MOTORSPORT: Teen Brabham victorious in Britain

Sam Brabham, a 19-year-old grandson of Australia’s 88-year-old triple Formula One world champion Sir Jack, won two races in the British Formula Ford Championship at the weekend.

Mark Webber’s second and final sports car warm-up race for Le Mans didn’t go well, his Porsche finishing 23 laps down on the victorious Toyota in the Spa Six-Hour in Belgium and the Audi and other Toyota that were on the podium. The other Porsche was fourth, one lap down.

The new Rallycross World Championship got off to a dream start in Portugal with  charismatic former world rally champion Petter “Hollywood” Solberg victorious in a Citroen DS3 ahead of a couple of Fords and two Volkswagens. Jacques Villeneuve didn’t make the semi-finals though in his Peugeot.

The man who leaked Ferrari secrets to McLaren seven years ago, sparking the “Spygate” scandal that cost McLaren a US$100 million fine, has died in a road crash.

Marcos Ambrose finished only 19th in the 10th round of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup after the tumult of the previous week, punching rival Casey Mears. Denny Hamlin won the Talladega race in a Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing and there were two of the usual multi-car shunts.

That makes Sam a nephew of Geoff, another Le Mans winner and long-time racer in America, and Gary, Sir Jack’s middle son, who was in an IndyCar at the Gold Coast more than 20 years ago.

Sam’s also a cousin of Matthew, Geoff’s son who is a little older and climbing the ladder in American open-wheeler racing, now with an Indy Lights podium under his belt after winning US F2000 and Pro Mazda titles the past two years.

Sam’s mum is Lisa, sister of Mike Thackwell, the New Zealander who for almost three decades was the youngest driver to start an F1 grand prix.

It’s easy to see young Sam has racing in his veins and his French-made Mygale Formula Ford car, run by Joe Tandy Racing, is painted in the Brabham livery like that his father sported in his first F1 stint in a Brabham car.

At Thruxton, one of Britain’s fastest circuit, the latest Brabham scored two pole positions and notched his maiden victory in the British Formula Ford Championship. He followed that up with fifth place in a reverse-grid race, then won the third race of the Formula Ford triple-header round.

He led from start to finish in both victories, although it wasn’t all easy. For six laps in the first race he had to circulate behind a safety car after there had been a big crash. In the race he didn’t win he set a lap record for the category.

“We started off with two pole positions – the first of my career – and to get my first race win is just something so special and a day I’ll never forget,” Brabham said. “We got solid points in race two on the reverse grid and I’m really chuffed to have set the series lap record.

“The last race was just fantastic. I was maintaining the gaps and pushing when I needed to. I had to think about the tyres, manage the fuel and back off where I could without losing too much time.

“It was the perfect race and now I’m aiming for more of the same at Oulton Park [in Cheshire on June 7-8].”

Thruxton was the third triple-header of the British Formula Ford Championship, in which the latest Brabham is sixth in the points. He had finished a storming second in one of the races at the previous round at Donington Park in Leicestershire. It is his second year in Formula Ford, having finished fourth in the championship last year and won the scholarship class.

He was a late starter in kart racing at 16 but already has had a taste of “wings and slicks” car racing in Britain’s Formula 2000 Challenge.

One of the 919s – driven by German Marc Lieb, Swiss Neel Jani and Frenchman Romain Dumas – started Saturday’s Spa Six-Hour from pole position, led the race early and again later, but an electrical problem perhaps cost it victory. Dumas was required to reset the twin-hybrid system while driving and lost more than a minute as he cycled through various checks. That time was at least the difference between making the podium and not.

Lieb set the fastest lap of the weekend – below 2 minutes – in practice, while Jani’s best qualifying lap was the next best time of the two-day meeting.

The Webber car started fifth after having finished third on debut at the Silverstone Six-Hour two weeks earlier. However, it had to stop to change the rear dampers, which dropped it to 27th, and later the crew had to swap a broken driveshaft in the garage. It finished 23rd of 28 starters – and 23 laps behind the cars on the podium, which all completed 171 laps.

“Despite the problems we had we never gave up fighting and got the most out of it,” Webber said. “The car runs well but we could not exploit its full potential.

