Tony Brooks & Jackie Oliver

Among the guests of honor at the recent opening of a new Motor Sports Gallery at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu, England, were Tony Brooks and Jackie Oliver. VRJ reporter Steve Havelock asked them for a quick comment on the gallery, but this evolved into an interesting discussion about motorsport past and present and unearthed some opposing views between the two of them.

Tony Brooks was 20 years old in 1952 when he started racing a Healey. He progressed to a Frazer Nash and drove Aston Martins at Le Mans and Goodwood, but really shot to public attention when he famously won the Syracuse Grand Prix in 1955 in a Connaught. In 1956, he entered the Formula One World Championship arena and endured a baptism-by-fire season with BRM, before finding the considerable success that he deserved with Vanwall in ’57 and ’58, which brought him four of his six World Championship Grand Prix victories and helped Vanwall to clinch the Constructors title in ’58. His other two wins fell in ‘59 at the wheel of a Scuderia Ferrari. In 1960, he drove Yeoman Credit Coopers and finished his Grand Prix days back where he started, with an unreliable BRM, retiring at the end of 1961 and grateful to still be in one piece having seen many of his friends perish.