Fascinating F1 Fact:86

It is a story which began in Castlemaine, Victoria, an old Australian gold mining town, about 75 miles to the northwest of Melbourne. Robert Russell, a Irish immigrant who had become a school inspector, lost his wife of 11 years. Two years later, in 1891, he married again, his new wife Lucy being 14 years his junior. They had a son almost immediately and he was named Robert, after his father. As he was growing up in Geelong he became known as Geoff, Geoffrey being his middle name. He served an apprenticeship and became a motor mechanic, settling in Wangaratta, a town on the Melbourne-Sydney highway, about 150 miles from Melbourne.

When he was 23 Geoff Russell enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and was sent off to serve with a field ambulance unit at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. He returned to Australia as a sergeant in 1919 and, once demobbed, he bought a share of the garage in Wangaratta.

But things had changed and after two years he sold out and moved to Melbourne to be his own boss, starting a small business reconditioning engines, in a tin shed in Collingwood. Russell was a practical engineer. He didn’t say a lot but he was an excellent craftsman. It was a good time to be in the car business as vehicle sales in Australia boomed. He and a colleague called Bill Ryan spotted an opportunity as many of the cars in Australia were imported. They were expensive and new parts were subject to tariffs and long delays. So they decided to manufacture parts. The company was called Replacement Parts Pty Ltd, but it soon became known as Repco.

The Great Depression had little effect on Repco because people in Australia stopped buying new cars and instead repaired their old ones, which meant that Repco was kept busy. By the end of the 1930s, Russell was wealthy enough to buy out Ryan and he then floated the company on the Melbourne stock exchange, remaining as the largest shareholder and staying on as managing director.

Sadly, Russell died of a brain tumour in 1946, but his company lived on and in the same year one of his engineers, Charlie Dean, acquired a Maybach engine which had been taken from an abandoned armoured car and shipped back to Australia by the government. After it had been thoroughly examined it was sold to Dean who modified it for racing. The result was the Maybach Special Mk1, which was raced in the years that followed by Stan Jones, often beating the imported racing machinery. Its triumphs included the 1954 New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore.

Realising the advertising value of the sport Repco became involved in the sport as the business began to expand internationally, supporting Jack Brabham. In 1961 he set up Motor Racing Developments Ltd in Repco premises in Surbiton, England and began building his own cars. Many of the early ones were known as Repco Brabhams.

At the end of 1964, the FIA decided the engine formula should change in 1966. At the time there were six principal teams in F1: Ferrari, Honda and BRM all built their own engines, while Lotus, Brabham and Cooper all used the Coventry Climax engine. It was, therefore, a major shock when Climax announced that it was quitting the sport, early in 1965. This meant that teams had less than 10 months to find new engines. Lotus decided to go with BRM, Cooper did a deal with Maserati but Brabham, ever the practical engineer, decided that there was a better solution and suggested to Repco CEO Charles McGrath that he might like to fund a project to turn an aluminium V8 Oldsmobile engine, abandoned by GM because of the production costs involved, into a Formula 1 engine.

Brabham had seen the engine in action in the Sandown Park International race in 1962 where Chuck Daigh’s Scarab ran with a Buick version of the engine. The same year Dan Gurney had used one at Indianapolis in the Mickey Thompson Harvey Aluminum Special. Jack bought one and shipped it to Australia to allow Repco’s chief engineer Frank Hallam to take a look. Hallam took on Phil Irving to oversee the project at the Repco Engine Laboratory in Richmond, Victoria. The redesign of the engine was completed by Irving in a rented flat in London and the final engine was very different to the original.

It made its F1 debut in South Africa in January 1966. Jack gave Repco its first win in the International Trophy in May that year and won the French GP in July, the first of four wins which took him to the World Championship.

The following year Repco did its own castings and an improved version of the engine took Denny Hulme to a second title. By then, however, the opposition was reacting and the arrival of the Cosworth DFV meant that Repco had to upgrade again in 1968. It was not a great success, although Jochen Rindt used one to finish third at the Nurburgring. At the end of 1968 Repco decided that the programme was too expensive and Brabham switched to Cosworth engines. Repco remained in racing, producing Repco-Holden Formula 5000 engines through until the late 1970s, but its extraordinary F1 adventure was over…