Cooper Car Company: The Rear-Engined Team That Changed Racing

The Cooper Car Company was a British racing car maker that Charles Cooper and his son John established in December 1947. Its mid-engined single-seaters reached Formula One and the Indianapolis 500 during the 1950s and early 1960s, while the Mini Cooper dominated rally and saloon racing. Today the Cooper name belongs to BMW, which uses it on its Mini range.

This guide follows the firm from its garage beginnings to its decline, and explains why the position of the engine mattered so much to the sport.

How did the Cooper Car Company begin?

Charles and John Cooper started in 1946 by building 500 cc Formula Three cars in a small Surbiton garage, with John's boyhood friend Eric Brandon. The cars used JAP motorcycle engines and were built from two old Fiat Topolino front ends. Demand from drivers led them to form the company in December 1947.

Early results were striking. An early highlight was Brandon's win in a 500 race at Gransden Lodge Airfield, and hill climbs and circuit events soon drew a steady stream of customers. Among them were Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Ivor Bueb and Ken Tyrrell.

The business grew by giving aspiring British drivers an affordable route into motor sport. Cooper became the first and largest postwar builder of racing cars for privateers. The works turned out roughly 300 single- and twin-cylinder machines across the 1940s and 1950s, and it dominated Formula Three, taking 64 of the 78 major races held from 1951 to 1954.

That success gave the firm the confidence to aim higher. Harry Schell qualified a modified Cooper 500, the T12, for the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix. He retired on the first lap, but his car was the first rear-engined entry to start a Grand Prix since the war.

A garage build that taught the sport where the engine should sit, and then lost its way once everyone copied it.

Why did the engine position matter so much?

Cooper placed the engine behind the driver because its motorcycle engine drove the rear wheels by chain, and a rear drivetrain was more convenient. The idea was not new, since German racers had used rear-mounted engines in the 1920s and 1930s. Cooper's real achievement was to popularise the layout until it became the standard for racing cars.

The first rear-engined Cooper sports cars, the T39 Bob-Tails, arrived in 1955, about two years after Porsche introduced its 550. Built on 500 cc chassis with modified Coventry Climax fire-pump engines, they were less prone to spins and put their power down more effectively. Cooper then built a single-seater version and began racing it in Formula Two.

When did a rear-engined car take the world title?

Jack Brabham and the Cooper works team took the 1959 Formula One World Championship, the first world title won by a rear-engined car. They repeated the success in 1960. The breakthrough had come a year earlier, when Trintignant took the 1958 Monaco race in a Cooper T45 and the rear-engined revolution began.

The concept had shown its promise a year before Monaco 1958. At the 1957 Monaco race, two Cooper T43s tried to qualify and only Brabham succeeded, in second-last place. He later ran third before a fuel pump failure on the 100th lap cost him the place, and he pushed the car over the line to take sixth.

The 1958 season was not a clean sweep for the newcomers. In Argentina, Stirling Moss led in a privately entered Cooper while his rivals pitted for tyre changes. The Italian teams assumed the Cooper would have to stop too, and realised too late that it would not pit at all. Front-engined cars took all the other races that year, but the sport had changed.

Who designed the Cooper chassis?

Owen Maddock, a designer employed by the company, drew the chassis that carried Cooper's mid-engined cars to success. His breakthrough came from a sketch he drew as a joke, with every tube bent, which Charles Cooper liked enough to build. Maddock later pioneered an early honeycomb monocoque and helped develop the C5S racing gearbox.

Maddock was a familiar figure in the 1950s paddock. His workmates called him The Beard, and Charles Cooper called him Whiskers. He wore an open-neck shirt and a woolly jumper, and he helped drive British racing cars to the top of the sport in the 1960s.

How did Cooper's cars fare at Indianapolis?

Jack Brabham tested a championship-winning T53 Lowline at Indianapolis in 1960, then entered a larger, offset car, the T54, in the 500-mile race of May 1961. Other teams mocked the small European machine, but it briefly ran in third and then took ninth. The result helped convince the Indianapolis establishment that the rear-engined future had arrived.

