MOTORSPORT: Sir Jack Brabham – A legendary life

How fitting it is that, if Australia had to lose its most successful motor racing identity, Sir Jack Brabham's death came in the week of the Monaco Grand Prix and America's Indianapolis 500.

It was at Monaco, the rich Mediterannean principality whose annual street race is the crown jewel of the Formula One world championship, that Brabham scored the first of his 14 grand prix wins 55 years and nine days ago, in 1959.

At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway he began a revolution by taking a nimble rear-engined open-wheeler car to the place known as The Brickyard that ended the dominance of the big front-engined roadsters.

Although he never won the Indy 500, Brabham is almost as much a legend at Indianapolis as he became in F1.

His 14 GP wins and three F1 world titles remain records by Australians – two more race victories and two more titles than Alan Jones, and five more wins than Mark Webber, who bowed out of F1 at the end of last year (having idolised Brabham) but without a title.

Tim Schenken and now Daniel Ricciardo are the only other Australians to have finished GPs on the podium.

And nobody else, Australian or otherwise, has won an F1 world title in a car bearing his own name.

Sir Jack died at his Gold Coast home on Sunday. He was 88 and had been the oldest surviving world champion. His passing will be mourned greatly in Australia but particularly abroad, especially at Sunday's Monaco GP and Indianapolis 500.

Brabham was, on an international scale, what Peter Brock was in national motor racing – Australia's icon.

He grew up at St George in Sydney, left school at 15, worked in a grocery store and garage before going off, as a Royal Australian Air Force mechanic, to World War II.

He began racing at Australian dirt-track speedways in the 1940s but in the 1950s went to Europe to join the Cooper F1 team.

In his early years abroad he raced against the likes of Juan Manuel Fangio and Sir Stirling Moss and later, in his heyday, against the great Scotsmen, Jim Clark and Sir Jackie Stewart.

Brabham won his first two world titles, in 1959 and '60, with Cooper but the most famous was his third, in 1966, driving a car of his own construction – the BT19, a Brabham powered by an Australian designed and built Repco engine.

Brabham had a great, almost anonymous (certainly outside F1) partner, Ron Tauranac. The designer of his cars once he left Cooper, Tauranac later created the hugely-successful Ralt open-wheeler brand.

The acronym BT stood for Brabham and Tauranac and it was a combination that, based in Britain, conquered the world against the might of teams like Italy's Ferrari and the original Lotus of the genius Colin Chapman. The BTs were proudly liveried in Australia's green and gold colours.

Brabham was 33 when he notched his maiden GP victory at Monaco and 44 when he last won in 1970, his final season before selling his share of his team to Bernie Ecclestone – something Tauranac also did a little later.

Brabham's name is rarely mentioned in talk of the all-time greatest F1 drivers, but he had something the others didn't: superb engineering skills that, combined with Tauranac's talents, made his cars super-reliable as well as fast.

He was known variously as "Black Jack” because of his dark hair, "The Old Fox” because of his guile, and – perhaps most appropriately – "Jack of all Trades”.

Brabham began a dynasty that continues today. His sons, Geoffrey and David, both count Le Mans 24 hour sports car race wins among many achievements. David had two stints in F1 and Geoffrey was hugely successful in America, including 10 Indy 500 starts – but, like his dad, without a victory at The Brickyard.

Another son, Gary, also was a racer, while Sir Jack's grandsons, Matthew and Sam, are winning open-wheeler races in the US and Britain now.

The Brabhams are Australia's first family of motor racing. Royalty in the sport.

Vale, Sir Jack Brabham: a hero, a world champion three times over, and a champion bloke.

Jack Brabham-Australia's First World Champion