by Terry Lovell
It marked the beginning of a tough baptism for Tauranac. By day he was working on converting cars for Jack Brabham Motors and by night in his bedroom in a flat above a shop in Tolworth, Surrey, designing his first racing car – the MRD Formula Junior – for Motor Racing Developments Ltd, a company formed by Tauranac and Brabham in 1961 and based in rented garage space a few miles away in Esher. It became established, after moving briefly to Repco’s new premises in nearby Surbiton, in a factory next to the River Wey at New Haw, near Weybridge. It was here that Tauranac, as technical director, produced the first Climax-powered Formula One car for the Brabham team debut in 1962.
Financed by the sale of Formula Three and Formula Two Libre production cars and Esso and Goodyear sponsorship deals, the combination of Tauranac’s design and technical expertise and Brabham’s driving skills soon established the Brabham team as a crowd-pulling contender, not least in classic battles with Colin Chapman’s Lotus Ford team. In 1966, at the age of 40, Brabham won his third World Championship in the first Repco V8-powered car – and became the only driver to win the title in a car bearing his own name.
The following season he came second in the World Championship title race to co-team driver, New Zealander Denny Hulme, who then left Brabham for McLaren. But ‘Black’ Jack felt time was running out. There was little more he wanted to prove or needed to achieve. He confided in Tauranac that he wanted to retire, which led to his partner acquiring his share in Motor Racing Developments Ltd in 1969. At the end of the 1970 season, Brabham, aged 44, made public his decision, bringing to a close an illustrious fifteen-year career spanning 126 Grands Prix, 14 wins and three World Championships. He returned to Australia to run a farming operation he had bought the previous year and to set up a Ford agency in Sydney with Tauranac’s younger brother, Austin.
Back in New Haw, it was business as usual for Tauranac. But he found Brabham’s absence unsettling. He very much missed his countryman’s support and friendship. The end of their partnership meant more than the end of a business relationship. The two men had created a formidable team and through many highs and lows had developed a close friendship. Brabham’s departure hit Tauranac harder than he could have imagined. It caused him to reflect on his own future in Formula One, which came to be influenced by other changes.
Following Brabham’s departure, chief mechanic Ron Dennis and his number two, Neil Trundell, decided to leave to set up their own Formula Two team, the unsuccessful and short-lived Rondel Racing; Goodyear, following a senior management reshuffle, were about to drop the Brabham team for newcomers McLaren, who had moved into Formula One in 1966 following the team’s success in IndyCar and CanAm racing in America; and lead driver Graham Hill, who hadn’t fully recovered from breaking both legs in an horrific accident in the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen in 1969, was past his prime. Running the whole show was proving a massive burden for Tauranac to carry alone.
Tauranac had one other ball to juggle: finding the all-important sponsorship money, which had been his former partner’s expertise. As the ship’s chief engineer, more at home with a spanner and an oil rag, it wasn’t his natural style to sweet-talk the corporate suits. Diminishing financial fortunes had, in fact, cost the Brabham team the services of Jochen Rindt. When Colin Chapman approached Rindt in 1968 to join the Lotus team, Tauranac had been unable to put a counter-offer on the table to keep him. Rindt’s departure was all the more difficult for Tauranac because of a friendship so strong – they even shared hotel rooms at overseas Grands Prix – that the Austrian had been prepared to stay with Brabham for half the money on offer from Chapman. But Tauranac couldn’t match even that. It was a combination of these factors that persuaded him to agree to a suggestion from Rindt, who, although unaware of the pressures on his friend, told him that he knew of someone who might be interested in buying the company. His name was Bernie Ecclestone, of whom Tauranac knew little.
Their first meeting took place on board a private yacht during the Monaco Grand Prix in May 1970. Ecclestone came straight to the point: he proposed a partnership in return for which he would provide the management nous and finance that the company sorely needed. Rindt would return as lead driver to get Brabham back on the podium. The proposal had its attractions for Tauranac, not least the prospect of Rindt returning to Brabham, but he cared little for the idea of a partnership. He was far from certain that, after working with Jack Brabham for so long, he could settle easily into a similar business association with someone else. For this reason he made a counter-proposal: he would sell the company to Ecclestone and, if it all went well, he would be happy to buy back in. Ecclestone was not keen; Tauranac stood firm. The discussions proceeded no further.
