Tony Brooks looks back: modest recollections of a grand prix great

Seventeen years ago, the chance of a British car winning a World Championship Grand Prix was unlikely, the prospect of that state of affairs changing looked remarkably dim. With Mercedes-Benz and Maserati having a virtual stranglehold on the World Championship series, British efforts in no way matched up to the Continental opposition. BRM’s effort usually resulted in a few fleeting moments of sheer speed which ended when the 2 1/2-litre motor fell apart or the chassis played evil tricks on its driver and sent him off the road. But the Guildford based Connaught organisation could at least be relied upon to field a car which handled well, even though the pre-war Alta motor just wasn’t capable of staying with the more sophisticated power units from Italy and Germany. Yet it was in one of these cars that an unknown name in Formula One put British cars on the post-war racing map by heating the works Maseratis in the non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix at the very end of the 1955 season.

The man who pulled off this historic win was a quiet, unassuming dental student from Surrey, Charles Antony Standish Brooks, and it was to Brooks’ modern Lancia and Fiat dealership in rural byfleet that we went to talk to him about the successful Grand Prix career into which he was virtually pitched as a result of that “outside” victory. Brooks has retired front Formula One racing for 12 years, an honest decision made after honest self-appraisal at the early age of 29, “after a season driving the works BRMs, which were forced to rely on Coventry-Climax 4-cylinder motors since the V8 unit never materialised, quite frankly, the whole thing was rather unsatisfactory and this encouraged me to hasten retirement to the motor business which I’d originally established in 1959”.

In any event, Brooks was openly disillusioned about the World Championship points system which, he felt, showed up in a very poor light in 1958. “Stirling Moss won three races for Vanwall, plus another in Rob Walker’s Cooper-Climax, I won three for Vanwall and Mike Hawthorn won two for Ferrari. It was then I realised that you could go on chasing the World Championship until you were 50 and still get no nearer to winning it. I thought, boy, if Moss won four, I won three and the World Champion won two, then forget it.” From many of today’s highly-paid F1 “heroes” such talk would be dismissed as “sour grapes”, but Brooks’ modest self appraisal lends sincerity to such a view. In fact, he talks about his arrival into top line racing in an almost apologetic fashion. In 1954 and 55 his prowess at the wheel of an old Frazer Nash at Goodwood marked him out as a youngster with above-average capability and this led him into the works Aston-Martin team as an occasional member when the Feltham organisation ran three cars. “But generally I found myself left out when just two cars were running, so I was very much a ‘part-timer’.”

Nevertheless, Brooks’ prowess was sufficiently great to earn him a place in the works team for the 1955 Le Mans race where he partnered wealthy amateur John Riseley-Pritchard at the wheel of the third entry. They didn’t finish but the effect of the terrible accident involving Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes-Benz which cost the lives of over eighty spectators brought family pressure to bear on Riseley-Pritchard to give up motor racing. He succumbed to his family’s insistence, thus leaving his Formula Two Connaught available, and he immediately recruited Brooks to handle it for the rest of the year.

Then in October came the non-championship Formula One event scheduled for the road circuit at Syracuse on the very southeast tip of Sicily. It wasn’t really much more than a glorified club affair, but the entry contained the Maserati team with Luigi Musso and Luigi Villoresi. The old London Transport coaches which the Connaught team used to transport their team of cars round in made the trip to Sicily and designer Rodney Clarke opted to give Brooks his chance at the wheel of one of their 2 1/2-litre cars. The young Englishman had to interrupt his dentistry studies at Manchester University to make the nine-hour ‘plane journey to Sicily, still reluctant to acknowledge that he might have any racing talent.

“Quite honestly I still felt that dentistry was the way to go. I wanted a secure career behind me while I went motor racing; in retrospect I feel that I should have put my profession on one side, gone racing and returned to it later on. But that is hindsight; quite honestly, I felt they picked me for Syracuse simply because there wasn’t anyone else available. As far as I was concerned it was study all the way down on the aeroplane and study all the way back. The race was what you might call a bit of light relief between studies.” By the time the official practice sessions ended. Brooks had planted the Connaught on the outside of the front row of the grid alongside the two Maseratis. The fact that he’d managed this feat simply didn’t register with him as he admits he was more preoccupied trying to observe the Alta engine’s strictly imposed rev-limit and “doing my best not to ‘jigger-up’ the pre-selector gearbox”. At the start of the race the Connaught was slow away but slowly and surely made up ground on the leading Maseratis, passed them, and started to pull away. For the driver of the green car “taught that red cars shouldn’t get bigger, they should get smaller in front of you”, the whole situation was rather beyond his appreciation. He stayed ahead and won.

Immediately after the race the young Englishman was mobbed by hundreds of enthusiastic Sicilians. Brooks recalled that he ran to climb onto his motor-scooter in order to escape their attentions—”I wasn’t as European in my thinking as I hope I am now; it really was quite a frightening experience”— and tried to tighten the protective handkerchief which he had tied round his sore palms by means of grasping it in his teeth.

“The crown on my front tooth promptly fell to the ground, amongst the feet of all these mad Sicilians! But fortunately I had a spare crown, which I fixed for the prize-giving. But if my smiles looked a little stilted, that’s the reason why!”