[David McKinney]

So far so good. The first difficulty comes when we try to allot chassis numbers to them, because no chassis record was available for the 1956 cars.

My belief is that the works cars were not initially numbered, but the two customer cars were - F2-1-56 for Walker and F2-2-56 for Wharton. Then when the works cars were exported at the end of the year they were given F2-3-56 (Brabham’s car) and F2-4-56 (Salvadori’s). In the chassis record produced by Doug Nye in his Cooper book, the Moore and Thackwell cars are shown as respectively F2-1-57 and F2-2-57. It’s not clear what model the school cars, F2-4-57 and F2-5-57, were, but it seems likely they, too, were T43s, even though they had 1100cc FWA engines.

The ex-works T41s were sold in Australia (ex-Brabham) and New Zealand (ex-Salvadori) in early 1957. A later owner of the NZ car, knowing it was the prototype, believed its number was F2-P-56 - possibly by misreading a badly punched ‘4’. In comparatively recent times the ex-Brabham car, too, has been represented as F2-P-56.

Confusingly, the chassis record reproduced by Nye lists among its early 1957 cars F2-P-56, with FWB engine. This is no doubt the reason the ex-Brabham car has been so described, but if this is its correct number, what was F2-3-56?

The point should also be made that both ex-works cars had been shipped out of England well before 1 January 1957 when, presumably, that year’s record was started. And furthermore no other Cooper prototype, before or since, was given a ‘P’ number