1947

The Cooper Car Company was a British car manufacturer founded in December 1947 by Charles Cooper and his son John Cooper. Together with John's boyhood friend, Eric Brandon, they began by building racing cars in Charles's small garage in Surbiton, Surrey, England, in 1946. Through the 1950s and early 1960s they reached motor racing's highest levels as their mid-engined, single-seat cars competed in both Formula One and the Indianapolis 500, and their Mini Cooper dominated rally racing. The Cooper name lives on in the Cooper versions of the Mini production cars that are built in England, but is now owned and marketed by BMW.

500

The first cars built by the Coopers were single-seat 500-cc Formula Three racing cars driven by John Cooper and Eric Brandon, and powered by a JAP motorcycle engine. Since materials were in short supply immediately after World War II, the prototypes were constructed by joining two old Fiat Topolino front-ends together. According to John Cooper, the stroke of genius that would make the Coopers an automotive legend—the location of the engine behind the driver—was merely a practical matter at the time. As the car was powered by a motorcycle engine, they believed it was more convenient to have the engine in the back, driving a chain. In fact there was nothing new about 'mid' engined racing cars but there is no doubt Coopers led the way in popularising what was to become the dominant arrangement for racing cars. 

Called the Cooper 500, this car's success in hillclimbs and on track, including Eric winning the 500 race at one of the first postwar meetings at Gransden Lodge Airfield, quickly created demand from other drivers (including, over the years, Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Jim Russell, Ivor Bueb, Ken Tyrrell, and Bernie Ecclestone) and led to the establishment of the Cooper Car Company to build more. The business grew by providing an inexpensive entry to motorsport for seemingly every aspiring young British driver, and the company became the world's first and largest postwar, specialist manufacturer of racing cars for sale to privateers.

cooper 500/formula 3 types

Cooper 500/Formula 3 Types

The Cooper 500 evolved as series of models from 1946 through to 1960. Usually a new model appeared for each year although this could be very arbitrary for the early cars (Mk II-IV) and dependent on parts availability and Charlie's mood. Later cars (Mk IX onwards) are almost identical. 500s are usually referred to by their Mk numbers however Coopers also recorded type (T) numbers. In many cases, cars were also fitted with 1 litre and 1100cc engines (usually JAP V twin), for hillclimbs and, for a while, Formula 2, where they were also successful. These chassis were longer and given a separate type number. Some related types are included for completeness such as the Triumph engined sports car, trailer and two streamlined record cars. T1 was retrospectively given to the Austin 7 special built by Charles Cooper for John in 1936.

Approximately 320 Cooper 500 cars were built, however it is impossible to be precise as cars were sometimes re-built and many cars left "by the back gate" sometimes with Charlie's approval and sometimes without!. Factory records were incomplete, at best, and many have been lost.

t39

In the 1950s, the Cooper Car Company came to influence the design of almost every single-seat racing car that followed by placing their engines behind the driver rather than in front. The car and driver could sit lower due to the absence of a drive shaft under the seat and it had better weight distribution between the axles. Although Auto Union had tried this approach a decade or two earlier, their ladder chassis and contemporary suspension tended to result in oversteer and they failed to dominate the field in the way that Coopers did.

Cooper's Chief Designer, Owen Maddock, conceived the T39 sports car around the Coventry Climax (Feather-Weight) FWA 1098cc four-cylinder engine and decided to adapt Cooper’s 500cc Formula 3 chassis to take the more powerful engine.

The T39 gained its ‘Bobtail’ nickname from the car’s truncated rear, developed by Maddock working alongside an aerodynamics team from Hawker Aircraft. This was a controversial design feature which became universally known as a ‘Kamm-tail’ or ‘Kammback’ after its exponent Professor Wunibald Kamm.

Having had its first successes on a national level in 1955, a Cooper-Climax T39 was 3rd in Class at the 1957 24 Hours of Le Mans, driven by Jack Brabham and Ian Raby - an achievement that grew the reputation of the T39 as well as the order books.

