Motor Racing Developments Ltd., commonly known as Brabham (), was a British racing car manufacturer and Formula One racing team.

In the 1960s, Brabham was the world's largest manufacturer of open wheel racing cars for sale to customer teams, and had built more than 500 cars by 1970.

In 1983 the Brabham BT52, driven by Piquet and Italian Riccardo Patrese, was powered by the BMW M12 Straight-4 engine, and powered Brabham to four of the team's 35 Grand Prix victories.

In 2009, an unsuccessful attempt was made by a German organisation to enter the 2010 Formula One season using the Brabham name.

Jack Brabham was 40 when he won the F1 drivers ' title in a Brabham car.

The Brabham team was founded by Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac, who met in 1951 while both were successfully building and racing cars in their native Australia.

Brabham was the more successful driver and went to the United Kingdom in 1955 to further his racing career.

Brabham was confident he could do better than Cooper, and in late 1959 he asked Tauranac to come to the UK and work with him, initially producing upgrade kits for Sunbeam Rapier and Triumph Herald road cars at his car dealership, Jack Brabham Motors, but with the long-term aim of designing racing cars.

The new company would compete with Cooper in the market for customer racing cars ; as Brabham was still employed by Cooper, Tauranac produced the first MRD car, for the entry level Formula Junior class, in secrecy.

From the 1963 season, Brabham was partnered by American driver Dan Gurney, the pair now running in Australia's racing colours of green and gold.

The car was fast — Rindt set pole position twice during the season — but Brabham and Rindt finished only three races between them, and ended the year with only ten points.

His replacement, Jacky Ickx, had a strong second half to the season, winning in Germany and Canada, after Jack Brabham was sidelined by a testing accident.

Sir John Arthur " Jack " Brabham, AO, OBE ( born 2 April 1926 ) is an Australian former racing driver who was Formula One champion in, and.

He was a founder of the Brabham racing team and race car constructor that bore his name.

Brabham was a Royal Australian Air Force flight mechanic and ran a small engineering workshop before he started racing midget cars in 1948.

John Arthur Brabham was born on 2 April 1926 in Hurstville, then a commuter town outside Sydney, Australia.

Brabham was involved with cars and mechanics from an early age.

On his 20th birthday, 2 April 1946, Brabham was discharged from the RAAF at the rank of Leading Aircraftman ( LAC ).

Brabham records that he was not taken with the idea of driving, being convinced that the drivers " were all lunatics " but he agreed to build a car with Schonberg.

Brabham has since said that it was " terrific driver training.

After the 1955 New Zealand Grand Prix, Brabham was persuaded by Dean Delamont, competitions manager of the Royal Automobile Club in the United Kingdom, to try a season of racing in Europe, then the international centre of road racing.

The Brabham BT3, the first Brabham Formula One design.

Jack Brabham took the team's first win at the non-championship Solitude Grand Prix in 1963.

At the French Grand Prix at Reims-Gueux, Jack Brabham became the first man to win a Formula One world championship race in a car bearing his own name.

At first Schonberg drove the homemade device, powered by a modified JAP motorcycle engine built by Brabham in his workshop.

A rear-engined T51 of the type Brabham used to win his first world championship. On arriving in Europe on his own in early 1955, Brabham based himself in the UK, where he bought another Cooper to race in national events.

In 1959, Cooper obtained 2. 5-litre engines for the first time and Brabham put the extra power to good use by winning his first world championship race at the season-opening Monaco Grand Prix after Jean Behra's Ferrari and Stirling Moss's Cooper failed.

The same year, Brabham entered the famous Indianapolis 500 oval race for the first time in a modified version of the Formula One Cooper.

Gurney took the lead driver role, and the team's first world championship win, while Brabham gave up his car to several other drivers towards the end of the season.

At the French Grand Prix at Reims-Gueux, Jack Brabham took his first Formula One world championship win since 1960 and became the first man to win such a race in a car of his own construction.

Having joined Brabham in 1978 for a $ 1 million salary, Lauda endured two unsuccessful seasons, notable mainly for his one race in the Brabham BT46B, a radical design known as the Fan Car: it won its first race, but Brabham did not use the car in F1 again, not wanting the car to be banned outright.

For the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Peugeot 908 HDi FAPs finished first and second overall, led by drivers Marc Gené, David Brabham, and Alexander Wurz.

Lotus used the concept of positive aerodynamic downforce, through the addition of wings, at a Tasman Formula race in early 1968, although Ferrari and Brabham were the first to use them in a Formula One race at the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix.

He was the first driver to win a Formula One World Championship with the Williams team, becoming the 1980 World Drivers ' Champion and the second Australian to do so following triple World Champion Sir Jack Brabham.

At the end of the season he had beaten Nelson Piquet by 13 points in the standings, becoming Australia's first World Champion since Sir Jack Brabham.

Brabham, who first won the Grand Prix in 1955 in an obsolete sports-bodied Cooper T40 Bristol he had brought home from his first foray into English racing, would test new developments for Cooper during the European winter, beginning a flood of Cooper-Climax Grand Prix machinery into Australia and New Zealand before Brabham started building his own cars, as well as the appearance of Lotus chassis as well, finally killing off the Australian ' specials '.

Brabham cars also competed in the Indianapolis 500 and in Formula 5000 racing.

In 1962 he established his own Brabham marque with fellow Australian Ron Tauranac, which became the largest manufacturer of customer racing cars in the world in the 1960s.

Brabham retired to Australia after the 1970 Formula One season, where he bought a farm and maintained various business interests, which included the Engine Developments racing engine manufacturer and several garages.

Brabham started racing after an American friend, Johnny Schonberg, persuaded him to watch a midget car race.

In 1948, Schonberg's wife persuaded him to stop racing and on his suggestion Brabham took over.

After successfully running the midget at some hillclimbing events in 1951, Brabham became interested in road racing.

Brabham soon " seemed to merge into Cooper Cars ": he was not an employee, but he started working at Cooper on a daily basis from the midpoint of the 1955 season building a Bobtail mid-engined sports car, intended for Formula One, the top category of single seater racing.

After more than three hours of racing, the exhausted Brabham, who " hated to be beaten ", pushed the car to the line to finish sixth.

He considered buying Cooper in partnership with Roy Salvadori and then in late 1959 he asked his friend Ron Tauranac to come to the UK and work with him, initially producing upgrade kits for Sunbeam Rapier and Triumph Herald road cars at his car dealership, Jack Brabham Motors, but with the long-term aim of designing racing cars.

Brabham and Tauranac set up a company called Motor Racing Developments Ltd. ( MRD ), which initially produced customer racing cars, while Brabham himself continued to race for Cooper.