This car, Lot 225, sold for $101,253 (£75,900), including buyer’s premium, at RM Sotheby’s Shift Online auction on April 28, 2025.
From a market standpoint, Cooper’s T51 racer is interesting because it embodies conflicting characteristics. It is extremely important from a historic standpoint, pretty in its own special way, and enormously fun and easy to drive. But (with a few specific exceptions) they have never been particularly valuable. Tracking down these threads and how they interact is today’s project.
Front to back
Let’s start with historic importance. From the earliest days, the conventional wisdom for car design was in accordance with Enzo Ferrari’s insistence that the “the horse pulls the cart,” (i.e. the engine is in front and drives the rear wheels). Except for the Auto Union GP cars of the late 1930s — which were few, and consistently beaten by Mercedes — no serious racers ever challenged this. Cooper might not have either, but in the late 1940s, garage owner Charlie Cooper helped his son John build a 500-cc Formula 3 racer. With little money and only a motorcycle engine to work with, they took the front ends of two pre-war Fiat 500 “Topolinos” and welded them together for the chassis. Chain drive was what the motorcycle used, so they put the engine behind the driver. As the saying goes, “It worked a treat.”
Starting in 1948, the Cooper Car Company built customer versions of this concept, adding front-engine sports cars and Formula 2 racers over the next few years, but the Formula 3 car was the main product. Post-war England was mad about motor racing, but finding a suitable small engine was difficult. Coventry Climax solved this in 1954 when it introduced the FWA, the automotive variant of an aluminum fire-pump engine, and Cooper designed a car to use it. Cooper wanted its F3 car to go 125 mph with the FWA’s 75 hp, which required light weight and minimal frontal area. The calculation was that one square foot of frontal area was the equivalent of 25 hp. Hiding the engine behind the driver seemed the best way to keep the profile small.
Putting the engine in back required coming up with a transaxle, which was basically an unknown concept at the time. This was resolved by taking a Citroën FWD unit and flipping it upside down, with custom 4-speed gears made by ERSA in France. The resulting racer — the Cooper T39 “Bobtail” — was a huge success in the 1,100-cc class, and later in the 1.5-liter class. Jack Brabham borrowed the construction jigs to build himself a Formula 1 special with a Bristol engine, winning the 1955 Australian GP. This worked as a sort of “proof of concept” for a mid-engine formula car and was called the Cooper T40.
Formula fun
Formula 1 in the mid-to-late 1950s was for 2.5-liter cars and three-hour races, which favored big cars from Ferrari, Maserati, Vanwall and BRM. Cooper focused on 1.5-liter Formula 2 instead, running shorter races where light and nimble virtues were more important. Meanwhile, Coventry Climax had introduced a purpose-built racing engine, the twin-cam FPF, originally 1.5 liters but eventually as big as 2.7. The first Cooper to officially race in F1 was the T43 in 1957 for the Rob Walker team. The initial GP for 1958 was in Argentina, where Stirling Moss drove his T43 to victory over the favored Ferrari and Maserati marques. The writing was on the wall.
The T51 was an evolution of the T43 for the 1959 season using the 2.5-liter FPF, and Jack Brabham won the world championship for Cooper with it. Though front-engine F1 cars staggered along for a few more years, the Cooper T51 was the nail in the coffin: Mid-engine racers were the future of all serious automobile racing. The T51 is thus iconic and historically important, a core part of any serious F1 collection.
From a vintage-racer’s standpoint, they are a joy. I have experience driving the T53 (the 1960 evolution) and can honestly state that it is the most fun I have ever had in an open-wheeled racer. They are light, nimble, predictable and love to be driven “loose.” They both invite and reward wild abandon. The downside, as with the first of any new concept, was that the T51 was quickly superseded by newer, faster iterations of the idea. Racing one today, competition is a challenge. As the dominant concept at the end of the front-engine 2.5-liter formula, they are too fast for that group and too few in number to have a full grid for themselves. The Monaco Historic Grand Prix, the ultimate vintage-open-wheel event, limits the 2.5-liter grid to front-engine cars to make a good show.
Cooper also made a ton of T51s. Historian Doug Nye, the true expert on these cars, writes that 28 were built, which for a bespoke Formula car is extraordinary. Most were sold to privateers in both F1 and F2; only a few had the kind of provenance and history that makes for collectible value. Cooper didn’t stamp or mark their chassis, relying on brass tags on the bodywork that were easily lost. Establishing the identity and history of many of the cars is all but impossible.
Doomed to display?
Which brings us to our subject car. Though I am told Doug Nye inspected it and found it to be a real T51, the chassis number and provenance are unknown beyond having been found in Australia in the mid-1980s. It has an original 2.7-liter FPF instead of the 2.5 it would need to race at FIA-sanctioned events, the Hewland transaxle is incorrect, the magnesium wheels are 65 years old, and the whole thing hasn’t run in 20 years. Turning it into a good running vintage racer is certainly possible, but is it worth it?
The FPF is probably not worth converting to 2.5; it is too old to be dependable in serious use. Crosthwaite & Gardiner in the U.K. are willing and able to provide everything needed, but an FPF is about $94k at today’s conversion rate, a correct transaxle about $60k. Wheels and other ancillaries are also not cheap. A proper restoration to a running T51 would cost at least $200,000.
As I mentioned, weapons-grade T51s are not exactly rare. Consensus among my dealer friends is that a good running one to FIA standards is worth about $150,000 today. So, where does this leave our subject car? Interestingly, the price was probably about fair for the car as a static collection piece: They are an important bookend to any serious F1 display. Just don’t have any illusions about making it into a vintage racer. It was fairly bought for what it is.
