Posted 24 February 2002 - 14:22
A great tribute Roger. That sounds heartfelt? You're a very, very good judge.
Tony Brooks is the most charming of men, and while he is genuinely quiet, and reserved, and retiring - every so often one does see the flash of steel - irritation that perhaps he is overlooked sometimes today, as he was in period.
Some years ago at Basildon, Essex, when the police closed the roads for an extraordinary Historic racing car bash, Moss took the wrong turning and shot up a dead-end, creating an embarrassing 94-point turn-around virtually amongst the crowd before he could regain the course...and Tony had followed him, and had to do the same thing.
"Oh, Stirling" - he said with a wan smile when they returned to the paddock - "...over forty years later, and you are still getting me into trouble...".
Tony is a man with a private, but deep, religious faith - and when he retired from racing at the end of 1961 part of his motivation was loss of interest in gutless 1 1/2-litre F1 cars - and part the notion that since God bestows life upon us, it is irresponsible and wrong of us to put it wilfully at risk...particularly when one has been married, and children are around.
As a tribute to this lovely man, and to his mould-breaking achievement at Syracuse late in 1955 - I hope you'll all enjoy this piece, written for the British national newspaper - 'The Daily Telegraph' - in 1995:
BROOKS, CONNAUGHT AND THE SYRACUSE GP
By Doug Nye
(Background - This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the first Grand Prix for 31 years to be won by a British car and driver. From these small beginnings grew this country's dominant modern racing industry.)
"Find a record of the English national anthem. Be quick!", snapped race director Renzo Castagneto, his words drowned by the flat, harsh bellow of a Formula 1 car booming by with a split exhaust. It was British racing green, number '22', leading the Grand Prix with ten laps to run - this was almost unprecedented. Fifty seconds later a flame-red factory Maserati, driven by local hero Luigi Musso, screamed by in hopeless pursuit. Whenever pressed, that green car ahead could pull out two seconds a lap.
Thirty-one long years had passed since any British car/driver combination had last won a Continental Grand Prix. Now, 23-year old Manchester dental student Tony Brooks was poised to end that drought. His car was a Connaught - built behind a garage on the A3 London-Portsmouth road at Send in Surrey. Until that weekend he had never even sat in a Formula 1 car before, while the Connaught team itself was so strapped for cash it transported its cars in a pair of worn-out AEC Greenline coaches...The ways of Formula 1 were, ahem, different then...
But since that Syracuse Grand Prix, run on October 23, 1955, other British Formula 1 teams have won some 90 per cent of all races run, and this country's motor racing industry is by far the world's largest and most effective.
Tony Brooks' win that day was the first for a British car and driver since Henry Segrave had won for Sunbeam at San Sebastian in 1924. It was celebrated last weekend at the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, when Brooks and Connaught technical director Mike Oliver recalled that momentous Sicilian weekend before an enthusiast audience.
Connaught Engineering had been created in the late 1940s by two ex-RAF pilots - Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver, backed by Kenneth McAlpine. They first built sports cars then handsome Formula 2 single-seaters before aspiring in 1954-55 to Formula 1. Then came a last-minute invitation to the Syracuse Grand Prix, postponed from its normal Spring date.
Mike Oliver: "The call came just nine days before. Syracuse is on the southern tip of Sicily, a 2,000 mile drive, but start money was good, £1,000 per car plus all expenses. We took a streamliner for Les Leston, and an open-wheeled car for this pleasant young newcomer. He was very inexperienced but came highly recommended by one of our old-car owners, John Riseley-Prichard for whom he had driven in Formula 2...
"We tested the two cars briefly at Goodwood, then sent them off in our old Greenline coaches - which were converted with the seats removed and doors cut in the back to accept the cars."
On the Monday, Oliver flew his road car out via Lydd-Le Touquet, expecting the transporters to be well south of Lyons. "But the RAC desk had a message for me, I was urgently required at Dunkirk - the AECs had been impounded...".
Their French Ponts et Chaussees permits had expired so Mike had to rush to Lille, find the proper office and arrange fresh paperwork. "We finally set off late that night, doubting we could reach Syracuse for Friday practice...".
They were right. They had also misjudged the Southern Italian mountain roads through Calabria: "...where the hairpins were so tight we had to reverse the AECs just to get round. In one hour's motoring we covered only 11 miles...".
Meanwhile Tony Brooks, the novice driver, had flown out - itself an epic - via Rome, to Catania. "As a penniless dental student I couldn't afford a hire car, so I rented a Vespa scooter. I hung around the Syracuse paddock that first practice day, wondering if the team would ever arrive. That evening I ground round lap after lap on the Vespa just to discover which way the circuit went..."
It was a daunting circuit too, 3.4 miles of bumpy public roads lined by unforgiving concrete walls, and including two level crossings. Over the bumps, the Vespa's twist-grip throttle split the webbing between Tony's right index finger and thumb, creating a searing, weeping sore.
Mike Oliver and the first AEC arrived late that Friday, the second coach - which had burned-out its brakes in Calabria - grinding in on the Saturday morning, the mechanic crews exhausted.
