The first cars built by the Coopers were single-seat 500-cc Formula Three racing cars driven by John Cooper and Eric Brandon and powered by a JAP motorcycle engine. Since materials were in short supply immediately after World War II, the prototypes were constructed by joining two old Fiat Topolino front-ends together. According to John Cooper, the location of the engine behind the driver — the rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout pioneered by German race cars in the 1920s and 1930s — was merely a practical matter: as the car was powered by a motorcycle engine whose gearbox drove a chain, it was more convenient to have the engine and drivetrain in the back. There was nothing new about mid-engined racing cars, but there is no doubt the Coopers led the way in popularising what was to become the dominant arrangement for racing cars.
Called the Cooper 500, this car's success in hillclimbs and on track — including Eric Brandon winning the 500 race at one of the first postwar meetings at Gransden Lodge Airfield — quickly created demand from other drivers (over the years including Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Jim Russell, Ivor Bueb, Ken Tyrrell, and Bernie Ecclestone) and led to the establishment of the Cooper Car Company to build more. The business grew by providing an inexpensive entry to motorsport for seemingly every aspiring young British driver, and the company became the world's first and largest postwar specialist manufacturer of racing cars for sale to privateers.
Cooper built up to 300 single- and twin-cylinder cars during the 1940s and 1950s, dominating the F3 category by winning 64 of 78 major races between 1951 and 1954. This volume of construction was unique and enabled the company to grow into the senior categories. With a modified Cooper 500 chassis — a T12 model — Cooper had its first taste of top-tier racing when Harry Schell qualified for the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix. Though Schell retired on the first lap, this marked the first appearance of a rear-engined racer at a Grand Prix event since the end of WWII.
The front-engined Formula Two Cooper Bristol model was introduced in 1952. Various iterations were driven by a number of legendary drivers — among them Juan Manuel Fangio and Mike Hawthorn — and furthered the company's reputation by appearing in Grand Prix races, which at the time were run to F2 regulations. Until the company began building rear-engined sports cars in 1955, about two years after the mid-engined Porsche 550 was introduced, they had not really become aware of the benefits of placing the engine behind the driver. Based on the 500-cc cars and powered by a modified Coventry Climax fire-pump engine, these cars were called "Bobtails"; with the centre of gravity closer to the middle of the car, they were less liable to spin and more effective at putting power down to the road, so Cooper built a single-seater version and began entering it in Formula 2 races.
At the 1956 French Grand Prix a rear-mid-engined car, the Bugatti Type 251, appeared, but with a straight-8 mounted transversely behind the driver it proved uncompetitive and retired after 18 laps. Two rear-engined Cooper T43s with the still undersized and underpowered 2-litre Formula 1 variant of the Climax FPF attempted to qualify for the 1957 Monaco Grand Prix; only Jack Brabham succeeded, second to last and over 6 seconds slower. After crashes, Brabham ran third towards the end until the fuel pump failed on the 100th lap; he coasted to the harbour and pushed the car over the finish line for sixth place, five laps down, for which no points were then awarded.
The first F1 win of a rear-engined car, at the 1958 Argentine Grand Prix, can be attributed to circumstances and deception. In the absence of most British teams, only 10 cars showed up early in the season in South America, one of them Rob Walker's privately entered Cooper-Climax driven by Vanwall driver Stirling Moss. Due to hot weather the race was shortened, and all teams were expected to stop for a tyre change; the Cooper T43, with regular four-stud wheels, was at a disadvantage to the single centre-lock nut of others. Moss took the lead while others pitted, and the Italian teams took it easy believing he would have to come in too. They realized too late that the nimble little car would not pit at all, and the two Ferraris could not catch him. At the 1958 Monaco Grand Prix three new Cooper T45s qualified among the top five, and when Maurice Trintignant won there the racing world was stunned: a rear-engined revolution had begun, even though front-engined cars won all the remaining races and the underpowered Cooper only added two podiums.
The next year, 1959, Brabham and the Cooper works 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 F1 World Champion after 1958 has been sitting in front of his engine. The little-known designer behind the Cooper was Owen Maddock, known as "The Beard" to his workmates and "Whiskers" to Charles Cooper, a familiar figure in the drivers' paddock of the 1950s and a prime force behind the rise of British racing cars to their dominant position in the 1960s. Maddock described how the revolutionary chassis came to be: "I'd done various schemes for the new car which I'd shown to Charlie Cooper. He kept saying 'Nah, Whiskers, that's not it, try again.' Finally, I got so fed up I sketched a frame in which every tube was bent, meant just as a joke. I showed it to Charlie and to my astonishment he grabbed it and said: 'That's it!'" Maddock later pioneered one of the first designs for a honeycomb monocoque stressed-skin composite chassis and helped develop Cooper's C5S racing gearbox.