However, Ecclestone’s sights were set on acquiring the Brabham team, although his plans would no longer include Jochen Rindt. Less than four months after the aborted meeting, he had his tragic accident at Monza. During the autumn of 1970 Ecclestone began fresh discussions with Tauranac for the purchase of Motor Racing Developments Ltd. This time Ecclestone agreed to buy the company, with Tauranac remaining as joint managing director. The deal was finalised that October. Ecclestone had been so confident Tauranac would sell that, while still in negotiations, he phoned the factory at night to ask a number of questions about the Brabham team. The call was answered by Nick Goozée, responsible for building the Formula One cars, who was working late. Perplexed by the specific nature of the questions, Goozée asked why he wanted the information. Identifying himself as Bernie Ecclestone, the caller added: ‘I’ve bought the company.’ Tauranac reassured Goozée the following morning that he hadn’t, which, at that stage at least, was true.
But the manner in which the sale of Motor Racing Developments Ltd was concluded did not go according to plan. At least, not to Tauranac’s plan, the consequences of which left him considerably out of pocket. Tauranac claims it had been verbally agreed that the purchase price would be based on his valuation of the company’s assets. The figure came to £130,000, and this, accompanied with an itemised list of the assets, was duly submitted to Ecclestone. Tauranac claims that he heard nothing more from Ecclestone and had therefore assumed that his valuation had been accepted. However, shortly before the deal was due to be concluded, he received a night-time phone call from Ecclestone with an offer of £100,000 (worth in 2002 about £860,000).
Said Tauranac: ‘We had a verbal agreement that he was going to buy it for the assets value of the company. I did an honest stock-take and valuation of it all and passed it on to him. I had gone ahead on that basis and more or less committed myself to selling the company, and at the eleventh hour he made an offer of £100,000. I should have said, “We have this agreement” and bartered a little bit. But I was a little bit naïve and, due to my lack of business experience, I thought it was “take it or leave it”. So I thought about it for five minutes and said OK. I should have had a solicitor or an adviser, or someone to talk things over with, but I didn’t.’ With a substantial part of the money earmarked for a trust set up for the benefit of his two daughters, then aged nine and 15, Tauranac remains today remarkably phlegmatic: ‘People in business, that’s the way they work. It was down to me.’ All the same, Tauranac would have given a wry smile to a motor sport magazine report which some years later claimed that Ecclestone had paid ‘something in the region’ of £500,000 for the company.1
Ecclestone gives a different account of events, which he remembered ‘very, very well’. He added: ‘There was an agreement involving the stock, which he didn’t know [the value of]. He said, “I’ve no idea what the stock is worth.” And I think I said to somebody, “Can you value the stock?”, and when they said whatever it was … when I met Ron, I said, “Ron, this is the value of the stock”, and he… I remember standing in the corridor outside the solicitor’s office [where the sale documents were signed] … and he said, “That means, then, it’s only a hundred [thousand pounds]…” I said, “Well, whatever it means is whatever it means. If you don’t think that’s true, then do it pr
operly.” That was it. I remember it so clearly.’ There was no hint of a take-it-or-leave-it offer, Ecclestone said. ‘At the time I bought that company I wasn’t even sure whether I wanted it or not. Nobody told him to go ahead. Nobody told him to do anything. Actually, he said to me, “I need to think about this again, because I am not sure whether I want to sell.” I said, “It’s up to you entirely.”’ Tauranac, he added, then agreed the deal.
To Ecclestone, the acquisition was surely a bumper bargain. In addition to stock and engineering equipment, the assets included five DFV engines with an estimated value of £5000 each, and two Formula One cars worth an estimated £10,000 each, totalling almost half the price he had paid for the company. It also included a lucrative sponsorship deal for the following year with YPF, a state-owned Argentinian fuel company, which Tauranac had arranged with new driver Carlos Reutemann through the Automóvil Club Argentino.
