Laconic Australian hero of the motor racing circuit

Sir Jack Brabham, who has died aged 88, was one of motor racing's great practical heroes, a tough Australian who applied a down-to-earth attitude to his craft.

Not only did he win three world championship titles, in 1959, 1960 and 1966, but the third was at the wheel of a car bearing his own name. This was a unique achievement in Formula One history and all the more satisfying given that he was 40 when he took that third title crown and regarded by many as being over the hill.

During a Formula One career that ran from 1955 to 1970, Brabham competed in 126 grands prix, winning on 14 occasions. For the first six years he drove for the Cooper team, and then set up as a constructor in his own right.

Brabham is recalled by all who worked with him as someone who never wasted words. He was shrewd to the point of cunning, a great mechanical improviser in the days when racing drivers still got their hands dirty and an all-rounder prepared to turn his hand to any chore. Wanted to fly The grandson of a cockney who went to Australia in 1885 and the son of Tom, a greengrocer, and his wife, May, Jack was born in Hurstville, near Sydney. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force aged 18, very much wanting to fly, but at a late stage in the war there was more demand for mechanics than aircrew. On being demobbed in 1947 he succumbed to the lure of motor racing.

After success on the Australian racing scene, Brabham aspired to a professional career. He was well ahead of his time when he attracted sponsorship for his Cooper-Bristol, but the Australian motorsport authorities made him remove the advertising.

In 1955 he left for Britain and became involved with the father-and-son racing-car builders Charles and John Cooper, making his Formula One debut in the 1955 British grand prix at Aintree in a central-seater Cooper sports car. Thereafter Brabham rode the crest of the Formula One wave as Cooper rewrote the parameters of contemporary car performance, their rear-engined models superseding all their traditionally front-engined rivals.

Although Stirling Moss won the first Cooper victory in the 1958 Argentine Grand Prix, once Brabham hit his stride in the summer of 1959 there was no stopping him. During that period he won seven races and two world championships. It was perfect timing; the right machine, the right driver, the right moment.

Nevertheless, Brabham had been nurturing long-term plans to manufacture production racing cars for the junior international formulas in his own right. Out on his own He left Cooper at the end of the 1961 season, by which time their star was fading, and gave the first Brabham Formula One car its race debut in the following year’s German grand prix. From 1963 to 1965 he employed the talented American Dan Gurney as his team-mate, the Californian winning the 1964 French and Mexican Grands Prix. But with the advent of the new three-litre Formula One engine regulations at the start of 1966, Brabham pulled another masterstroke by arranging for the Australian Repco company to build him a Formula One V8 engine to power his car.

Brabham scored his first victory at the wheel of his own vehicle in the 1966 French Grand Prix at Reims and followed this up with wins in the British, Dutch and German races. In a defiant retort to the view that he was too old for the top flight, he hobbled on to the grid before the Dutch race wearing a false beard and leaning on a stick.

The Brabham-Repco momentum continued into 1967, when Jack’s team-mate, Denny Hulme, won the championship, although by the end of the season the writing was on the wall for the Repco V8. With the introduction of the new Ford-financed Cosworth DFV V8, every other engine was suddenly reduced to the role of also-ran.

Brabham won his final grand prix victory in South Africa in 1970, after which he retired. He continued to contribute articles to racing journals and wrote three books. His first marriage, to Betty Beresford, in 1951, ended in divorce in 1994. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret Taylor, whom he married in 1996, and three sons from his first marriage, Geoff, Gary and David.