peterwindsor.com

Enter the 2016 F1 cars

No big new F1 car launches these days.  No pre-paid tickets to Paris or Bologna. No Marlboro watches, BMW duck-down jackets or Ferrari leather folders.

Just Barcelona in mid-February. Misty mornings. Dodgy wifi.  And closed garage doors.

They eventually broke cover, though, the new 2016 cars.  And when they did so we were watching with Craig Scarborough, one of F1’s leading technical observers.  This was how the conversation went when we were back at the bar after the first day of running…

Images courtesy of LAT Photographic

They built racing cars….

Pure and simple.  For F1.  And, in order to finance those F1 projects, every other type of racing car too – from Formula Junior to big-banger sports cars.  Cooper and Brabham.  Two titans of the sport. Cooper gave us rear engines, Jack Brabham the sight of a brilliant driver winning races and championships in a car bearing his own name and his own indelible stamp.

Join Rob Wilson and I as we drive into Surrey, south of London, to capture some of the spirit of Cooper and Brabham.

Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac pre-empted the closed-cockpit look back at Monza in 1967. Jack’s long-term mechanic, Roy Billington (left) looks anxious…

How they finished

With the first of the two Barcelona tests due to begin shortly (Feb 22), let’s take a last look at how they finished, team-by-team, in 2015.  With me in the TRE studio is my friend, Craig Scarborough: