On this day...... 40 years ago.June 2nd 1970The world of Motor Racing was rocked by the death of Bruce McLaren in an accident while testing his famous McLaren Can Am Cars at Goodwood in the UK, when his McLaren M8D lost its rear bodywork at high speed, spun off the track and collided with an earthen embankment in front of the marshalls post.. It was one of bits of news you dont believe, like with Senna, it just seemed not possible. Others yes, but not him.
Perhaps saddest of all was that the accident occured as the team stopped for lunch, but Bruce wanted to do 'one more lap' before lunch to give himself time to consider the issues facing the team......
Bruce was certainly one of my Motor Racing heroes at the time, and posters of the Orange cars (particularly the Can-Am cars) adorned my bedroom walls. I can still vividly recall the first I knew of his death.... outside the train station coming
home from school, in the middle of the week, (it was a Wednesday) seeing the headlines on an "Evening Standard" placard outside the newsagents kiosk....
Piers Courage also lost his life the same month, at Zandvoort a couple of weeks later, and Rindt was only months away. A bad year.
Bruce Leslie McLaren: 1937 - 1970
* Tasman Series Champion 1964
* Can-Am Champion: 1967 & 1969
* Winner: First United States Grand Prix (Sebring, 1959)
* Winner: 1966 Le Mans 24 Hours (with Amon)
* Winner: 1967 Sebring 12 Hours (with Andretti)
* Brands Hatch Race of Champions winner 1968
This tribute which follows is largely based on the official Bruce McLaren Biography as written by Frank Falkner in 1970, just after Bruce's death, but with a fair bit of additional material that has become available since, some from the Bruce McLaren Trust, plus other material added by myself......
Bruce, when he died at the age of 33 on June 2nd 1970, was already one of the most experienced of all F1 drivers in terms of years (Only Jack Brabham had more)
Lets go back to the beginning, and the roots of a name that is now firmly entrenched in Motor Racing Folklore, with the team that bears his name currently leading the WCC on the back of its 1-2 result in Turkey.....
Bruce was born to Les & Ruth Mclaren on 30th August 1937 in Auckland, New Zealand, the second child in the family after elder sister Pat. Father Les had always shown great achievements in his motor cycle racing days, but having driven Petrol Tankers in his career with the Texaco/Caltex Oil Co he had invested in a service station in Remuera. He had however retained a healthy interest in Motor Racing and both Les and Ruth became Bruce's greatest supporters.
Before that all came about though,
Bruce was to face an uphill challenge from the age of ten, when he developed Perthes Disease (a hip joint problem) which resulted in him being hospitalised for three years in a special needs orthapaedic hospital, confined to a Bradford frame, (a frame as per the diagram below, basically much like being in traction after breaking a leg, but to lock the entire body in a position flat on the back whilst joints healed.)
Bruce was released from hospital, allowed to go home on crutches in late 1949. Crutches made way for walking sticks a year or two later, and then later he was able to walk unaided. After recovery from Perthes Disease, the hip joint is never completely efficient and is occasionally painful, and Bruce remained afflicted by a limp for life, his left leg shorter than the right.
To show that even at this time in hospital he was firmly gripped by motor racing is this tale of how he led his like-aged colleagues in a grid of four-wheeled "spinal chairs" on a secret night foray down the winding, smooth, downhill paths of the
hospital grounds. The steering and handling were, of course, lamentable, and there was naturally an awful multiple shunt into the flower beds. The important part of the story is that all involved, - by team effort and leadership got back to their rightful bed stations totally undiscovered and unharmed.
On his return to homelife, Bruce's father surprised him when, at the age of 14, a truck full of boxes of spare parts, towing an Austin Ulster, arrived at the family home. This was to be the basis of Bruce's first racing car, and was built up with his father's help in the kitchen at home! When built Bruce was still too young to drive and so used the car in a figure of 8 track in land out the back. Bruce applied for his licence at aged 15 (old enough back then in NZ).
At 16 he was a secretly frightened competition license holder competing in his first hill-climb in a highly tweaked Austin 7...... he went on and competed in local hill climbs, gymkhanas, sprint meetings etc.
His Dad had an Austin Healey, and Bruce was one day allowed to drive it at Ardmore, a good showing leading to an association with Jack Brabham.... In January and February 1957 Jack Brabham raced a 1.5-litre, bob-tailed, centre-seat Cooper in New Zealand. A month later Bruce's father 'Pop' McLaren bought the car. Bruce immediately began to modify and improve it—and master it—so much so that he was runner-up in the 1957–8 New Zealand championship series.
McLaren and Brabham kept in touch all that year eventually agreeing on a deal for the 1958 season. Jack Brabham would bring to New Zealand a pair of single seat Coopers, which he and Bruce would race. Success was immediate. At their first race, the New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore in January 1958, Bruce finished second behind Brabham.
This success, along with a word from Jack led to Bruce becoming the first of the New Zealand International Grand Prix Association's "Driver to Europe" scholarship winners.
This scholarship got Bruce to Europe all right, but that was about all, and with his next two years studies at University put on hold, 20-year-old Bruce, with his friend Colin Beanland acting as mechanic, set foot in England in March 1958..... the scholarship only payed the trip to Europe and set up nothing beyond that.....
Jack Brabham, (who Bruce affectionately referred to as his "god father") duly took Bruce under his wing, and along with John and Charles Cooper provided the much-needed father figures and the two New Zealanders moved into the Cooper
works to literally build their own Formula 2 Cooper.
