After winning the world championship in his own car in 1966, Jack Brabham was content to play a supporting role within his own organization, focusing on running the business alongside a good teammate. Denny Hulme won the title for him in 1967, and then Rindt showed great speed in 1968, although the results were not as good.
“Jochen was a great driver,” Brabham told the journalist who signs this article in 1999. “I had seen enough of him to know that I would like to have him in the team. He knew nothing about cars, and that could sometimes be a advantage to him!”
“He was a really forceful character, and a very good driver, a driver that I really enjoyed racing. We could compete wheel to wheel and there was no friction or controversy, and then we laughed a lot.”
When Rindt left for Lotus in 1969, Brabham signed Jacky Ickx. The Belgian won two grands prix before returning to Ferrari the following year. Meanwhile, Rindt was unhappy at Lotus and considered rejoining Brabham.
“In 1970 he was going to drive for us again,” Brabham recalled. “We had made a deal, it was all signed for ’70. But when we got to Watkins Glen, Colin Chapman offered him a lot more money, and he came over and asked if he could go with him. We released him and I went on for another year. I was going to withdraw at the end of 1969 if Rindt came to the team”.
Additionally, the team signed rookie Rolf Stommelen. The German was not as quick as might be expected and, almost by default, Brabham became the number 1 driver once again.
For 1970, Ron Tauranac ‘s new BT33 replaced the outdated BT26, and that new car soon proved competitive. Brabham started the season with a win at the South African GP, his first win since 1967, after surviving a first lap contact with Rindt.
“That was good, I was able to win again,” he recalled. “That return to victory was good. We were building tube-framed production cars for private customers…it wasn’t until 1970 that we built a monocoque Formula 1 car and started picking up again.”
At round two, at the Jarama , Brabham took pole, but a new Cosworth DFV engine suffered crankshaft failure as he battled for the lead with Jackie Stewart’s March. At least he got the consolation of the fast lap.
In Monaco, where Brabham had scored his first F1 victory with Cooper in 1959, it was clear that he was once again a contender for victory, despite his 44-year-old age.
Jack Brabham, Brabham BT33 Ford, en el pitlane
For his part, Rindt’s season had gotten off to a low-key start in Kyalami . The new Lotus Type 72 was not ready for the first race, and stuck with the reliable 49C. He qualified fourth, but ended up with engine problems.
Lotus finished the 72 and presented it to the press. He did it on April 1st, Britain’s joke day, and the look was dramatic, with an Indy-derived wedge shape and novel ideas like internal brakes.
At Jarama, Rindt had an accident caused by a brake failure, and retired. According to the Austrian, the complex anti-dive suspension of the car caused more problems than benefits, so the team decided to review it.
For Monaco, he returned to the 49C, a model now in its fourth season but which, in the hands of Graham Hill, had won the last two races in the Principality. With a change to the wing they were looking to find a bit more speed from the old design.
When that Monaco GP started, a young American racing fan (17 years old) was on holiday in the UK with his family.
“My parents took me and my brother to England,” recalls Bobby Rahal . “My mother’s home is in Yorkshire so we went to see distant relatives. My father was a pilot at the time so we went to Slough to see Lola’s headquarters and then to Chevron’s in Bolton. It was a very racing trip.”
“Then my dad suddenly said: ‘Let’s go to Monaco, why not?’ So we left, on a Comet [plane]. We had no hotels booked, no tickets or anything. I think we stayed in Nice.”
“My hero was Jim Clark, but unfortunately he had already retired by then. I liked Jo Siffert, because my dad had competed with Porsche, and the same with Pedro Rodríguez. Brabham was one of my favourites, and I also really liked Rindt for his talent and quirkiness.”
Jochen Rindt, Lotus 49C Ford por delante de Piers Courage, De Tomaso 308 Ford
In qualifying, Stewart, who had won in Spain, took pole in the March, with teammate Chris Amon second. Hulme started third in the McLaren, while Brabham was fourth, despite struggling badly with brake balance issues.
For qualifying, Rindt made some changes to the setup that didn’t work, and he fell two seconds off the fastest time. He had to settle for eighth place with his time from the day on Thursday, before an engine failure caused him to stop. His teammate John Miles failed to even qualify for the 16-car grid.
The Lotus guys went to work improving Rindt’s car overnight, taking a step back on the set-up and changing the proportions. The Rindts, Colin Chapman and Rindt’s manager, Bernie Ecclestone , spent the weekend on the Crest Cutter, one of the most impressive yachts in the harbour. Meanwhile, the Rahal family had hit the circuit successfully on Saturday night.
“We went to Monaco and arrived in time for the F3 race,” recalls Rahal. “Tony Trimmer won that race. We went to the hairpin stands. Since there weren’t many people there to watch the F3 race, my father took the seating boy by the hand, gave him some money, and said ‘we’re coming back for the F1 race, so remember! from my!”.
“We went back there on Sunday and of course the place was packed. The boy remembered us, so obviously my father gave him more money. He sat us almost on the catwalk of the grandstand, and there we saw the race”.
Brabham joined his old teammate Rindt on the yacht for lunch. There were veal chops, but the Australian veteran didn’t eat much. He also wisely declined Ecclestone’s invitation to sample a glass containing red liquid… Rindt was not optimistic for the afternoon race, recalling that he had never finished a race in Monaco. Chapman, Ecclestone and his wife Nina cheered him on.
