MOTORSPORT: Brabhams win fight for name

Comments by Red Bull motorsport powerbroker Helmut Marko point to this year being Mark Webber’s last with the energy drink company’s triple world championship-winning team.

The V8 Supercar paddock – and the category’s fans – are still awaiting the announcement of a TV deal for the new season now just 48 days away. And a revision of this year’s calendar is in the wings, as we foresaw the day it was announced.

On the Dakar Rally in South America the MINI of French legend Stephane Peterhansel and the buggy of Qatar’s Nasser Al-Attiyah are less than  10 minutes apart – that’s mighty close in Dakar terms – after five days and with the field now in Chile. And an Aussie is 13th.

But the story of the day is that the Brabham trademark registration has reverted to the family of Australia’s triple Formula One world champion, 86-year-old Sir Jack Brabham.

It’s a name that became an international motor racing constructor in the early 1960s, winning the F1 constructors’ world titles in 1966 and ’67.

It was in that team’s BT19 – BT standing for Brabham and Tauranac, Sir Jack’s fellow Australian designer Ron Tauranac – that Brabham became the only driver to win the F1 drivers’ title in a car of his own construction. That was in 1966 and the car had an Australian-built Repco engine.

Sir Jack’s first two world titles, in 1959 and ’60, had been with the Cooper team. It was as he began transititioning to a constructor with Tauranac in the early 1960s that he began the revolution at America’s Indianapolis Motor Speedway with rear-engined cars that ended the era of the front-engined roadsters and changed US oval track racing forever.

Sir Jack also introduced Japanese motorcycle giant Honda to four-wheel racing, using its engines in his Formula 2 cars in the mid-1960s.

Bernie Ecclestone bought the team Brabham team when Sir Jack and Tauranac bowed out in the early ’70s and had success with it in the days of Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet Senior in the early ’80s.

As Ecclestone’s attention turned to running the whole F1 business the team went through a succession of changes and a sad decline, last appearing on an F1 grid 20 years ago.

There have been various legal arguments over the ownership and rights to the name since.
In recent years the family, led by Sir Jack’s youngest son David, himself an ex-F1 driver and a versatile racer who has made sports car competition his specialty, has been fighting a German group set up by Formtech founder Franz Hilmer over the Brabham trademark.

That group failed in attempt to gain an entry to F1 in 2010.

It recently came to light that David Brabham had sued a Michael Trick in the German High Court over his refusal to cancel registrations with the European Union involving the Brabham name.

Trick has been marketing road cars under the Brabham Racing banner.

David Brabham announced the success of the family’s legal action overnight.

The decision is seen as protecting the Brabham name against anyone or any organization trying to use it without the family’s consent.

"I'm delighted that this situation has finally come to an end," David Brabham said.

"It's been a long and tiring battle, but this was something I felt we needed to do to protect the Brabham name.

"The global brand stands for success and innovation bolstered from 60 years of racing heritage, and deserves to be protected.

"This ruling will not only help future plans for the Brabham brand, but also protect the third generation of drivers, in Sam and Matthew, coming up through the ranks."

Sam is David’s teenage son, a karter in Britain, while Matthew is the teenage son of Sir Jack’s eldest son, Geoff, and is advancing through the ranks of American open-wheeler racing under the Road to Indy program.

Matthew Brabham won the US F2000 Championship last year in his first year overseas and – having won a scholarship worth almost $400,000 - will compete in the Pro Mazda for American racing dynasty the Andretti family this year.

He also had a couple of tastes of competition in Europe at the end of last year.

Matthew Brabham has F1 ambitions and David Brabham hinted in an obscure Brazilian interview that surfaced recently that the family may want to revive itself as a constructor in time, but “not for a while”.

At least the way now appears to have been cleared if that day ever arrives.

A legend of the Le Mans 24-Hour, where he was a multiple winner, Pescarolo was the most successful privateer entrant at the French classic for most of this century.

He has flagged that he may work with another entrant for this year’s Le Mans in June and that may look to restart a team of his own next year.

However, he said that would depend on the European economic situation and whether new Le Mans rules would allow privateers to be competitive with factory teams in the premier category.

Meanwhile, the great British sportscar name Lola – which collapsed last year - has been kept alive under a recent deal.

Autosport.com reported that a new group would take over engineering support and the supply of spare parts for Lola’s Le Mans Prototype category 1 and 2 cars.

Lola Group Holdings has agreed to a licensing deal with long-time associate Canadian Multimatic Motorsport and even longer US distributor Carl Haas Auto.

Lola Cars International went into administration last May with debts of about $30 million and stopped trading in October.

Parent Lola Group Holdings bought the racing company’s assets to retain the intellectual property to its designs and trademark.

Red Bull honcho’s blunt assessment of Mark Webber

Mark Webber slipped to sixth in the F1 world championship last season after having been third the previous two years. And he will turn 37 in August.

Webber’s much younger German teammate Sebastian Vettel has won the world title in each of the past three years, while Red Bull Racing has been the world champion constructor in each of those years.

This year will be Webber’s seventh year with Red Bull, the team which gave him the Adrian Newey-designed cars to become a grand prix winner – including the Monaco and British GPs for the second time last year.

