Cooper T43
The Cooper T43 was a Formula 1 and Formula 2 racing car , built in 1957 by the British motorsport team Cooper .
Development history and technology
The Cooper T43 followed the Cooper T41 in the MKII Formula 2 version in 1957 . The car had an enlarged and slightly redesigned chassis. The regular drive - a first car had an FWB engine - was the FPF Climax engine with two overhead camshafts and approx. 150 HP (110 kW). The transmission originally came from the Citroën Traction Avant .
Racing history
Rob Walker received the first T43 with a larger fuel tank. The Scottish team was the first racing team to field a Cooper with a Climax engine in the world championship. In retrospect, it turned out that this first Climax Cooper was a converted T41 MKII Formula 2, as Jack Brabham had completely destroyed the original Walker car during training for the Monaco Grand Prix . In the race, Brabham was even briefly in third place, in the end he crossed the finish line in seventh.
The big hour for Cooper and the T43 came when the season opened in Argentina in 1958 , when Stirling Moss drove the racing car to the British team's first victory in the World Championship. This historic triumph - it was the first time that a mid-engined car won a race in the World Automobile Championship introduced in 1950 - outshone the successes that the small vehicle could still achieve over the course of the season. Brabham won the New Zealand Grand Prix on a T43. The successor model, the Cooper T45 , hit the racetracks that same season .
The Italian racing team Scuderia De Tomaso made a copy of the Cooper T43 in 1960. The car was named the De Tomaso F2 .
literature
- David Hodges: Racing Cars from A – Z after 1945. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-613-01477-7 , p. 62.
