the Cooper Car Company Print, Vintage Formula 1 Poster, UK Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

COOPER 1959-60 — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Cooper 1959-60, 1959-1960.

The engine that won two Formula One world championships was descended from a fire pump.

Coventry Climax built a lightweight petrol engine for fire brigades: something two men could carry to a burning building and use to move water. It was small, light and made of aluminium because it had to be lifted. Somebody in the motor trade noticed that those are also the qualities you want in a racing engine.

The car it went into was built behind a garage in Surbiton, on the Ewell Road, by a man named Charles Cooper and his son John. They had started after the war making tiny single-seaters out of Fiat parts and motorcycle engines, and because a motorcycle engine drives by chain, the simplest thing was to put it behind the driver. There was no theory involved. It was where the engine fitted.

Every racing car in the world had the engine in front. That was not a preference, it was an assumption, and it had held since the beginning. Cooper broke it by accident and then found out it was faster, because the car was lighter, smaller and easier to point.

In 1959 Jack Brabham won the drivers' championship in a Cooper. He clinched it by pushing the car over the line at the last race after running out of fuel, on foot, in the Florida heat. In 1960 he won it again. Cooper took the constructors' title both years, against Ferrari and Maserati, from a suburban high street in Surrey.

Within four years every serious car in Formula One had the engine behind the driver. Cooper themselves were finished by the end of the decade, overtaken by people who had learned the lesson faster than they did.

Two of those people had driven for them. Bruce McLaren won a Grand Prix in a Cooper at twenty-two and left to build cars under his own name. Brabham did the same, and in 1966 won the world championship in a car called a Brabham, which nobody else has ever managed before or since. Both teams outlived the one they came from.

There is a red plaque on the Ewell Road now. Most people walking past it are going to the shops.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.