WEC: Brabham name to return with crowd-funded P2 program

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The famed Brabham name is set to return next season as David Brabham, son of 3-time Formula 1 world champion Jack Brabham, elevates the family-run brand to the World Endurance Championship under the "Project Brabham" banner.​

An ongoing legal battle with a German outfit claiming to own the rights to the Brabham name was recently resolved in favor of the family, allowing the Brabhams to build on four decades of competition recorded between 1962 and 1992. The next chapter, planned for 2015, will begin in sports cars, and specifically, in the LMP2 category with a new operation based in England.

For David Brabham, whose resume includes an LMP1 championship in the American Le Mans Series and three victories at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans, the move from driver-for-hire to taking his destiny into his own hands with Project Brabham is a long-held goal that has come to fruition.

"There was the seven-year battle we went through to get our name back; I couldn't do anything with the name until that matter was sorted," Brabham (LEFT) told RACER. "It was around nine or 10 years ago, honestly, where I thought we just weren't doing anything with the Brabham brand, and we'd been very successful with the Formula 1 team, so once we got everything cleared in December of 2012, the next step was to do some brand research and we hit upon the keywords of pioneering, inspirational, and engineering. The next thought was to put together a team of our own."

With the desire to continue in the sport and re-establish Brabham as an entrant, forgoing the traditional route of finding paying drivers and corporate backers was an early concept embraced by the 49-year-old Aussie. Creating a collective-based program that brings the next generation into the Project Brabham endeavor was also a defining choice to stand upon.

"We want to inspire the next generation of fans, drivers and engineers, and we came up with the idea of engaging all of them through our team, to ask them to be a part of the effort through our website, was a great place to start. This model, for Brabham, has a much greater model for people being involved than any other model out there."

"This is about a journey, about making history, about inviting the motorsports community and doing this together," Brabham explained. "What's down the road is a mystery, to some degree. We have goals, obviously: Going into LMP2, doing that for three years, then look at building the first LMP1 car as a constructor. Trying to engage designers and engineers throughout the world to design that car starting with those who come in through our portals, make it like an e-learning experience, and these are the models to make it a sustainable effort.

"Doing this through a digital platform, creating an environment where young minds can learn and grow in this field and earn certificates from their efforts and maybe going into the marketplace to work with other teams is where we really see this project taking on a life of its own. It's a lot different than us simply buying a car, hiring a team, and closing out the world to everything but our press releases singing our own praises. This is designed to be the opposite."

Brabham's longstanding relationship with Honda would make the marque's new ARX-04b P2 coupe a logical chassis to consider once Project Brabham meets its initial funding milestones, but he says those kinds of decisions will be driven by other key developments.

"The crowd-funding campaign is to kick start the program, and I'm kind of doing things in reverse," said Brabham. "The normal routine is to establish the team then try and create the fan base, but we're going about it the other way, wanting to build our support from fans and others who are interested first, then with that community behind us, go to manufacturers who are interested in having a lot of built-in support already in place and see where that could lead.

"We can go and purchase a chassis, but we're more interested in talking to the parent company to see who else we can get involved in our program. That's where it becomes more sustainable and reaches a global audience."

Crowd-funding is the key to getting Project Brabham off the ground, and while the concept isn't entirely new in motor racing, it has yet to be utilized at such a global level with a high-profile name like Brabham.

"From the feedback we've gotten, there's an appetite from people wanting to go that step further to be involved with a team, and through it, it allows us to build the community we need to grow the team," he added. "To me, that's far more powerful than going the traditional route to start a team such as this. And once it takes off, we can go to more investors and add to the team, but our early investors will be the foundation we build from. This is meant to be everyone's team, and we're obviously hopeful enough people want to be part of something unlike anything else in our sport."