Oliver: "Tony sat in his car for the first time that Saturday morning and I limited his practice to save the car for the race. I was desperate he shouldn't break it, because if we failed to start we'd earn no start money to cover the trip."
Yet despite this restricted practice, Brooks qualified third fastest, only marginally slower than the factory Maseratis of Musso and Gigi Villoresi. He recalls: "They had more power, but Syracuse's curves and swerves put the accent on roadholding and handling, which were Connaught strengths."
Mike Oliver: "Our engines were based upon parts made by a little company at Tolworth named Alta, and we had to tune them so highly to be at all competitive it then became a question of 'Will it last?'. After a slow start, Tony settled into the race, caught the Maseratis and - glory be - passed Musso for the lead. Towards the end Musso looked as if he had settled for second place, and when our car went by with its engine sounding peculiar the crowd were expecting it to go bang, but in fact it was merely the exhaust which had split - the engine stayed healthy."
Tony: "I was well aware of how marginal reliability might be, so once I had established a lead, I used 500 revs fewer than Mike's limit and just nursed it round to the end..."
Mike: "Tony was fantastic. Without risking the car he was two seconds a lap faster than Musso, he raised the lap record from 99mph to 102, and won by almost a minute. Dusk was falling as Tony came out of the last corner to take the flag. I remember Denis Jenkinson of 'Motor Sport' magazine - Moss's Mille Miglia-winning navigator - nudging my elbow and saying 'Mike - This is history!'. Tony was such a self-effacing chap I had to push him up onto the podium...he didn't want to go."
Tony: "I found the crowd very friendly but overwhelming. I just wanted to get back to our hotel on the Vespa, but by this time my sore hand was in a terrible state. To pad it against the twist-grip throttle I wrapped a handkerchief round it which I then tried to pull tight in my teeth - surrounded by this seething mob of excited Sicilians. But as I tugged the handkerchief tight with my teeth it dislodged my expensive dental bridgework which shot out under their feet!
"I dived down to to retrieve it but they hadn't noticed - they made even more of a fuss once I was grovelling around on my hands and knees, and I never did find it..."
Whistling his excuses through a lopsided grin, Tony extricated himself and rode back to the hotel for a bath. Being an exceptionally well-organised young man he had a spare dental bridge which he fitted for the prize-giving dinner that evening "...though it was terribly insecure"; the race organisers interpreting his demeanour as Britannic stiff upper lip.
Connaught's elated mechanics then eased their AECs the 2,000 miles back to base, Mike Oliver stopping off at Pirelli, Milan, to arrange racing tyres for the following year. "After our win it was a long meeting, involving all Pirelli's directors, speaking through an interpreter. Finally the most senior of them asked what did this unknown young driver 'Broo-ooks' do for a living? I replied that he was a trainee dentist, to which the interpreter responded 'The director says, that if Signor Broo-ooks, is as good a dentist as he is a racing driver, the next time he comes to England, he would like to make an appointment with him'.
Tony went on to drive for BRM, Vanwall and Ferrari 1956-61, competing in 38 World Championship-qualifying Grands Prix of which he won six.. He shared another historic all-British first - this time the first Formula 1 World Championship round win - with Moss in the Vanwall at Aintree '57, and went on to win the Belgian, French, German (twice) and Italian GPs. He was third in the 1958 Drivers' Championship and second - pipped at the post - in 1959. Stirling Moss was - and is - a great fan, describing the retiring Brooks as "the greatest unknown racing driver" of their era. Connaught closed down, having completely run out of money, in 1957, and Mike Oliver returned to flying, becoming Folland's chief test pilot developing the exquisite little Gnat fighter/trainer later so famous as chosen mount of the RAF's Red Arrows.
Waving the flag you see - in the days before such behaviour became unfashionable.
SIDEBAR - THE WINNING CAR?
Tony Brooks' victorious Connaught 'B1' returned to Syracuse in April 1957, to be driven by Les Leston. But a drive-shaft broke in practice there, its flailing end splitting the fuel tank whose nitro-methane contents ignited on the hot exhaust. So the heroine of '55 was burned to the ground, but its scorched chassis survived to be sold in the Connaught closure sale of late 1957.
Into the Historic motor racing era of the 1960s and '70s, it was then sold-on with sufficient bits to recreate a running car. From 1971-74 this 'entity' was actually owned by H. Jones - ten years later the posthumous Falklands VC - but he never had the time to make it a runner. As recently as this Autumn, 'B1', now recreated around this chassis, has been acquired by a past owner/entrant of other Connaughts; Bernie Ecclestone, head of the Formula One Constructors' Association, and architect of modern Formula 1 motor racing.
ENDS
One final thing - at dinner after the Goodwood Festival of Speed one year, Rick Mears' wife asked Mario Andretti who was the greatest racing driver he had ever seen as a kid in Italy. Mario pointed discreetly across the table and whispered, "Stirling Moss - but I tell ya, that guy there was probably better..." - and then he had to explain who the slim gentleman with the hawkish face, and the lovely bubbly Italian wife, was. C.A.S. Brooks.
DCN
)
Thanks a lot, Richard. 
