Tony Brooks, Last 1950s Grand Prix-Winning Driver, Dies at 90

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• Tony Brooks, the last F1 driver to have won a race in the 1950s, has died at 90.

• Brooks was training to be a dentist when he got a call to drive a Connaught in a non-points GP in Sicily. He won the race.

• With Brooks' passing, Jackie Stewart becomes the oldest surviving Grand Prix winner at 82.

Tony Brooks was almost world champion in 1959, winning two races for Ferrari that year but ultimately finishing second to Jack Brabham in the title chase. In all, Brooks won six grands prix and had numerous podiums, using a fast, smooth driving style he himself called, “poetry in motion. “Brooks was a tremendous driver, the greatest—if he'll forgive me saying this—‘unknown’ racing driver there’s ever been,” Stirling Moss told Autoweek alum Nigel Roebuck in the 1986 book Grand Prix Greats. “He was far better than several people who won the world championship.”

You could be forgiven if you’ve never heard of him. Brooks shunned the spotlight throughout most of his life.

“For six or seven years I went motor racing and thoroughly enjoyed it,” he said. “But I never had the dedication of, say, Stirling. It was never going to be my life. Just a part of it.”So it was only 10 years ago, at age 80, that he was convinced to write his autobiography.

“Friends and racing journalists, they just turned up the pressure,” he told the BBC in a documentary about the book, Tony Brooks, Poetry In Motion, Autobiography of a supreme Grand Prix driver.

Brooks started out as a club racer, driving his mother’s Healey Silverstone in his first race. That’s not so absurd a car—it looks a lot like an Allard of the same period. He did well enough that word eventually got around that he could drive. So when a driver for the Connaught F1 team was unable to take the wheel, the call went to Brooks.

He was then a 23-year-old dentistry student at Manchester University preparing for his finals when he got the call to drive in the 1955 non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix in Sicily, ESPN wrote.

“I was swotting (Britspeak for studying) when they (Connaught) rang me, a few days before the race. I had never so much as sat in a Formula One car before but rather absent-mindedly said yes and put the phone down.”

He missed the first day of practice, learned the track on a rented Vespa, and won the race, beating the factory Maseratis of established F1 drivers Luigi Musso and Luigi Villoresi.

That was in 1955. Brooks went on to win the 1957 British Grand Prix for Vanwall, in a car shared with Moss, and triumphed for Ferrari in France and Germany in 1959, the year he finished second overall to Brabham for the title. He was also twice a runner-up in Monaco.

“From ‘55 to ‘59 I won 50% of the Grand Prixes I finished,” he told the BBC in a documentary on him and his autobiography in 1982. “There was only Ascari, Fangio, and Moss who won more Grand Prixes than I did in the ‘50s.”

He also drove in sports car races of the day.

Perhaps he could have gone on to win more races and maybe even a championship, but racing in those days was extremely dangerous, so much so that he considered it “almost suicidal.”.

“Any one mistake could be your last,” he told the BBC. “It was a very, very dangerous sport. There were three to four top drivers being killed every year on average throughout the ‘50s. I’d had a pretty good run throughout the ‘50s, of course I’d have loved to have the label ‘World Champion,’ but I don’t have any great regrets about it. I was happy with the most grand prixes after Ascari and Fangio and Moss.”

He walked away from the sport at the age of 29 and never looked back. He also never tried to capitalize on his racing career, at least until 10 years ago when he published his book, preferring to let his driving record speak for itself.

“If I was going to have a team, I would put Tony Brooks at No.1, with Jim Clark alongside him,” said Moss. “Tony was that good. He was careful with the car and very, very fast.”

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