The race that ignited Jack Brabham’s unique title charge

This was to be the final occasion when Reims-Gueux hosted an F1 Grand Prix, and it lived up to its reputation as a high-speed circuit in the eyes of Motor Sport’s Denis Jenkinson, especially thanks to the season’s introduction of 3.0-litre engines, doubling the capacity of prior years’ cars.

“The new formula is developing really fast cars, after the comparatively slow years of 1961-65,” Jenkinson remarked, particularly taken by the spectacle of Graham Hill’s BRM exiting the woods from Muizon on the downhill straight to Thillois during practice.

But while it might have sounded good, the BRM’s 2.0-litre engine struggled to match the power possessed by the Brabhams, the Cooper of John Surtees and the Ferraris of Lorenzo Bandini and Mike Parkes.

Bandini, Surtees, Parkes — making his Ferrari debut as Surtees’ replacement — and Brabham took up the first four spots on the grid; Hill started down in eighth.

At the end of the first lap Brabham was hanging on in Bandini’s slipstream, but lap-record times enabled the Italian to pull away with a two second lead “which does not sound much, but, at Reims average speed, is a long way,” Jenkinson contextualised.

Elsewhere, Brabham’s team-mate Denny Hulme had started down in ninth, but climbed up to a steady fourth place in his BT20, the first race for the team’s latest creation. Brabham himself had “broken in” the car in practice, as Jenkinson put it, but was committed to racing the ‘Old Nail’ BT19.

The key to the BT19’s success was fully on show in this race: reliability. Although Bandini was able to build a 30-second gap over Brabham at the front of the pack with his Ferrari 312/66, he was afflicted by a broken throttle cable on lap 32 and was forced to stop at the hairpin, allowing Brabham to take the lead.

For Hulme, too, mechanical reliability worked in his favour when Jochen Rindt’s Maserati-engined Cooper T81 lost power. That had helped him up to fourth before Bandini’s troubles got Hulme onto the podium. There was a late scare for the New Zealander courtesy of a failing fuel pump, but not enough to prevent him completing a final lap, albeit two laps down.

When Jack Brabham finally took the chequered flag again, for the eighth time in his career, it kickstarted a charge to his third World Championship. Brabham was only the second driver behind the great Juan Manuel Fangio to reach that milestone, but neither he, nor anyone since, saw his name also engraved on the Constructors’ Championship trophy.

A spark was ignited in France that day, as Brabham leapfrogged Bandini to take the lead in the standings, just as his team did with Ferrari, and their positions were cemented as Brabham won the following three Grands Prix on his way to the title.  

"Even the rival teams were delighted with 40-year-old Brabham's victory,” reported Jenkinson, though they might not have been so generous with their goodwill had they known the domination that was to unfold throughout that 1966 season.

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Main image courtesy of Getty Images.