For a while, it was inevitable that John Cooper and Colin Chapman were mentioned in the same breath. Colin could turn on the charm and dazzle people, he had charisma and he would refer to Cooper Cars as, “Those bloody blacksmiths.” By contrast, John was an affable and modest man, who admired Chapman enormously. When pushed on the subject, he’d say, “We did win two World Championships before Colin, and you didn’t need to pack a welding kit when you raced our cars.”
There is a story that there are no Cooper drawings because all the chalk marks have long gone from the factory floor. This was something John encouraged. When his son, Mike, decided to build a vehicle for the Goodwood Soapbox Derby, he asked his Dad how he should begin. John replied, “Piece of chalk and the factory floor.”
I once visited Owen Maddock, the Cooper draftsman, and he had drawers full of detailed blueprints. Owen was never exactly a designer at Cooper (he did design the McLaren M1), but he had an input into the general mix of ideas that were in the air. Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren both found berths at Cooper because of their understanding of what made cars work, which is not quite the same as engineering.
Cooper actually built a Formula One monocoque before Lotus and there is a photograph on pg. 268 of Doug Nye’s seminal work, Cooper Cars. It got no further than the tub because it would have been difficult to repair in the motor racing environment of the day, when F1 cars were towed to races behind Ford Zephyrs.
As comparison, it was the Hawker Hurricane, which won the Battle of Britain, not the Supermarine Spitfire. Hurricanes outnumbered Spitfires 2:1, sure, but they were also easy to repair. If a Hurricane had been in a scrap, you welded in a few tubes and covered them with Irish linen. The Spitfire was a monocoque and while it was the best fighter in 1940, and offered more opportunities for development, repairing one was a new craft. The Hurricane could take more damage, and it was much more versatile as a warbird, but the Spitfire was prettier.
That sums up the Cooper philosophy. Coopers were effective, and that is the essential point in motor racing.
Charlie Cooper, John’s father, had been a racing mechanic who had established a business in Surbiton, now part of South London, not far from Brooklands. I’ve never got much sense about Charlie from anyone who knew him, including John.
Charlie is often described as “irascible.” It is true that he might have benefited from a wider education, but he would not have been the same man. He knew how to wheel and deal and he had an acute sense of what was in the air. Before WWII he had marketed a touring caravan which could be disassembled and stored as components over the winter.
By the time the war broke out, he had invested in his business, in machine tools, so it was ready to take on subcontract work from Hawker, who made the Hurricane. Cooper Cars was ideally positioned to enter postwar motor racing because it had both kit and experience and also the sport was in Charlie’s blood.
The relationship between Charlie and John was not simple. Charlie built John an Austin Special for his 12th birthday and got him into Brooklands to drive it. The ruse was noticed, John received the bollocking of his life, but Charlie had built his boy a car and his boy had driven it at Brooklands.
Later, it was a measure of how big a falling out John had had with his father as to the amount of rubber John left on Hollyfield Road, Surbiton, as he stormed into his car and drove off.[pullquote]“Coopers were effective, and that is the essential point in motor racing.”[/pullquote]
I cannot tell the Cooper story on a page, but a few stories may give pointers. The family of Tony Marsh, six times an RAC Hill Climb Champion, made its money on pork products and Charlie was a sucker for York ham. At the time, this was not widely available. Customers had been known to arrive at Cooper and ask where was the car they’d ordered. Charlie would wave at the tube racks.
Tony Marsh would arrive and waft a huge ham under Charlie’s nose. He’d say, “I am camping in that van out there. I intend to live off ham sandwiches until my car is finished. I will leave you the ham left over.” Tony had no problem with delivery.
The name of Cooper is in BMW’s MINI. John was consulted throughout the model’s development and he approved of it. Shortly before he died, he told me that it was a “real” Cooper. Cooper, “the blacksmiths” is the name that lives.
Such a car was in the air at the time; there were outfits which would tune your engine and modify the suspension. Cooper had experimented with a Coventry Climax FWA engine in a Renault Dauphine, but it remained a “Rollover Renault.”
There was no problem in boosting the power from a Mini’s engine, but where John made a difference was in two areas. One was that he and Alec Issigonis had been friends from when they had competed in club events. Issigonis had designed a car for the masses; it was John who persuaded him to open a few doors and John breezed through those doors.
The other thing was that someone at Lockheed had told John that they had set a task for trainees: design a disk brake within the 10-inches of a Mini wheel, it will never happen. That exercise became the backbone of the Mini Cooper, “It’s the brakes, Stupid.”
I think that the difference between Cooper and Lotus can be found in golf (may I never grow so feeble). Colin would have examined the rules for loopholes, John would have said, “If it’s so bloody important to put the ball in the hole, pick the bugger up and drop it in.”