But it is not hard to envisage that this will be Webber’s last year with Red Bull – and perhaps in F1.

An interview with powerful Red Bull motorsport chief, Austrian ex-F1 driver Dr Helmut Marko - the man who has the ear of the energy drink’s owner Dietrich Mateschitz, another Austrian – in the company’s Red Bulletin magazine has laid out the team management’s perspective on Webber.

And, in a nutshell, it is that Webber is still good enough to win races but not to win the world title.

"It seems to me that Webber has on average two races per year where he is unbeatable, but he can't maintain this form throughout the year," Marko said.

"And as soon as his prospects start to look good in the world championship he has a little trouble with the pressure that this creates.

"In comparison with Seb [Vettel's] rising form, it seems to me that Mark's form somehow flattens out.

"Then, if some technical mishap occurs, like with the alternator for example, he falls relatively easily into a downward spiral.

"No driver remains unaffected by this, because the tension is palpable.

"In 2010 it was particularly extreme. Webber headed into the final race with better chances than Vettel, and he probably carried the disappointment of his defeat into the 2011 season, which is so easy to understand."

Marko said Webber had struggled with the psychological challenge of Vettel’s ascension in the sport as the Australian found himself for the first time in a car capable of winning the title.

"Something that I think is also very important is that for much of his career Mark was never in a top team, but he was always regarded as a high flyer if he only could get into the right team," Marko said.

"Then Red Bull puts him in a car - a possible winner – and suddenly along comes this young kid and he snatches the booty from under Mark's nose.

"Psychologically it's not easy, of course; this would gnaw away at anyone's confidence. It's more than understandable."

Webber often has been mentioned as a possible teammate to Spaniard Fernando Alonso at Ferrari, which could provide a fairytale ending to the Aussie’s F1 career.

However, another young German, Nico Hulkenberg, has now come into calculations for the second Ferrari seat.

And, if not there, Hulkenberg – who will race for Ferrari-powered Sauber this year – could be on the shopping list of Red Bull to replace Webber, depending on whether either of Red Bull-owned Toro Rosso’s youngsters, Australian Daniel Ricciardo and Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne, prove themselves capable of it this year.

Last year’s visit to Abu Dhabi as a support act at the F1 grand prix was an unhappy experience for the V8 Supercar community and a return is now even less likely with F1 feeder categories GP2 and GP3 confirmed as support categories this year.

The seemingly imminent demise of the Abu Dhabi round will be a blow to the international expansion plans of V8 Supercars – a pet project of the category’s former executive chairman Tony Cochrane.

But it could mean a replacement round in Australia, as happened last year when a new international round – thought to have been planned for Korea or the Philippines – did not eventuate and Sydney Motorsport Park (formerly Eastern Creek) filled the breach.

An event at the Sydney permanent circuit most likely would be mid-year rather than at the start of November, just a month before the Sydney 500 on the Homebush street circuit.

And this time the Australian Racing Drivers’ Club that operates Sydney Motorsport Park may insist, after losing more than $500,000 on last year’s event, on V8 Supercars leasing the venue and bearing the financial risk.

The great Peterhansel on top in Dakar again

A mea culpa before a brief update on the fabulous Dakar Rally.

How on earth among all the names we, no I, nominated as motorsport’s man of the year in our 2012 review did I leave out Stephane Peterhansel, the 10-time winner – on four wheels and two – of the Dakar?

The only excuse is that as the marathon rally is in early January almost 12 months passes before review time.

But that would be a limp excuse. Invalid.

Peterhansel’s achievements must rank up with those of Michael Schumacher in F1 and Sebastien Loeb in the world rally championship. A case could be made that his feats are even greater.

Whatever, it was a terrible oversight to overlook him in deciding last year’s man of the year.

Reigning winner Peterhansel may now be headed for an 11th Dakar victory as he is leading the event again in MINI after five days as the field crossed from Peru into Chile overnight.

Less than 10 minutes behind though is Qatar’s 2011 Dakar winner Nasser Al-Attiyah in a new two-wheel drive buggy.

Al-Attiyah’s teammate, Spain’s 2010 Dakar winner and former world rally champion Carlos Sainz, is pretty much out of contention already after a host of navigational and electrical problems.

Sainz recouped time he lost on day two when organizers admitted a satellite problem was to blame for his navigational difficulties, but Peterhansel soon moved back into the lead and Sainz’s woes have since worsened.

South African Giniel De Villiers, another winner and in a Toyota HiLux, is running third but is more than half an hour behind Peterhansel.

The best-placed of the three Australian drivers in the car category is Cairns resort operator Geoff Olholm, who is a brilliant 13th in his Toyota HiLux, and within two hours of Peterhansel.

The Isuzu D-MAXs of Bruce Garland and his customer, rookie Adrian Di Lallo, are 46th and 51 respectively.

Best of the Australian bike riders are Rod Faggotter, 20th on a Yamaha, and Ben Grabham, 27th on a KTM, while Tasmanian rookie Matt Fish, the “waterboy” in the Husqvarna factory team, is now 56th after having been sixth after day two – and an incredible third on the second stage.

Tonight’s sixth stage is 313km from Arica to Calama with a day’s rest to come in a couple of days.

Image: www.speedcafe.com

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