“The team works really hard and we are learning very quickly.

“Our speed is encouraging. We now have to solve the teething problems, which are normal for such a new project.”

The victorious Toyota TS040 was driven by Englishman Anthony Davidson, Frenchman Nicholas Lapierre and Swiss Sebastien Buemi, finishing a little more than a minute ahead of the Audi R18 e-tron Quattro of Frenchman Loic Duval, Dane Tom Kristensen and Brazilian Lucas di Grassi.

Audi’s three entries all finished – the others were fifth and sixth – after the two cars it ran at Silverstone both crashed.

The Toyota that was third at Spa – driven by Austrian Alex Wurz, Frenchman Stephane Sarrazin and Japan’s Kazuki Nakajima – was only seven seconds behind the best of the Audis. The Japanese manufacturer now heads to Le Mans with its best chance of defeating Audi, which has won the 24-hour classic all but one time this century.

However, Webber – whose co-drivers are German Timo Bernhard and young New Zealander Brendon Hartley – may have to wait at least another year for a genuine chance to collect the grandest prize in sports car racing.

World RX begins with a dose of Hollywood
Petter Solberg, Norway’s 2003 world rally champion, is the first winner in the new Rallycross World Championship – just what it needed.

“It’s unbelievable – it feels like winning my first rally again,” the extrovert Solberg said as he celebrated the victory at Montalegre in Portugal in his Citroen DS3.

Despite failing to finish heat two due to a broken throttle cable, “Hollywood” Solberg qualified on pole position for the six-lap final, led into the first corner, retained the lead and saved his compulsory “joker lap” – an excursion that adds a couple of seconds – until the end. He beat countryman Andreas Bakkerud and Latvian Reinis Nitiss – both in Ford Fiesta STs for Swedish team Olsbergs MSE.

Things didn’t go anywhere near as well for Canada’s 1997 F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve, who was caught in traffic in his first heat and then was slowed by a puncture in his second heat. He missed his third heat when his Peugeot 208, entered by Scottish team Albatec Racing, developed a water leak in the paddock.

Held up in traffic again in his fourth and final heat, Villeneuve could not make the top 12 and so missed a place in the semi-finals.

Classified 17th for the event, he said it had been “an appetiser” for the next round on May 24-25 at Britain’s Lydden Hill, the sport’s birthplace in 1967.

Now Stepney is dead at 56, killed in a crash on a British motorway last Friday.

Police say Stepney had stopped his VW caddy van on the shoulder of the M20 in Kent, then was hit by a truck as he re-entered the traffic.

Stepney was one of the two key villains in the 2007 “Spygate” affair, passing Ferrari secrets to Mike Coughlan, then at McLaren. It was for that that Stepney was prosecuted in Italy – and for which the McLaren team was fined US$100 million by motorsport’s governing Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).

Stepney began work as a mechanic in British touring car racing before advancing to F1 with the Shadow, Lotus and Benetton teams and ultimately Ferrari, where as a kind of team co-ordinator he was credited with making the crew’s pitstop work the most disciplined in F1.

At Lotus he had worked with Ayrton Senna and at Ferrari he was associated with all five world titles that Michael Schumacher won with F1’s most famous team. However, Stepney’s relationship with the scuderia soured – reportedly because he felt he was not given an appropriate promotion after Ross Brawn’s departure – and he was accused of sabotaging the red cars at a Monaco Grand Prix and then passing the team’s intellectual property to great rival McLaren.

The FIA discredited him by recommending F1 teams not associate with Stepney after Ferrari sacked him, but he resurfaced a couple of years later with a British GT and sports car squad, JRM. Stepney was JRM’s technical director when it won the 2011 FIA GT World Championship. The team then fielded Honda Performance Development sports cars at Le Mans, with David Brabham as one of its drivers.

Last year it won a European endurance championship with a Nissan GT-R. This author had the pleasure of a guided tour of Ferrari’s Maranello F1 headquarters by Stepney 13 years ago. He had talked of writing a book on his experiences, but – unless he has left a manuscript – it’s too late for that now.

It would have been an enthralling read.