What's in a name?

It may be your own moniker but that doesn’t mean you own it

Quite a bit, if you ask David Brabham. His battle to gain back control of the family name, from a business point of view, was perhaps the toughest of his life. Now he has it, he continues to work out what to do with it.

Badging an LMP2 sports car team would be relatively easy, but that’s not in keeping with the Brabham tradition that Jack built. Anyway, David rightly doesn’t see the value in that and has higher ambitions. The concept he’s created isn’t simple, but he promises a racing business offering a greater level of interactive online public involvement than we’ve yet seen. Conversations with potential investors continue… so watch this space.

For now, his account of Jack’s ‘encouragement’ in the family name battle is worth recounting: “About 10 years ago I started to think about what I was going to do when I retired. I thought at least I had the name and I ought to be able to do something with it – but had no idea what. And then we found out this other guy had registered it in Germany. I spoke to Dad about it and he was incensed, furious. I said we’ve got two options: we either go to court and fight to get it back, or we walk away from it, forget it and we never see it again. Obviously we weren’t going to sit back. The fight was on. 

“We got as far as the front door of the court, turned around and Dad had gone. He said, ‘If you want to carry on with this, go ahead but I’m no longer involved’. That was another one of the times we fell out!” – at this point he adds a few choice words about the old man – “So I went on by myself and was successful. 

“After we’d won Dad rang me while I was at the Autosport Show in 2013 and said ‘Well done, David. Good news you’ve got your name back’. He actually offered to give me a bit of money towards it, which was good because I had nothing left. He was chuffed… From the moment I found out who the bloke was to getting the name back under my control was seven years. Now I’ve put all that time and effort in, I have to find a way to use it.”

To find out more about Project Brabham, go to www.brabham.co.uk