Isn’t it a beautiful racing car? Painted in green with a white vertical stripe, white wings and a white border around the nose. If I didn’t know better, I would have assumed that this was a Formula 1 racing car from 1970 or 1971. However, it is “only” a Formula 2 racing car, although the Formula 2 European Championship was very popular and highly competitive at the time. Some of the drivers who took part were seasoned Formula 1 drivers and made the competitive situation even tougher.
This Formula 2 racing car presented here was built by Brabham and is called the Brabham BT36. The BT is an abbreviation for the names of Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac, who was the designer of Brabham Motor Racing Developments Ltd (MRD) at the time and was responsible for the development and design of the Brabham racing cars. Brabham Motor Racing Developments was founded in 1961 by the then two-time Formula 1 World Champion Jack Brabham and engineer Ron Tauranac and over the years won two constructors’ world championships in 1966 and 1967 and four drivers’ titles with Jack Brabham’s third title in 1966, making him the first Formula 1 World Champion in his own racing car, with Denis Hulme in 1967 and with Nelson Piquet in 1981 and 1983.
The most successful period for this racing team was undoubtedly the late 1970s through to the 1980s under the leadership of Bernie Ecclestone and with the sometimes ground-breaking designs of Gordon Murray, such as the 1976 Brabham BT46, which went down in history as a hoover racing car.
In the 1960s, Brabham Motor Racing Developments Ltd. was the most successful and largest manufacturer of racing cars for customer teams in the world. By 1970, the company had built more than 500 racing cars for a wide variety of racing formulae. Brabham racing cars raced not only in Formula 1, but also in Formula 2 and Formula 3, as well as in the Indianapolis 500 and Formula 5000.
As Brabham Motor Racing Developments produced many Formula 2 racers and also sold them to private drivers or other racing teams, many a very prominent racing driver had the pleasure of driving one of these fast racers on the track. One of them was the unforgettable Jochen Rindt, the pop star of motorsport in the sixties. But Graham Hill, Tim Schenken and the young Argentinian newcomer Carlos Reutemann also drove the Brabham BT36. The BT 36 was therefore the direct successor to the BT30, the main competitor in the Formula 2 European Championship races came from March with the Type 721M, which was already a monocoque construction in contrast to the BT36, which still had a tubular steel frame as its base. Brabham then also converted to this more modern design for the 1972 season.
The Brabham BT36/11 photographed here was originally delivered to Silvio Moser in July 1971 to replace his BT30. At the end of 1971, the BT36/11 was most likely sold to the Swiss Hans Obrist, who probably also used it in various hillclimb races until 1973. Despite changing owners, the racing car was probably used in a number of hill climbs in Switzerland, France and Luxembourg until the early 1980s. Since 2011, the Brabham BT36/11 has been owned by Luciano Arnold, who repeatedly drives it on various occasions as part of the historic Formula 2 races and thus truly enriches the picture on the starting grid. Because beautiful racing cars like this Formula 2 racing car from Brabham enrich every picture. Find out more about our photographer Ralph Lüker.
