Famed car builder John Cooper passed away on Christmas eve after losing his battle with cancer, he was 77. John Cooper and his father Charles were instrumental in the postwar boom in motor racing and their impact on racing worldwide has been enormous.
Coopers built and raced the first significant rear-engine racing cars and in 1959 and 1960, Jack Brabham won the Grand Prix World Championship in a Cooper with the engine “in the back.” In 1961, Cooper shook the Indy establishment by sending a tiny rear-engine car to the 500 for Jack Brabham, where he finished 9th and altered Indy tradition forever. In the same year, another legend was created when the Coopers started an association with the British manufacturer BMC and launched the Mini-Cooper, a very small saloon car with a 1000 cc engine which would be successful in racing and rallying and as a road car for decades. By 1965, the Mini-Cooper had a potent 1275 cc engine and won the Monte Carlo Rally and another of several racing championships.
Charles Cooper died in 1964, but John continued to develop customer single-seater racing cars, though the Formula One team was having fewer successes. Through these times it was the Mini-Cooper which kept the Cooper name in the limelight. Single-seater production finally ended in 1969, but variations on the Mini-Cooper have continued to the present day. Vintage racing brought John Cooper out of relative obscurity in the early 1980s where he became a regular at historic race meetings. He was always an essentially shy person who had lived in the shadow of his autocratic father for a number of years, but was the key to Coopers great Formula One successes and the worldwide fame of the Mini.
John Cooper was always approachable and a pleasure to talk to. He was straightforward and had thousands of stories in his head going back to the early 1940s and was always willing to share them. It is hard to believe that one of the nicest people to talk with about racing is no longer with us.
Submitted by Ed McDonough
