The unique Australian F1 feat that will never be repeated

Giuseppe Farina did it first. Lando Norris did it most recently. Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton have done it most often. 

Since 1950, only 35 of the 782 drivers to race in a world champinonship grand prix have been crowned 'F1 world champion'. Of those, 34 of them have done so as a regular driver, an employee of the team, if you'd like. 

But only one has completed the unique feat of winning the world championship in a self-constructed car bearing his own name - a unique feat which stands as one of the greatest achievements in F1, and one which will surely never be matched.

The driver? That's three-time F1 champion, Sir Jack Brabham. 

F1's most unique champion

Brabham, who was born in New South Wales in 1926, found his way to Europe after the Second World War and success in Tasman racing across his home country and New Zealand, including winning the Speedcar championships in both countries.

In 1955, he turned up at Cooper and managed to wrangle himself a drive, debuting at the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree, the famous race where Juan Manuel Fangio won his third title, and possibly let team-mate Stirling Moss win his maiden grand prix in front of his home crowd in the process. The jury remains out if Fangio truly did let Moss win. 

After odd entries here and there, in 1959, Brabham and Cooper won the world championship - and made history. The Cooper T51 machine was the first car to win the title with a rear-mounted engine. A front-engined car would never win the title again, with Mike Hawthorn's 1958 success being the last time the 'horse would pull the cart'. 

Brabham defended his title in 1960, but was soon getting itchy feet and after a poor 1961 title defence, with just four points, he left Cooper to set up his own team, the Brabham Racing Organisation, which debuted at the 1962 season-opening Dutch GP. 

'Black Jack' scored points four times and finished ninth overall, but 1963 proved promising with the great Dan Gurney as his team-mate.

Gurney scored podiums in Belgium and the Netherlands before Brabham took the first in his own car in Mexico, and in 1964, the wins started to come. 

This was for Gurney, again, in Mexico, but he departed ahead of 1966, ironically setting up his own team, having got the bug from Brabham, with the Anglo-American Racing squad, and the beautiful Eagle-Weslake T1G machine. 

For 1966, Brabham was joined by New Zealander Denny Hulme, and with a new Repco 3.0-litre V8 bolted in the back, Brabham entered the history books. 

From his six finishes in the nine-race season, he won four times, finished second once and fourth in the other, to become a three-time F1 world champion.

In doing so, Brabham became the first, and to-date, only driver to win the F1 world championship in a self-constructed car bearing his own name. 

Others, such as Bruce McLaren, his team-mate at Cooper in the early 1960s, have won races in cars bearing their own name, but Brabham is the only driver to claim the title.

To boot, Brabham won the constructors' title as well, before Hulme became the only New Zealander to win the title in 1967, with Brabham finishing as runner-up in another championship double, before the end of the 1960s saw the team fall on hard times.

Brabham called it quits at the end of 1970, a year he arguably could have won a fourth title, having won in South Africa, crashed from the lead in the closing stages of Monaco to finish second, and then run out of fuel to finish second again, at the British GP. 

He retired as the second-most successful driver in terms of titles, behind Fangio on five, and it was not until 1993, when Alain Prost won his fourth, that someone went above Brabham on the list. He was knighted in 1979.

To date, only Schumacher, Hamilton, Fangio, Prost, Sebastian Vettel, and Max Verstappen have won more titles than Brabham, who is equal on three with Jackie Stewart, Niki Lauda, Nelson Piquet, and Ayrton Senna.

His business partner Ron Tauranac sold up in the early 1970s to a certain Bernard Charles Ecclestone, under whom the team won two further drivers' titles in 1981 and 1983, and invented the iconic 'BT46B fan car' in 1978.

Brabham himself died in 2014, aged 88, his place in the F1 history books secured forever as the first, and incredibly likely to be the only, driver to win the title in a self-constructed car bearing his own name.

He is one of only two Australians to win the title, the other being Alan Jones in 1980.