Cooper built up to 300 single-and twin-cylinder cars during the 1940s and 1950s, and dominated the F3 category, winning 64 of 78 major races between 1951 and 1954. This volume of construction was unique and enabled the company to grow into the senior categories; With a modified Cooper 500 chassis, a T12 model, Cooper had its first taste of top-tier racing when Harry Schell qualified for the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix. Though Schell retired in the first lap, this marked the first appearance of a rear-engined racer at a Grand Prix event since the end of WWII.

Jack Brabham raised some eyebrows when he took sixth place at the 1957 Monaco Grand Prix in a rear-engined Formula 1 Cooper. When Stirling Moss won the 1958 Argentine Grand Prix in Rob Walker's privately entered Cooper and Maurice Trintignant duplicated the feat in the next race at Monaco, the racing world was stunned and a rear-engined revolution had begun. The next year, 1959, Brabham and the Cooper works team became the first to win the Formula One World Championship in a rear-engined car. Both team and driver repeated the feat in 1960, and every World Champion since has been sitting in front of the engine.

After the death of his father, John Cooper sold the Cooper Formula One team to the Chipstead Motor Group in April 1965. The same year, the Formula One team moved from Surbiton to a modern factory unit at Canada Road, Oyster Lane in Byfleet, just along the road from Brabham in New Haw and close to Alan Mann Racing. Cooper's 1965 season petered out and at the end of the year, number one driver Bruce McLaren left to build his own F1 car for the new for 1966 3-litre formula.

250f

The Maserati 250F was a racing car made by Maserati of Italy used in '2.5 litre' Formula One racing between January 1954 and November 1960. Twenty-six examples were made. The 250F principally used the SSG, 220 bhp (at 7400rpm) 2493 cc capacity  Maserati A6 straight-six engine.

The 250F first raced in the 1954 Argentine Grand Prix where Juan Manuel Fangio won the first of his two victories before he left for the new Mercedes-Benz team. Fangio won the 1954 Drivers' World Championship, with points gained with both Maserati and Mercedes-Benz; Stirling Moss raced his own privately owned 250F for the full 1954 season. Prince Bira was another driver favouring the 250F.

In total, the 250F competed in 46 Formula One championship races with 277 entries, leading to eight wins. Success was not limited to World Championship events with 250F drivers winning many non-championship races around the world.

Stirling Moss later said that the 250F was the best front-engined F1 car he drove.

Cooper's new owners held the Maserati concession for the UK and arrangements were made for Cooper to build a new 3-litre Cooper-Maserati car which would be available for sale as well being raced by the works team. The Maserati engine was an updated and enlarged version of the 2.5-litre V-12 which had made sporadic appearances in the works 250Fs in 1957.

t61

The Cooper T61 (Type 61), also known as the Cooper T61 Monaco, or the Cooper Monaco T61, is a sports racing car, designed, developed and built by British manufacturer Cooper, in 1961. It is the successor and evolution of the T57. Its motor racing career spanned 6 years (1962-1966, 1968); where it won a total of 16 races (plus 2 additional class wins), achieved 23 podium finishes, and clinched 3 pole positions. It was powered by a number of different engines, including a Coventry Climax four-cylinder engine, a Maserati V8 engine, a Ford FE engine, and a Chevrolet small-block engine.

t73

1964

The Cooper T73 is a 1.5-litre Formula One car, designed, developed and produced by Cooper Cars for the 1964 Formula One season.

The T73 was driven by Bruce McLaren and Phil Hill in 1964, debuting at the Monaco Grand Prix.  McLaren and new teammate Jochen Rindt raced the T73 at the 1965 South African Grand Prix, after which it was replaced by the T77.

One of the works cars was later sold to J.A. Pearce Engineering who fitted it with a Ferrari GTO 3-litre V12 and entered it in several races in 1966 and 1967 for Chris Lawrence. It was not particularly successful although it

t86b

For 1968, Cooper would have liked to have joined the queue for the Cosworth-Ford DFV, but felt that its connections to British Leyland with the Mini-Coopers made this inadvisable. Instead, a deal was done with BRM for the use of its 3-litre V-12, originally conceived as a sports car unit, but which BRM themselves would be using in 1968. A slightly modified version of the T86 was built for the new engine, dubbed T86B and Italian ex-Ferrari driver Ludovico Scarfiotti and young Englishman Brian Redman were employed to drive it. 

