In 1959, following the deaths of Peter Collins and Luigi Musso and the retirement of Mike Hawthorn the previous year, Enzo Ferrari hired a new driver: Tony Brooks. Brooks would only stay with the Scuderia for one season, but during that time he nearly won the World Championship.
Charles Antony Standish Brooks was born in Dukinfield, Cheshire, England on February 25, 1932. He came from a keen motoring family, and started racing in his mother’s Healey Silverstone at age 20. He progressed to a Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica, and after just three years of club racing, his success earned him a drive in a Formula 2 Connaught in July 1955 at Crystal Palace. There, he finished fourth behind the more powerful F1 cars of Mike Hawthorn, Harry Schell and Roy Salvadori.
This result led to factory drives with Aston Martin at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Goodwood Nine Hour Race; he finished third in the latter, co-driving with Peter Collins. Connaught soon entered him in the non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix. It was the 23-year-old dental student’s first F1 drive, and he won it against world-class opposition, including Luigi Villoresi and Luigi Musso, becoming the first British driver to win a Continental Grand Prix in a British car since 1924.
BRM snatched him up for the 1956 F1 season, but in his World Championship debut at the British Grand Prix, a stuck throttle led to an accident that ended his season.
Brooks left for Vanwall in 1957, and shared a GP win with teammate Stirling Moss at Aintree. The following year, he won the Belgium, German and Italian Grands Prix, helping Vanwall clinch the Constructor’s Championship.
Vanwall retired from racing in early 1959, which led to Brooks joining Ferrari. He left the Scuderia at the end of the ’59 season, and raced for two more years with British teams before retiring.
FORZA caught up with the 76-year-old Brooks at the 2008 Goodwood Revival.

THE CARS
How did the drive with Ferrari materialize?
Ferrari approached me after Tony Vandervell announced the retirement of the Vanwall team in January 1959. Almost immediately, I got a call from Ferrari saying, “Would you like to drive for us?” I went over to Italy and met with Enzo Ferrari. Our initial discussion couldn’t have been much more than half an hour, and we agreed to the terms in that time, without an accountant on one side, a solicitor on the other and a manager looking over your shoulder. It was just between the two of us. Well, my wife was present, but there were no professionals involved. My wife is Italian and I speak Italian, so that obviously helped. Ferrari wanted me to drive sports cars as well as Formula 1, so regretfully I had to end my four-year relationship [driving sports cars] with Aston Martin.

How did the Ferrari sports cars stack up against the Aston Martins?
The only Ferrari sports car I drove was the Testa Rossa. It was a very nice car with a much superior engine and gearbox to the Aston Martin DBR1. The Ferrari had good roadholding, but it was not quite as balanced as the Aston, which you could throw in and out of drifts with ease. The Aston had wonderful roadholding and wonderful brakes, and because of that it was able to make up for its deficiencies in power on circuits such as the Nürburgring or Goodwood. But at Le Mans, the Aston Martin was always outperformed by the sheer power of the Ferraris, Jaguars and the Maseratis.

When you signed for Ferrari, you excluded the 24 Hours of Le Mans. You had a bad accident in ’57 at Le Mans; did that have anything to do with it?
No, not at all. In fact, apart from Syracuse, I won all my Grands Prix after my BRM accident at Silverstone in 1956 and after my Aston Martin accident at Le Mans in ’57.
So in terms of winning races, the accidents didn’t have any effect on me whatsoever.
I just disliked Le Mans because it wasn’t a race: It was a high-speed tour. You had to go around 15 seconds a lap slower than what you and the car were capable of in order for the car to hopefully last the distance.
In addition, Le Mans in 1958 was a very wet affair. My co-driver, Maurice Trintignant, brought in the Aston at about three o’clock in the morning, but I’d used up all my dry clothes. You try pulling on wet shoes and wet socks, wet overalls and a wet helmet at three o’clock in the morning. I said to myself that if ever I do this race again, please send for the men in the white coats.
So I never did, and in fact I drove for Ferrari in ’59 on the understanding that I didn’t have to do Le Mans. I was pleasantly surprised that Enzo accepted the condition because, of course, Le Mans is very important to Ferrari. Some journalists aren’t quite so concerned with accuracy and say that I only drove Ferrari sports cars because Ferrari said either you drive them or you don’t drive Formula 1. That’s absolute nonsense. I drove them voluntarily, but requested that I didn’t do Le Mans.

What was your preference: sports cars or F1 cars?
Oh, Formula 1. It’s like the difference between riding a race horse and a cart horse.
A Formula 1 car is lighter, more compact and much more responsive to good driving. They respond to finesse and a delicate touch, and because of that I got much more satisfaction out of them than out of sports cars. But I still gave my best in sports cars.

What was the F1 Dino like to drive, and how did it compare to your Vanwall, which won the constructor’s title the year before?
The Dino was a very nice car to drive. It was the last of the front-engined Formula 1 cars, and like all Ferraris it had a beautiful gearbox and a very good engine. It held the road pretty well for a front-engined car and was much easier to drive than the Vanwall. In a sense, the Ferrari gave me more satisfaction: It responded more when you were really pressing on with it, and it performed best at the fast circuits. On the slow to medium-speed circuits, the light, compact Lotuses and rear-engined Coopers were too much for the large, heavy, front-engined Ferrari.
The Vanwall was not a particularly easy car to drive. You had to be much more precise to get the best out of it, and it was not a forgiving car. The Vanwall did grip the road very well and went round the corners very well, however, so I wouldn’t knock it; it was good enough to win the championship in 1958. Stirling won three Grands Prix and I won three, so it was a very successful car.

You were a very versatile driver: You did well at slow circuits like Monaco and also won on the fast ones like Monza and Spa. Did you have a preference for slow or fast circuits?
I liked the faster circuits because I think the ultimate skill of that time was drifting. There is much less opportunity to demonstrate that technique on a slow circuit, whereas at somewhere like Spa the corners are fast enough to indulge in what is, or what was for me, the most satisfying aspect of race driving: drifting and controlling the car with just literally a caress of the wheel, a caress of the accelerator, no brute force about it at all. You are balancing the car on a tight rope and there is much more scope for that on the medium to fast circuits.

What was your most satisfying race?
It was the 1958 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, when I beat the Ferraris in my Vanwall. Due to the poor handling of the Vanwall with full [fuel] tanks, I was something over 30 seconds behind Hawthorn and Collins in their Ferraris. They had quite a battle between the two of them, and I had a lot of satisfaction in catching them up and then overtaking them.

This was the race where Collins was killed when he went off trying to keep up with you?
Yes, that’s right. Obviously, that aspect was saddening then and saddening now, but you asked me which gave me the greatest satisfaction, not the greatest joy. The satisfaction was pulling back over 30 seconds on two of the very, very top-line drivers at the Nürburgring with a car which wasn’t really up to the Ferrari, either in power or probably even in roadholding.