From day one Ecclestone’s attitude towards Tauranac was one of indifference. On his arrival as the new owner, without first stopping off as a matter of courtesy at Tauranac’s office, he went straight to the workshop to talk to the mechanics about what they thought of the company, including the new joint managing director. It was the start of a fraught relationship between the two men, made worse when, without notice or consultation, Ecclestone instructed the company accountant, Brian Sheppard, to stop paying Tauranac’s salary. The problem was resolved by Tauranac writing out his own salary on a company cheque each month after being advised of the net figure by Sheppard, who, incidentally, later became accountant to several of Ecclestone’s companies. Said Tauranac: ‘I don’t know why he did it. It’s the way he works. He never spoke directly [to me]. He did everything unilaterally.’
But Tauranac’s problems were only just beginning. He returned from a Christmas holiday to find that Ecclestone had appointed someone else as joint managing director. ‘I went for my usual skiing holiday at Christmas – I would go for two weeks every Christmas because that way I only missed about four days’ work – and when I came back someone else was ensconced and running it, and there was virtually nothing for me to do.’ While Ecclestone was apparently trying to drive him out, Tauranac nevertheless continued to attempt to fulfil his responsibilities by working at home on various project drawings – but it was not long before that was brought to an end.
In March 1972 he received a letter from Ecclestone requesting the return of the drawings and adding that it was time to ‘finalise’ their relationship. ‘So I took the drawings back, got a signature for them, and that was it.’ Once again Ecclestone’s account differs from Tauranac’s. The projects Tauranac was working on, he claims, were for Mo Nunn’s Ensign team. ‘All I know is that he was paid by us, employed by us, and went to work for Mo Nunn. And I said, “I think you had better stay with Mo Nunn.” That’s how he left us.’
Tauranac, described as the first professional racing-car designer, cleared his desk and walked away from the Brabham works – and a million memories of a unique but dying era in Formula One. ‘But I had no regrets,’ he said. ‘The way things were going I was happy to get out.’ To this day Tauranac remains unclear about Ecclestone’s motives. ‘The production of the custom-built cars (for which he was responsible) was never an issue. There were never any discussions about it, or anything else. He never discussed how or why. He just did these things. I can only imagine it was his way of sidelining me so he could be in complete control.’
Ecclestone was now established as a wealthy and successful man. By 1968, at the age of 38, he had moved into a large mansion-style house, comprising seven bedrooms and three bathrooms, in Farnborough Park, Kent, bought for £40,000 from a property developer who owned a fair-sized chunk of Mayfair. The new owner had one large room turned into a library, filled with books bought by the yard to line the walls, some of which were used to create a concealed door. The 26 acres of woodland, which Ecclestone bought with money borrowed from a Guernsey-based offshore tax haven, became his private park, with a two-acre lake brimming with perch and golden orfe, which, standing by the lakeside with a large scoop and a sack of fish food he bought wholesale, he enjoyed feeding. He invited privileged friends to fish the lake, although he was so fond of the fish – ‘they were enormous,’ said a former associate, ‘and I think he saw them as his pets’ – that he insisted they were returned to the water uninjured. This he ensured by supplying rod and line with hooks whose barbs had been removed. Along with the rods, about six in number and racked neatly against the wall of a wooden lakeside hut, seats and keep-nets were also provided.
Sharing this opulent lifestyle with Ecclestone was his girlfriend, Dora Tuana Tan, a beautiful Singaporean, whom he appointed director to several of his companies. They had met several years earlier at, it was believed, the gaming tables, and began living together in a more modest but nonetheless imposing house in Chiselhurst Road, Chiselhurst. His marriage to Ivy, described as a plain, aloof but well-groomed woman, had long come to an end. ‘Ivy was a very nice girl,’ said a friend who used to socialise with the couple, ‘but never for Bernie. Not from the word go. Mind, you, who would be right for Bernie?’
Ecclestone even owned a B.125 twin-engine Beagle Bulldog, bought through his company partnership with Jochen Rindt, in which they travelled to European Grands Prix. He bought several of the aircraft, in fact, for a knock-down price after the manufacturers, taken over three years earlier by the Labour government from the British Motor Corporation, went into receivership in 1969 for the lack of £6 million for necessary development and expansion. They were put up for auction and sold overseas, except, that is, for one Ecclestone sold to March Engineering, owners of the March racing team, through Max Mosley, one of the four founders of the company. It proved an unfortunate purchase at £10,000 (worth about £95,800 in 2002), particularly as it came without an airworthiness certificate.