Cooper's version of the BRM V12 was a less powerful "sportscar" version of the engine, which was already one of the heaviest on the grid, but after finishing third and fourth (thanks to the unreliability of others) in both Spain and Monaco the car gradually slipped down the grid towards the season's end. Cooper continued the season with a motley collection of drivers, none of whom could make anything of the outclassed T86B. During the season, Cooper built a modified chassis, the T86C, intended to take an Alfa Romeo 3-litre V-8 but the project was stillborn.

The beginning of the end for the Cooper Car Company was in 1969, as it tried, and failed, to find sponsorship for a new Cosworth DFV-powered car and there were many redundancies. Frank Boyles was the last to leave, since he was in charge of building customer cars and it had been hoped that some more F2 cars would be sold. Frank went on to design and build a Formula Ford car called the Oscar and also a series of Oval Circuit cars known as Fireballs. Driving the rear-engine version of this car, Frank won more than 200 races during a period up until 1975 in a car he had designed and raced himself. This record is believed to have never been beaten.

In all, Coopers participated in 129 Formula One World Championship events in nine years, winning 16 races.

mini cooper

The Mini (developed as ADO15) is a small, two-door, four-seat car produced by the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and its successors, from 1959 until 2000. Minus a brief hiatus, original Minis were built for four decades and sold during five, from the last year of the 1950s into the last year of the 20th century, over a single generation, as fastbacks, estates, and convertibles.

Issigonis' friend John Cooper, owner of the Cooper Car Company and designer and builder of Formula One cars, saw the potential of the Mini for competition. Issigonis was initially reluctant to see the Mini in the role of a performance car, but after John Cooper appealed to BMC management, the two men collaborated to create the Mini Cooper. The Austin Mini Cooper and Morris Mini Cooper debuted in September 1961.

BMC operated a Competition Department at Abingdon, Oxfordshire, under the control of Stuart Turner, which built specially prepared Minis (mostly based on Cooper and Cooper S versions) to compete in international rallies and other motorsport. This department played a key role in ensuring the Mini's huge success in motorsport throughout the 1960s, in particular, winning the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964, 1965 and 1967, the 1000 Lakes Rally in 1965, 1966 and 1967, and dominating all of the first 9 positions in the 1966 Gallaher 500 at Bathurst.

The car also won the 1961, 1962, 1969, 1978 and 1979 British Saloon Car Championship season, as well as the British Rally Championship in 1962, 1963 and 1970, the European Rally Championship in 1965 and 1966, and won the Finnish Rally Championship in 1965 and 1966. Minis also won the 1965 Lowood 4 Hour endurance race, and the final Finnish Grand Prix in 1963.

In rallycross, the Mini finished on the podium in the first ever race, at Lydden Hill Race Circuit in February 1967, winning races in the FIA European Rallycross Championship in 1974 and 1975. The car competed as late as the 1979 Australian Rallycross Championship.

BMC and Issigonis were awarded the Dewar Trophy by the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) for the innovative design and production of the Mini.

John Cooper Works (JCW) is a British car marque now owned by BMW and it is an in-house tuning, development, and international automotive racing division for Mini vehicles. It was founded in 2002 by Michael Cooper, son of John Cooper, the racing car maker and tuner responsible for the original Mini Cooper.

In 2007, German automaker BMW acquired the rights to the name, and it bought out the company in 2008.

The first ever JCW kit was a 126 bhp  upgrade for the Mini Cooper. The kit consisted of the following components:

• Flowed and ported cylinder head
• Air filter
• Cover injection tube
• Uprated exhaust (from the catalytic converter back)
• Remapped ECU
• Decorative emblems

Despite its price tag of over €2000, this kit only offered a power increase of 11 bhp, a sportier exhaust note and a crisper throttle response. The main advantage was that these improvements, though fairly minor, could be made to the Cooper without jeopardizing the factory warranty. In 2004, JCW discontinued the Cooper kit and introduced a Sound Kit for the Cooper. The Sound Kit consisted of a unique air intake system, cat-back exhaust and an ECU remap.