Aston Martin Lagonda Limited

Jack Brabham raised some eyebrows when he took sixth place at the 1957 Monaco Grand Prix in a rear-engined Formula 2 Cooper. But when Stirling Moss won the 1958 Argentine Grand Prix in Rob Walker’s privately-entered Cooper and Maurice Trintignant duplicated the feat in the next race at Monaco, the racing world was stunned and a rear-engined revolution had begun. The next year, 1959, Brabham and the factory Cooper team became the first to win the Formula One World Championship in a rear-engined car. Both team and driver repeated the feat in 1960, and every World Champion since has been sitting in front of his engine.

Brabham took one of the Championship-winning Cooper T53 “Lowline” to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for a test in 1960, then entered the famous 500-mile race in a larger, longer and offset car based on the 1960 F1 design. Arriving at the Speedway May 5, 1961, the “funny” little car from Europe was mocked by the other teams, but it ran as high as third and finished ninth. It took a few years, but the Indianapolis establishment gradually realized the writing was on the wall and the days of their front-engined roadsters were numbered. Beginning with Jim Clark, who drove a rear-engined Lotus in 1965, every winner of the Indianapolis 500 has had the engine in the back. The revolution begun by the little chain-driven Cooper 500 was complete.

Once every Formula car manufacturer began building rear-engined racers, the practicality and intelligent construction of Cooper’s single-seaters was overtaken by more sophisticated technology from Lola, Lotus, BRM and Ferrari. The Cooper team’s decline was accelerated when John Cooper was seriously injured in a road accident in 1963 driving a twin engined Mini and Charles Cooper died in 1964.

After the death of his father, John Cooper sold the Cooper Formula One team to the Chipstead Motor Group in April, 1965. Their final Formula One victory was achieved by Mexican driver Pedro Rodríguez at the 1967 South African Grand Prix in a Cooper T81. In all, Coopers participated in 129 Formula One World Championship events in nine years, winning 16 races.

Besides Formula One cars, Cooper offered a series of Formula Junior cars. These were the T52, T56, T59 and T67 models. Ken Tyrrell ran a very successful team with John Love and Tony Maggs as his drivers. Following the demise of Formula Junior, Ken Tyrrell tested Jackie Stewart in a Formula Three car, a Cooper T72. This test at the Goodwood Circuit marked the start of partnership which dominated motorsport later on.

In 2008, the Cooper name survives (2008) in the chain of UK BMW dealerships operated by Inchcape plc.

The Cooper Car Company was founded in 1946 by Charles Cooper and his son John Cooper. Together with John’s boyhood friend, Eric Brandon, they began by building racing cars in Charles’ small garage in Surbiton, Surrey, England in 1946. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, they reached auto racing’s highest levels as their rear-engined, single-seat cars altered the face of Formula One and the Indianapolis 500, and their Mini Cooper dominated Rally racing. Thanks in part to Cooper’s legacy, Britain remains the home of a thriving racing industry, and the Cooper name lives on in the Cooper versions of the Mini (BMW) production cars that are still built in England but are now owned and marketed by BMW.