Said Mosley: ‘It was a lovely aeroplane, but never flew. I should have said to Bernie, “I’ll buy it when it’s got a certificate of airworthiness.”’ It didn’t get a certificate, apparently because the cost of carrying out certain necessary work turned out to be prohibitive. Ecclestone’s comment suggested that Mosley should have looked on the bright side: ‘At least it didn’t cost much to run.’ The plane was sold for £7000, recalled Mosley, to ‘this poor chap, an American, who flew off to America’. Did he arrive safely? ‘Well, he never paid the second instalment so there’s a suspicion that perhaps he didn’t.’
Ecclestone made another killing that same year when an Italian car company, Iso SpA, of Bresso, Milan, which produced the Iso marque from 1962 to 1975, hit financial difficulties. He bought a number of the two-seater Iso Grifo cars with Chevrolet engines – a former close associate said as many as 14 for £3000 each – plus some parts and spares, which he sold on through an Irish car trader. Said the former associate: ‘He was able to write a cheque out for 50 grand or whatever … made one phone call to a chap, who was an Irish trader, right, and in less than two or three weeks, he had sold the lot for a bit of a commission.’ Ecclestone, he added, was always able to get ‘the best deal’ because he had the money available to pay cash.
Three years earlier, in 1972, he moved quickly to buy the German team Eiffeland Formula 1 and its equipment as ‘as a pure business exercise’ after the team’s sponsors, caravan manufacturers Eiffeland, were taken over. Apparently Ecclestone was keen to acquire two ‘12-series’ Cosworth engines especially obtained for the team by Ford Germany in January and May of that year and described as ‘particularly good ones’. There was, in fact, no such series. They were standard DFV 3-litre V8 engines supplied by Cosworth to all teams but were so described to persuade Ecclestone that they were something ‘special’. It was in this quick-buck world that he excelled. To extract an extra percentage point or two in a deal was a challenge he passionately embraced, to an extent that strains belief.
A classic example is demonstrated by events at a car auction in Southampton where, in the early sixties, car dealer Chris Mars
hall, a touring-car racer who went on to manage the Formula Three career of James Hunt, regularly took cars for sale. He had discovered that he could buy cars at an auction in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, more cheaply than elsewhere and the next day have them driven to Southampton, where they would go under the hammer for perhaps ten per cent more.
He would regularly buy four or five cars a day in this way for a quick resale. In the days when a Morris Oxford cost about £400, a profit of £40 on each car added up to a quick and attractive turnover. And it was in Southampton that Marshall arrived one day with an Austin A40 for sale. He took up his customary position behind the rostrum, from where he could see the auctioneer’s foot tap the floor, a signal that told him that a genuine bid had been made. Up until then the auctioneer would often take bids ‘off the wall’ until a car reached its reserve price. Interest in the A40, with a reserve price of little over £400, continued until it reached a final figure of £450. Marshall was delighted.
The buyer, he claims, had been a small, immaculately dressed man, whom he recognised as Ecclestone, accompanied by two well-built associates. A few minutes later a tannoy announcement from the engineer’s office requested Marshall’s presence. He was informed that there had been a complaint from the buyer: the engine ‘sounded rough’ and he wanted £25 knocked off. It was a plea that fell on deaf ears. Ecclestone was compelled to pay up. Ecclestone dismissed Marshall’s account as ‘pure crap. We would never go to Southampton to buy bloody cars. And I certainly wouldn’t have been there.’
The two men, according to Marshall, had met, in fact, about a year earlier. This time, he claims, it involved a two-seater Tripacer Piper plane that Marshall’s car business, then based in Hove, East Sussex, had advertised for sale in Flight magazine for £3750. Among the interested calls was one from Ecclestone. He said that if Marshall, a qualified pilot, was prepared to fly the plane to the former wartime RAF base at Biggin Hill – which, incidentally, Ecclestone would later acquire – he would be there to meet him with a banker’s draft for £3500. The deal was agreed.