Ron Tauranac "just designed bloody good racing cars"

The schoolboy stood shyly by the flung-open workshop doors. It was the first day of his summer holiday of 1963 and he had cycled the short distance from his Byfleet home to gawp at his Brabham heroes.

His loitering did not go unnoticed: job list long, time short, he was put to work.

“Eventually someone came out and said, ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful?’ After that I worked there every day of my holiday, sweeping up, making tea and trying to be helpful.

“I wanted to end my academic education and Ron Tauranac agreed to meet my father. He told him that although Brabham didn’t do apprenticeships they would call me their apprentice: ‘If he buckles down, we will teach him all he needs to know.’”

Thus began the racing education of the man who would become Managing Director of Penske Cars. Nick Goozée spent the rest of the 1960s – bar a few “fish out of water” weeks at McLaren in 1969 – learning his trade in “monastic” circumstances.

“Brabham then was very harsh – not like the sanitised teams of today’s Formula 1 – and I was pompous and posh,” he says. “Basically I was ‘beaten into shape’ by these solemn Aussies and Kiwis in a very working-class environment.

“I was assigned to Denny Hulme. Whenever he was in the workshop – Denny worked on his own cars right through to the end of 1967 [his world championship-winning season!] – I would clean his cars, unload the truck, etc. Gopher-ish jobs. And when he was away racing I would get on with my ‘apprenticeship’.

“This wasn’t a case of somebody sitting down and teaching you how to bend metal or how to weld tubing; you had to do it in your own way and in your own time because everybody was so busy. I wasn’t the brightest candle in the box and Ron was a very impatient man. He shouted at me a lot, as he did with others, but I was used to that having come from a very tough boarding school. I just took my ‘punishment’.

“Not everything was drawn and so you had to make decisions: where to put a bracket or to hang something. Not until it was done would Ron come along and tell you that it was not in the right place or not what he wanted. We weren’t given prior instruction; we were given post instruction.

“My ‘apprenticeship’ faded as, I guess, I became useful. From 1968, Ron made me responsible for the build of the F1 cars. Also I would travel to about a third or half of the races, primarily as a fabricator but also as second mechanic to Ron Dennis on Jack Brabham’s cars.

“The only time I saw much of Jack and Ron together was when we were at the racetrack; back at the factory Ron spent more time on the production side of the business.

“The F1 cars sort of mutated. They were kept for quite some time and would become derivatives. Jack was primarily responsible for how they were configured and he and Ron used to have quite heated discussions. They were never disrespectful of one another – no shouting and no sulking – but Ron was emphatic and Jack was stubborn. I just waited until they told me what to do.

“Theirs was a husband-and-wife relationship: they ‘lived’ together but didn’t always see eye to eye. Jack very quiet even his victorious moments and Ron was never a demonstrative man;

he was not the sort to put his arm around you or say, ‘Well done.’

“But you somehow knew when you had their approval.

“I was working an all-nighter when the workshop phone rang. This voice said, ‘Who’s that?’ I replied ‘Who are you?’ It was Bernie Ecclestone

“Ron later admitted that he wished he’d been more able to deal with people in a more productive manner. He had quite a lot of regrets. His good side was overlooked because of his inability to be tolerant of people whom he thought made mistakes.

“There was a kindness to him and we became friends.

“I only attended two races with McLaren. I got on well with Bruce, and Denny, who had been the best man at my wedding, looked after me. But I was a Brabham man.

“At the second of those races, the International Trophy, I was having a pee in Silverstone’s awful brick pissoir when Ron came up alongside and said, ‘I’m thinking about designing a monocoque. Do you want to build it?’ Two weeks later I was back and glad to be so.