David Brabham, son of the Jack Brabham, the founder and world champion driver of the Brabham team, claims that he had a serious approach to buy the family name for a current F1 team for 2019.

Autosport are reporting that David Brabham turned down several deals since winning back the name Brabham in 2013 after a long court battle.

Since then Brabham has returned to racing after some degree of failure crowdfunding a race team with the ultimate goal of running in the Le Man 24hr in an LMP2 car.

Now the company has changed tack, securing some investment and building their own ‘supercar’ for the track, called the Brabham BT62, with their BT72 spec car that ran last weekend at the Bathurst 12hr, breaking the lap record.

A Le Mans 24 Hours GTE Pro effort has been targeted for 2021 / 22.

Despite the concentration on sports cars, David Brabham told Autosport that F1 has been something he’s considered: “From a brand point of view, if I told you how many people contacted us and said they’re going to buy an F1 team and wanted to call it Brabham: it’s a long list.

“But guess what, nobody was ever able to buy the team.

“At first you get quite excited by it but after a while you learn.

“It came to a point where you learned your lessons, and you’re like ‘prove you’ve got the funds’.

“Then it didn’t waste our time as much.”

Rather alarming words from David after wasting time and money during the failed Project Brabham crowdfunding enterprise!

David Brabham claims to have discussed a serious option for 2019 that was ultimately unsuccessful. The obvious candidate being Force India / Racing Point.

The Force India team changed its name to Racing Point after the Stroll’s bought the outfit in August 2018, and then temporarily renamed them with the intention of having a new team name again for 2019 onwards. It seems now that Racing Point stays Racing Point, perhaps after these failed negotiations with David Brabham.

Autosport say that Brabham was not comfortable relinquishing the use of his name to a project he could not be a key part of, claiming real family involvement gives it “credibility”.

“I was involved in F1 with Brabham and I saw that affected the name, because of the lack of success and difficulties the team were going through,” he said.

“I looked at Lotus and thought ‘that’s not how you do it’.

“You’ve got to understand the brand, what your DNA is, that your messaging about who you are is ruthlessly consistent.

“I think with Lotus there was too much confusion around the brand.

“I just couldn’t afford to do that.”