the travel on the swinging halves, and then started designing a better geometry for the swinging halves. Instead of having the short swinging halves, I made a triangulation that crossed over, so that the half axle was in fact three-quarters of the width of the track – which Mercedes did a year later on their sportscar. They didn't see my design, of course, but it came out on that car a year later.
Q: When you started working, it seems that you had a lot of different jobs from which you gained skills that inadvertently came in very handy later on.
RT: Yes, that's right. I did a number of jobs, but the leading one was working for CSR Chemicals. I was in designing – we all designed the factory – and it was jig and tool design where I was more of a specialist. They picked out of 50 draftsmen four of us to supervise the subcontracting of all the stuff. And as it happened, I chose rather than supervising all the welding, to do the casting side of it. So I got involved in castings and pattern making, and then I took the lead in mounted runners and risers on the board, so I knew all about that side of it.
So it was a bit of everything. CSR didn't worry about qualifications. If you could do the job, you got it, so you went from one thing to another. Then it was all finished, and I was Shift Supervisor, and I didn't like the shift work so I left and got into designing nuts and bolts and screws and all that sort of stuff.
When I was at CSR, there was a company called Quality Castings that we subcontracted most of the stainless steel casting to. So they offered me a job as works manager. I went there and met Jack [Brabham] by chance, and used to subcontract work for him, which is how we built up the relationship. He had a little one-man machine shop. We got talking, got friendly, and then I helped do design work on his car and he did machining for mine.
Q: Did you have any reservations about making the move to the U.K. when Jack asked you to move over there and join him?
RT: That was a big jump. I had a big job, I was works manager, and I had a wife and a four-year-old kid. He went to England, and after a few years he went to Cooper and became their works driver. When they were switching from the leaf-spring to the double wishbones he wrote me a letter and asked me what the proportions should be. He fed the proportions in to Owen Maddocks, who was there – he was more of a draftsman than a designer – without Charlie Cooper knowing anything about it. So that's how a lot of the development work happened on that.
And he [Brabham] used to come back for the Tasman Series every Christmas and we'd see each other. Then when he was back in 1960, he offered me a return air ticket to go over and see if I liked it for six months. I swapped the return air ticket for one air ticket for me one-way, because I had to go via L.A. to look at a race at Riverside. I helped run his Cooper there in the sportscar race. And my wife and kid got on the boat and went over. In 1960, that was a hell of a step. I don't know why I didn't think about it more [laughs].

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part 2 Ron Tauranac

The first Ralt, the RT1, saw action in Formula 2, Formula 3 and Formula Atlantic between 1975 and 1978. Here, Nelson Piquet puts an F3 version through its paces in 1978.

Q: It's probably just as well that you didn't, or you might not have gone through with it.
RT: That's right, yeah. Well, right through life things have happened like that. Like when I sold Brabham, Colin Chapman got on to me and offered me a job there. I accepted, and he came down in his plane and flew the family up to find a school and a house for the kids, and all that was done. Then on the Monday morning, after we'd spent the weekend up there, he rang up and said, 'can we put it on hold for a little while?' He had to sort something out with his staff, because I think the chap there that had come from BRM wanted the job of top designer.

So I just said to Colin, 'well if you can have second thoughts, I can'. And he thought that was a 'no', so we did nothing more until he asked if I could come and race engineer one of his cars at Mosport in Canada, which I did. And then by chance, Larry Perkins drove up with a car and a trailer in my driveway and asked if I'd have a look at it and see if I could recommend some improvements.
I wandered around it and said, 'well, I think it would be easier to start again', and he said, 'well, let's do that!' My wife wanted to get me out of the house, because I'd always worked seven days and five nights and now I was home most of the time, except for a bit of consulting work. She saw a factory advertised and that was the start of Ralt, so all of these things are a little bit by luck.
Q: So there is no regret that things didn't work out with Chapman?
RT: No. Who knows, you never know what the other side of it would have been. But I think it was far better to do my own thing and do Ralt, because that became bigger than Brabham, really. I think at Brabham we made about 550 customer cars, and then at Ralt, over 1000. I think the total of the two was up around 1650.
Q: Is there a common philosophy across your cars?
RT: There are a few things, yeah. Particularly after the first Ralts, I realised that control of the tire contact patch was very important. Even if you really didn't know where you ought to make it move, it had to be rigidly attached to the car, and be very consistent with its movement.
So that made it consistent in handling, and gradually I realised that it was important that, because of the varied caliber of mechanics, that you needed to make the car consistent in its set-up. So if you altered, say, the camber, it didn't want to alter the toe-in. And if you altered either one of those, say on the rear suspension, you didn't want to alter the corner weights.
Corner weights weren't that important back in the Brabham days. It was only when the cars got much stiffer and the ground effects came in that it became very important. So that's when, in the Ralts, when you designed it you realised you didn't want to screw up the corner weights. Everything was independent adjustment.
The other thing in the earlier days was where you put the roll centre and the roll centre movement. It needed not to jump around and not to move laterally across the car unless you particularly wanted it to do it. And in doing that, I tried to make the car so that if you liken the handling of a car to a globe, you could be anywhere around the top and it was still going to work alright. Whereas if you made it like an ice-cream cone, you might get much better handling if you're on the peak, and if you fell off the edge because of someone not setting it up right, it didn't handle. So that was my philosophy. Not to make the quickest possible car with Michael Schumacher driving it, but to make something that everyone could drive.
Q: Do you think your approach might have been different had you focused on designing and building F1 cars rather than customer cars? Would you have been less conservative?
RT: I don't know. The Formula 1 cars seemed to work alright, and there wasn't a problem there, and our Indianapolis car worked fine. That was always built in a big hurry – we didn't know we were going to do it until Christmas, whereas other people started the year before. So we had to rush over there with the car.
The first one I did for that, [Mario] Andretti drove. His mechanic ... I think the chap that had the Brabham, crashed it and it needed a repair. And Andretti's mechanic offered to repair it if they could make a copy. So they made two copies, and that became Andretti's car that he won [the] Indy [championship] in. And it went on from there.

