MOTORSPORT: Brabham designer Tauranac 90 not out

One of the great achievers in Australian motorsport history, but still largely unknown to the general public, reaches a milestone today – Ron Tauranac turns 90.

Tauranac designed the Brabham cars of the 1960s and early '70s, including the BT19 in which his lifelong mate Sir Jack Brabham won the 1966 Formula One world championship.

And, it is usually overlooked, the BT20 in which New Zealander Denny Hulme won the world title the next year.

Those cars were powered by Australian-made Repco engines.

Through the '70s and '80s Tauranac was one of the world's most prolific builders, if not its most prolific, of open-wheeler racing cars, mostly for lesser formulae.

Tauranac and Brabham were rival drivers in Australia in the 1950s before the latter moved to Europe and won his first two world titles with the Cooper team.

When Brabham hatched the plan for his own F1 team he enticed Tauranac to Britain to design them. Tauranac had been born in Britain to a father of French origin and came to Australia as a four-year-old. The cars he and Brabham built together carried the initials BT, representing their surnames.

Tauranac-designed cars won 13 F1 grands prix and were renowned for simplicity, strength and reliability, in contrast to the revolutionary but often-fragile Lotuses of the era's other great designer, Colin Chapman.

When Brabham retired from race driving at the end of 1970 he sold his share of the team to Tauranac, who a year later sold it all to Bernie Ecclestone.

The cars Tauranac built later were called Ralts – a name he had used with his brother, Austin, before going to Europe. He also continued an association with Honda, the Japanese manufacturer with which Brabham also enjoyed a long relationship.

While Brabham, who died last May, aged 88, was motorsport's first knight, Tauranac was awarded an Order of Australia in 2002.

A lunch in Tauranac's honour is being held today at the Parramatta Park Event Centre in Sydney. On the guest list are Spencer Martin, Australia's dual open-wheeler racing champion of the mid-1960s, and Larry Perkins, the one-time F1 driver and European Formula Three champion (the latter in a Ralt) before coming home to build and race Holden touring cars in which he won multiple Bathurst 1000s.

An American legend also reaches a milestone this week – A.J. Foyt will be 80 on Friday. Foyt was the first four-time winner of the biggest open-wheeler race in the US, the Indianapolis 500.

He is the only driver to have won the Indy 500, NASCAR's Daytona 500 and the 24-Hour sports car classics at Le Mans in France and Daytona in Florida.

He raced in 35 consecutive Indy 500s, winning in 1961, '64, '67 and '77. Fellow Americans Al Unser Senior and Rick Mears are the only other drivers to have equaled that feat.

Texan Foyt remains an IndyCar team owner but has suffered heart problems in recent years and had a triple bypass late last year. Anthony Joseph Foyt, otherwise known as "Super Tex", has been one of American racing's greatest figures and, as a driver, the esteem in which he is held in the US rivals that of NASCAR's Richard "The King" Petty and the late Dale "The Intimidator" Earnhardt.