Sport: Fast Out of the Turns

The broad-faced driver has never before been a headliner: the low-slung car is operated on a shoestring. But Australian-born Jack Brabham and his Cooper-Climax are challenging—and beating—the world's biggest names this season in the exacting sport of Grand Prix road racing, the ultimate competition for lean speed machines that can chafe off rubber in skidding turns, accelerate to 190 m.p.h. on the straightaways.

The Cooper-Climax is the product of a small British company that grew out of a garage started in 1919 by Charles Newton Cooper in Surbiton, eleven miles southwest of London. After...