senor honda

part 3 Ron Tauranac


Jack Brabham; 1969 Italian GP. Tauranac leans in from the left; on the far right, young team mechanic Ron Dennis.
Q: Your cars were often described as being 'solid and dependable'. I guess this would have been highlighted by the fact that some of the other things that were around, like Lotuses, were renowned for being neither of those things.

RT: Well I think the other difference is that Lotus and all those people employed designers. And the designer had to come up with something new each year, or they won't keep him. And I, if there was a new formula that came out, I sort of thought, 'well, if it lasts four or five years, where's it going to go?'
So for a production car, one tried to build the car that was going to be right in five years time, you backed off from that and built something that was just good enough to win. And then you keep doing updates. And that meant that cars, particularly like my Formula Atlantics, you could get one three or four years later, and you could still win.
The people that had the money would buy the new car to save doing the service. And the people that bought old cars, they were designed as such so that all you had to do was, I'd recommend, put all new rod ends on every year. Again, my rod ends were bigger than everyone else's, because I wasn't saving weight. On all the other cars, like Lotus, they would wear out, and when it got to the slop in it, you'd put another one in. But if it could get some slop in it, you couldn't control your wheel contact patch accurately.
So I'd put bigger ones in, they didn't wear, and at the end of the season the fatigue life would set in, maybe, and you'd throw the lot away and get a new lot. So there's a different sort of philosophy.
Q: While reading Mike Lawrence's book [Brabham, Ralt, Honda: The Ron Tauranac Story], I was struck by a remark from someone who once worked with you, who said, 'If Ron could reincarnate, he'd come back as Chapman'. How does that sit with you?
RT: [laughs] No way. See, Chapman had to sing his own praises, and have it done for him by journalists, whom he employed, because he had to get the publicity for his road cars and all the other things. I didn't want any publicity. I just wanted to build the car, and I didn't want anyone copying any ideas. So I never said, 'oh, that's new'.
I think Chapman came up with a couple of big innovations – they weren't new. Like, the monocoque had been around twenty years before. He brought that into racing. So there were a few bigger things like that which he made public, like making the engine part of the structure. And BRM had done that anyway, but Chapman got the publicity. But when it comes down to detail, and design innovations and things like that, I think we had, probably, as many as him. We just didn't say anything about them.
But there's a whole lot of things - adjustable anti-rollbars and all sorts of little things. You didn't say anything. You tried to hide them.
Q: How do you see the way the whole designing game has evolved over the past few decades? It has become a lot more specialized since you started out.
RT: Yes, it has. It has become very specialized. People from university ... like, the aerodynamics is the main thing, that's really jumped ahead. Electronics ... there are specialists in each field. There are very few all-round people who can really marry the whole lot up. I suppose you've got Patrick Head, and John Barnard, and Adrian Newey – although his specialty is aerodynamics. I don't know he how much he has developed in other fields.
You've got those sorts of people, and there are some others that are reasonably all-round. Most of the older ones. But the younger ones are specialists. OK, it's gone on a long way, but I think there is still room for people that can look at something and make a judgement.
Q: So is this ability to see the car as whole becoming a lost art?

RT: A little bit because of that, and another bit because of the FIA regulations. With all these one-make formulae, there is just nowhere to go for all these young designers. If they got in and they were able to develop the car, it's like the problem with Formula 3 – you homologate it, and you're stuffed. So out here, they have year-old models or older for their series, but you can't do enough to train people.
Q: Do you find it less interesting?
RT: Oh, it's still a challenge, whatever you do. And I think it becomes more of a challenge, to be able to assess what's going on with all these things. You can listen to what the driver's saying, and say, 'oh well, you need to do this or that'. And other people have got to look at the data, and download it, and it takes half an hour ... so there's still room for people.
Q: Do you have a particular affection for any of the cars that you have designed?
RT: Not really. I suppose the best of the Formula 3 cars was the RT35. It went on and on being best even after it was outdated by composites. It was a honeycomb car, and it worked. And I suppose the ... I forget all the numbers, but in the Brabham days, the BT30 was pretty good. That was the first aluminium monocoque that we'd done in F1. We'd done an aluminium monocoque at Indy before that, but you didn't need it for Formula 1. You didn't need a particularly stiff car then, because you didn't have stiff springs, and you were able to use the body shape to get the air out.
It was only when they brought in that you had to have bag tanks [ED: fuel bladders] that it became desirable to do a monocoque and put the bag in the monocoque. Well, it was compulsory. That turned everything around.

Brabham on his way to the 1966 world championship in the BT19