Brabham took one of the championship-winning Cooper T53 "Lowlines" to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for a test in 1960, then entered the 500-mile race in a larger, longer, offset car based on the 1960 F1 design, the unique Type T54. Arriving at the Speedway on 5 May 1961, the "funny" little car from Europe was mocked by the other teams but ran as high as third and finished ninth. Beginning with Jim Clark, who drove a rear-engined Lotus in 1965, every winner of the Indianapolis 500 since 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 mid-engined racers, the practicality of Cooper's single-seaters was overtaken by more sophisticated technology from Lola, Lotus, BRM, and Ferrari. Changing engine regulations — down to 1500cc in 1961 and a "return to power" with 3000cc in 1966 — also made racing difficult. The team's decline was accelerated when John Cooper was seriously injured in a 1963 road accident 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. That same year the team moved from Surbiton to a modern factory unit at Canada Road, Oyster Lane in Byfleet. Cooper's 1965 season petered out and at the end of the year number-one driver Bruce McLaren left to build his own F1 car for the new-for-1966 3-litre formula. Cooper's new owners held the Maserati concession for the UK, and arrangements were made for Cooper to build a new 3-litre Cooper-Maserati. The Maserati engine was an updated, enlarged version of the 2.5-litre V-12 used in the works 250Fs in 1957 — an old design, heavy and thirsty — and the new T81 chassis built to take it was necessarily large. Three cars were sold to private owners (Rob Walker for Jo Siffert, Jo Bonnier's Anglo Swiss Racing Team, and French privateer Guy Ligier), none achieving much success.
Jochen Rindt was entering the second year of his three-year contract. With McLaren's departure and the team's lack of success, Cooper were fortunate to acquire Honda's Richie Ginther temporarily, then made a one-off arrangement with Chris Amon for the French Grand Prix before John Surtees became available after falling out with Ferrari. Once fuel-contract issues were resolved, Surtees joined the team, and with his development skills and a switch to Firestone tyres the car improved to the point that Surtees won the final race of the year in Mexico. Surtees left to join Honda for 1967 and Pedro Rodríguez joined Rindt, immediately winning the opening race of 1967 in South Africa in an unlikely Cooper one-two — a fortuitous win, as Rodríguez was being outpaced by Rhodesian John Love until Love had to make a late fuel stop. This was Cooper's last Grand Prix victory. Rindt, impatiently seeing out his contract, deliberately blew up his antiquated Maserati engine in the US Grand Prix and was fired before the season finale.
For 1968 Cooper would have liked the Cosworth-Ford DFV but felt its British Leyland connections via the Mini-Coopers made this inadvisable, so a deal was done with BRM for its 3-litre V-12. A modified T86, the T86B, was built for it, driven by Italian ex-Ferrari driver Ludovico Scarfiotti and young Englishman Brian Redman. The cars managed third and fourth in the Spanish and Monaco Grands Prix, largely thanks to the unreliability of the competition, but then Scarfiotti was killed driving a Porsche in the Rossfeld hill climb and Redman had a big accident in the Belgian Grand Prix that put him out for months. The beginning of the end came in 1969 as the company tried, and failed, to find sponsorship for a Cosworth DFV-powered car; there were many redundancies. 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 — the T52, T56, T59, and T67 models. Ken Tyrrell ran a very successful team with John Love and Tony Maggs as drivers, and following the demise of Formula Junior, Tyrrell tested Jackie Stewart in a Cooper T72 Formula Three car at the Goodwood Circuit, marking the start of a partnership that dominated motorsport later on. John Cooper retired to the Sussex coast, where in 1971 he founded a garage business at Ferring, near Worthing, selling Mini Cooper engine-tuning kits and performance parts; the garage was sold to Honda in 1986. In October 2009, Mike Cooper, the son of John Cooper, launched Cooper Bikes, the bicycle division of the Cooper Car Company.
As the company's fortunes in Formula One declined, the John Cooper-conceived Mini — introduced in 1961 as a development of the Alec Issigonis-designed British Motor Corporation Mini with a more powerful engine, new brakes, and a distinctive livery — continued to dominate saloon-car and rally races throughout the 1960s, winning many championships and the 1964, 1965, and 1967 Monte Carlo rallies. Several different Cooper-marked versions of the Mini and various Cooper conversion kits have been marketed by various companies. The current BMW MINI, in production since 2001, has Cooper and Cooper S models and a number of John Cooper Works tuner packages.
On 1 April 1968, John Cooper leased the building at 243 Ewell Road to the Metropolitan Police, and the local Traffic Division (V Victor) moved in for the next 25 years, 'TDV' becoming one of the busier police garages. In August 1968 they were supplied with two Mini Coopers, index numbers PYT767F and PYT768F, whose steering-wheel centre boss was replaced by a speaker, microphone and a PTT transmitter switch. The vehicles were trialled for a number of months but no orders were placed for other garages. The police later moved out and the building became a Porsche dealership.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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