The change took years to complete. From 1965, when Jim Clark drove a rear-engined Lotus to victory, every Indianapolis winner has carried the engine behind the driver. Cooper's chain-driven little car had started that shift, and the Indianapolis paddock had been slow to follow.

What led to the decline of the Cooper team?

Cooper lost its lead as rival builders such as Lola, Lotus, BRM and Ferrari adopted mid-engined designs with more advanced technology. Engine rules changed too, with a 1500cc limit in 1961 and a return to 3-litre power in 1966. A road crash in a twin-engined Mini in 1963 left John Cooper badly hurt, and Charles Cooper's death followed in 1964.

In April 1965 John Cooper parted with the Formula One operation, selling it to Chipstead Motor Group. The works moved from Surbiton to a factory at Canada Road in Byfleet that year. Bruce McLaren left at the end of 1965 to build his own car, and the new owners arranged a Maserati-powered 3-litre car, the T81, which was heavy and thirsty.

John Surtees, who had fallen out with Ferrari, joined the team and won the final race of 1966 in Mexico. He left for Honda for 1967, and Pedro Rodriguez took the season's first race, in South Africa, giving Cooper a one-two finish. That was the team's last Grand Prix victory. The 1968 season brought BRM V12 engines into a modified T86B, but the cars were outclassed. In 1969 Cooper failed to find sponsorship for a Cosworth DFV-powered car, and redundancies followed.

Frank Boyles was the last to leave. He had been in charge of building customer cars, and the company had hoped to sell more Formula Two cars. A modified chassis, the T86C, was built to take an Alfa Romeo 3-litre V8 during 1968, but that project never reached the track.

How many Grands Prix did Cooper win?

Cooper took part in 129 Formula One World Championship events over nine years and won 16 of them. Its final victory came at the 1967 South African round. Away from the Grand Prix grid, the company also sold Formula Junior cars, and Ken Tyrrell's team ran them successfully with John Love and Tony Maggs.

Ken Tyrrell's connection with the company also gave him an early look at a future champion. He tested Jackie Stewart in a Formula Three Cooper T72 at Goodwood, a session that began a partnership that would dominate motor sport later on.

Why is the Mini Cooper still linked to the name?

The Mini Cooper was a John Cooper development of the Alec Issigonis Mini, introduced in 1961 with a stronger engine, new brakes and a distinctive livery. It won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964, 1965 and 1967, and it kept winning saloon and rally titles through the 1960s. BMW now builds Cooper and Cooper S models.

The name also lives on in tuning. John Cooper set up a garage at Ferring in 1971, selling tuning kits for the Mini and performance parts. Honda bought the garage in 1986, and the operation moved to East Preston, where Minis were turned into competition machines. In October 2009 Mike Cooper, John's son, launched Cooper Bikes as a bicycle arm of the company.

What happened to the Cooper garage on Ewell Road?

From 1 April 1968, John Cooper rented out a building at 243 Ewell Road, and the police took it on. The local traffic division, known as V Victor, moved in and stayed for 25 years, making the site one of the busier police garages. The building later became a Porsche dealership.

In August 1968 the police were supplied with two Mini Coopers for a trial. Each steering wheel hub gave way to a speaker and microphone, and a transmit switch on the column let the driver talk on demand. No orders followed for other garages, and the police moved out in due course.

Key milestones at a glance

Where does the Cooper name stand today?

BMW now owns the Cooper name and markets it through the Mini range, including Cooper and Cooper S models built in England. The current Mini has been in production since 2001, and John Cooper Works packages sit alongside it. The name therefore lives on in road cars rather than in racing.

Cooper-marked Mini versions and conversion kits have been sold by several companies over the years, and some still are. Enthusiasts still trace the marque back to the racing cars of the 1950s and 1960s, even though the Formula One operation ended long before the Mini story reached its modern form.