Greatest Racecar? Tony Trimmer’s Formula Three Brabham BT28

Winning the 1970 Monaco Formula Three race was seen as my ticket to a Grand Prix future. I’d made my F3 debut the previous year, in 1969, so winning such a high-profile race early in my career was a great boost for me. It wasn’t an easy win either, as throughout the final race Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Cassegrain, driving a similar car to mine, had pushed me hard. It was a great relief to see the checkered flag. My Brabham BT28 was just the greatest car to have to thread around the streets of Monte Carlo—such a jewel-in-the-crown race too. The BT28 was certainly the car to have in 1970, a spaceframe chassis with outboard suspension and a slippery body. It was quite a tight cockpit, but I was younger then. The car was successfully used in many other European F3 series too.

My career started far away from the race circuits of the world, I was a merchant seaman and went on to become a mechanic for Frank Williams. He’d headhunted me to join him as a mechanic, and I built my own Formula Ford car up from a wrecked Formula Three Brabham chassis; I raced the car for two seasons, 1968 and 1969. Frank was buying wrecked Formula Three chassis from the continent, we would strip the cars back to the chassis and rebuild them, using brand-new parts, and sell them for less than two-thirds of the cost of a new one. It was the era when you could update a car for several years. I shared a flat with Frank and we worked from a “lock-up” garage at the back—much to the detriment of the people who shared the block, in Pinner, Middlesex. We moved, after a while, to a proper leasehold property in Slough. Things were starting to look up a bit from then on.