Cooper T58 history

Don O'Sullivan in his second Cooper at Sandown Park on 27 February 1966. Copyright Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Used with permission.

The Cooper T58 was the first car built for the Coventry Climax FWMV V8 engine in 1961. The car was soon replaced by a newer design and ended its racing career in Western Australia.

The British F1 teams had attempted to resist the introduction of the 1500cc Formula 1 in 1961, preferring to stay with their successful 2500cc designs, so went into the new formula with only the 4-cylinder Coventry Climax FPF engine ready. Climax belatedly started work on a FWMV V8 engine, which was only ready to race in August. Cooper prepared a new car for this engine, the Cooper T58, which was almost identical to the 1961 4-cylinder Cooper T55 design, with just a few changes required to the engine bay to accommodate the new powerplant.

Jack Brabham gave the Cooper T58 its debut at the Nürburgring and qualified second, but crashed out of the race. He raced it again at the Italian and United States GPs but retired from both with overheating. New Cooper T60s were built for 1962 with one of the T55s being retained as a spare car, so the T58 was surplus to requirements. In the autumn, it was sold to Reg Parnell’s Bowmaker F1 team, which had been running Lola Mk4s in F1 in 1962, and fitted with a carburettor BRM V8 engine. John Surtees tested the car at Brands Hatch and found it worked well, so it was taken out to the Mexican Grand Prix for Moises Solana to drive. Unfortunately the BRM engine could not be tuned to the circuit’s high altitude and after trying to hire Roy Salvadori's Lola instead, Solana did not start.

Bowmaker withdrew from F1 at the end of 1962 and sold the team’s equipment to Reg Parnell. Parnell took two of the Lolas and the team’s remaining Cooper T53 out to New Zealand and Australia for the Internationals at the start of 1963, hiring the Cooper T53 to Jim Palmer. At the end of the series, Parnell did a deal to sell both the T53 and the T58 to Lex Davison, together with a stock of parts including two Colotti gearboxes.

Davison had been racing the ex-Jack Brabham Cooper T53 F2-17-60 in the 1963 Internationals, and as well as buying the two Coopers from, Parnell, he also bought Bruce McLaren’s Cooper T62, which had been the dominant car in the Internationals. Somewhere lurking in his workshop would have been the Cooper T53 that he had wrecked at Longford 12 months earlier, so Davison now had five Coopers: the T62, the T58, his ex-Brabham T53, the ex-Parnell/Palmer T53 and the T53 he wrecked at Longford. Davison then raced the T62 and, in July, he sold his ex-Brabham T53 to Tony Osborne. Also sometime in 1962 he sold the damaged Longford car to Don Fraser. The movements of his other two Coopers are more of a puzzle, but Davison advertised the T58 alongside the T62 in August 1964. Photographs show clearly that the T58 was the car bought by Don O’Sullivan a year and a half later after he wrecked his ex-Stillwell F1-5-61 at Lakeside in February 1966.

After racing the T58 at Sandown Park on 27 February, O’Sullivan took the car back to Western Australia and raced it at Caversham for the next year. It was also driven by his mechanic Jamie Gard at Caversham in September and October 1967 after O’Sullivan bought a newer Cooper T70. Parts of the car were still in Australia in 2024, but its history since 1968 remains unknown.

These histories last updated on 01 Mar 2024.