Jochen Rindt, Lotus 49C Ford
When the race started, Stewart moved into the lead from pole, with Amon trailing behind him. Brabham passed Hulme on the first lap and settled into third place, closing in on Amon. Finally, on lap 22, he passed him at the final hairpin and moved into second.
Stewart had about a 14-second lead at the time, but his engine started to sound funny, and on lap 28, the defending champion slowed down and pulled into the pits. With some 52 laps to go, Brabham inherited the lead.
Amon took second, but he didn’t seem to be a threat. Then, on lap 60, 20 minutes from the checkered flag, a failure in the March’s suspension caused him to retire. Brabham had it even easier.
However, the problems of those in front had allowed Rindt to go from eighth to second. A certain scent of victory was beginning to come to him, and he began to roll faster and faster, managing to cut while Brabham was hindered by the laps. The gap was reduced to 10 seconds with 10 laps to go, and the race suddenly came alive.
“With about seven or eight laps to go, my parents wanted to leave,” says Rahal. ‘I said, ‘No, no, Rindt is catching up with Brabham.’ And we stay. Rindt was so relentless in his pursuit that it was very special to watch. He drove impressively.”
With four laps to go, Brabham nearly stopped on the uphill climb from Santa Devote when he ran into Jo Siffert: the Swiss driver was side-by-side in his March, trying to save fuel.
Rindt continued to spin faster and faster, and with a single spin to go, the margin was 1.5 seconds. The Austrian was more to the limit than ever with the Lotus, and even had a scare. Towards the end of the lap, Brabham caught up with Piers Courage’s De Tomaso, who had taken a brilliant second in Monaco the year before.
Piers Courage, De Tomaso 505 Ford
Brabham passed the De Tomaso shortly after Tabac and had fourth-placed Hulme immediately ahead, with the finish just hundreds of meters away.
Taking an unusually tight inside line at the final hairpin, he slammed on the brakes. With the wheel yanked hard to the right, he skidded right over the barrier and broke the BT33’s nose, right in front of the onlooker Rahal.
“I have a photo of Brabham sliding into the barrier on the last lap,” says Rahal. “It all happened in a hurry! Where he wanted to go was quite wide. If you see the barrier marks, they tell the story. He was disconnected and he braked too late.”
Rindt was so close that he was in the lead almost before Brabham stopped, and his surprise appearance down the main straight caught the man with the checkered flag, who was unable to wave it.
“We didn’t know we had won,” remembers Rindt’s mechanic, Herbie Blash . “Jack was in the lead, and we thought he had won. We went out to wait for Jochen, not even looking at Brabham, and we didn’t realize Jack wasn’t there. We thought we finished second, so it was plan ‘congratulations’ and after that people said to us: ‘You have won…’.
A dejected Brabham, car damaged, passed some 23 seconds later. His team, including mechanic Ron Dennis , couldn’t believe such a weird mistake.
Brabham would admit his guilt, but he always felt that Courage had done him a disservice, even though the overtaking of the lapped took place before the final hairpin.
“On the last lap I got to the back of the pits,” he reflected. “Poor old Piers Courage was on his way to the hairpin. I had to make a decision on which side I was going to go, the right or the left, it just crossed my mind that due to inertia, he was probably going to go out.”
“I decided to go inside. It was a mistake, because that had filled up with sand during the race, and I couldn’t brake. I could have gone on, but I hit the guards and stopped the engine. There was no major damage to the car.”
“I turned it on and when I turned it on, a marshal jumped the barrier and came to push the car. I motioned for him not to touch it, and just as he got there he lost his balance and fell onto the front of the car, his arms as if to say, ‘what are you doing?’ I had to wait until the guy got up. I couldn’t believe it, probably the worst thing that ever happened to me…”
Jack Brabham, Brabham BT33
Rindt’s final lap was a 1:23.2: he had broken the lap record, and was 8 tenths quicker than Stewart’s pole, and 2.7 seconds quicker than his own qualifying time. He seemed a bit shy when he collected the trophy from Prince Rainier, but he had no reason to be ashamed: his relentless and aggressive performance had forced his former employer into error, and it had been worth it.
The two spoke that evening at the Prince’s gala dinner, and then in the morning Rindt’s yacht headed for Saint-Tropez. Monaco would be the beginning of a good season but in which he would lose his life in Monza and become the only posthumous world champion.
For Rahal, that weekend was an experience he would never forget.
“It was an exciting race,” he remembers. “And there we were with no plans, showing up in Monaco, and my dad proving that even if you don’t have tickets, all you need is money. In that case it was.”
“For me, going to Monaco was already something huge. In those days, equipment was in garages all over town. Suddenly you heard the noise of a car going down an alley and it was a BRM or something else. It was a great experience for me as a racing fan.”
Only eight years later, Rahal would be back in Monaco, competing in the F3 race with a Dallara managed by Walter Wolf, a car designed by the same man as De Tomaso de Courage, on a grid that included drivers like Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet, Elio de Angelis, Andrea de Cesaris, Stefan Johansson, Derek Warwick and Teo Fabi.
“How could I have imagined that? Then when I was there in 2001 with Jaguar on a Saturday night, I was walking down to the harbor late at night. I called my dad and said, ‘Hey, I’m walking through where Scott Stoddard crashed!’ My father had taken me to the presentation of the movie Grand Prix in Chicago. What a great effect it had on my life to see that…”.
