Word: brabham
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...flat, twisting course laid out on an old military airfield near Sebring, Fla., the world's best drivers and fastest cars met last week in the first Grand Prix of the United States. The man to beat was a broad-faced Aussie named Jack Brabham, 33. A steady man with a mechanic's instinct for pushing his low-slung Cooper-Climax no harder than metal and rubber can stand, Brabham rose out of the ranks this year (TIME, Aug. 10) to take the lead in the world driving championship...
...with an outside chance to outdrive Brabham for the championship in the last Grand Prix race of 1959 was Britain's nonchalant Stirling Moss, 30, who, on a good day and when his car holds up, is probably the world's best driver. But Moss, who had earlier broken the speed limit and outraced an enraged sheriff on his way to the track, slowed to a halt on the fifth lap in an ooze of black smoke from a crippled gearbox. That left Britain's Dentist-Driver Tony Brooks as the only other threat to Brabham...
...broad-faced driver has never before been a headliner: the low-slung car is operated on a shoestring. But Australian-born Jack Brabham and his Cooper-Climax are challenging-and beating-the world's biggest names this season in the exacting sport of Grand Prix road racing, the ultimate competition for lean speed machines that can chafe off rubber in skidding turns, accelerate to 190 m.p.h. on the straightaways...
...result, says Driver Jack Brabham, 32, "is a car that's safer and easier to race." As others tell it, the driver makes the package look good. The son of a greengrocer in a Sydney suburb, Brabham studied engineering, during World War II was a flight mechanic in the Royal Australian Air Force. Brabham was lured into the pits by a driving friend who wanted a good mechanic on hand, and soon found himself behind the wheel, although he confesses: "I was frightened to death...
Last week, on a long, straight course tailor-made for high horsepower, Britain's Tony Brooks led the Ferraris to a one-two-three sweep of the German Grand Prix in West Berlin,* and Brabham failed to finish. But Brabham still leads Brooks in the world driving championship, 27-23, and British experts are betting on the Aussie and the Cooper-Climax to sew up world championship honors on the tortuous turns of the three remaining Grand Prix events...