It wasn't long before Bruce was getting entries at good Formula 2 races and causing enthusiasts to look at the program to see who this small, very young antipodean might be. This came to a head, and made everyone really sit up and take notice, at the 1958 German Grand Prix, a combined F1 and F2 race at the Nurbürgring (Nordschleife). Bruce was running in the GP field driving an F2. A brilliant drive led him to finish 5th overall and first F2 car...... he stood on the victory podium beside Tony Brooks, who had won the F1 race in a Vanwall that day. At this point Bruce had truly arrived and his career in the big time started.
In this same year, 1958, Ken Tyrrell, one of the great spotters of driving talent, offered Bruce the drive in his F2 Cooper, and this friendship and educational experience was also important in Bruce's future character.... The perfectionist in
Bruce began to show itself in many ways. The late "Noddy" Grohman and Mike Barney were perfectionist Cooper mechanics, and friends also. One hour before the race, Bruce, with a little list in his hand, would run down his checklist with them.... "Noddy and Mike, did you top her up with oil?" The two mechanics would not even deign to answer and gave him looks that could kill. When they were not looking, however, Bruce simply could not resist undoing the filler cap to peek.
The next year saw Bruce join the Cooper factory GP team along with Jack Brabham and Masten Gregory. It is not widely known that Bruce had received much training in engineering school and through his father, and during the next years he showed his talents in the technical aspects, and there would not have been two other drivers who spent more time involved in testing, development and preparation than he and Brabham.
This was also the time when the leaders in the sport were quietly realizing that while it was important to get maximum horsepower, seconds could also be knocked off lap times by tuning the chassis. Ken Tyrrell was a pioneer here and he always thought very highly of Bruce in this regard. As Tyrrell explained it, one of the most difficult things a driver is called upon to do in testing is to drive constantly flat-out at exactly the same speed, lap after lap, and then report on the handling and so on. It was here that all the groundwork for the subsequent maturation in the whole field of motor racing was done.
At the end of 1959 Bruce McLaren became, at 22, the youngest driver ever to win a World Championship F1 race, the U.S. Grand Prix at Sebring. It was the race where Jack Brabham took his first world championship. Ironically, Bruce, even 50+ years later, is still the 3rd youngest driver to have ever won a Grand Prix, with Vettel and Alonso still the only younger race winners.
In addition to that, at the 1959 Monaco Grand Prix whilst still only 21, had already seen him take the honour of being the youngest ever points scorer, and at the 1959 British GP he added youngest ever Fastest Lap and Podium winner to his achievments.
For Cooper, 1959 was the first of the two successive golden years, as they won the Manufacturers’ Championship, and
in 1960 Jack retained his World Championship with 23-year-old Bruce second in the standings for WDC. Bruce was to win a total of four GP's: U.S. (1959), Argentina (1960), Monte Carlo (1962) and Belgium (1968). As an indicator of his experience and reliability over the years, at the time, in accumulated championship points he ranked fifth behind Graham Hill, Fangio, Jim Clark and his friend Brabham.
He remained with Cooper until 1966, succeeding Brabham as their No. 1 driver when Jack left in 1962 to build his own cars. Bruce started during this time his expansion into all branches of racing, including sports cars. He came to enjoy this very much and made many friends in the U.S.
In 1966 he won the 24 hours of Le Mans with Chris Amon in a 7-liter Ford Mark IIA and in the following year the 12 hours of Sebring with Mario Andretti in a Ford Mark IV.
Another milestone was reached in 1963-64 because he was keen to break out and have his own team. For the Tasman series he formed Bruce McLaren Racing, and he had his own two specially built 2.5-liter Coopers. The late Timmy Mayer had spent his first European season in Formula 3 driving in Ken Tyrrell's team, and Bruce invited him to join him 'Down Under', being much impressed with his talent. This was to be a sort of rehearsal as John Cooper had also been impressed enough to sign the young American as his number two driver to number one McLaren for the following season.
Although Bruce won that Tasman series championship, the new team returned in sadness for Timmy was tragically killed in practice for the last race of that series.
For Teddy Mayer, manager for his brother, and mechanic Tyler Alexander, however, this was the start of their long subsequent association and eventual setting up of McLaren Racing Ltd. in 1966 with Teddy Mayer as partner. From that point on we saw another quality emerge in Bruce, that of an astute businessman and hard working executive.
The McLaren marque made its Formula One debut on May 22, 1966, (pic above) in the Monaco Grand Prix, Bruce McLaren lined up his little team’s ‘Mallite" monocoque car – M2B chassis ‘2’ – on tenth fastest spot on the starting grid.
It was powered by an Indy Ford 4-cam V8 reduced from its Speedway-standard 4.2 litres capacity to the contemporary Formula One limit of 3-litres. It was a great raucous lump of a power unit, topped by Hilborn fuel injection intake trumpets which would do credit to the ventilators on an ocean liner, and tailed by high-level ‘snake-pit’ exhaust, as can be seen in these pics from the Mexican GP that year..
Bruce remained a world-class driver but more and more his maturity allowed him to be comfortable that others were quicker and that his future lay in design, building and development. McLaren Formula 1 cars were then produced and Bruce
won Spa in 1968 in his own McLaren-Ford and later that year his team driver, Denny Hulme, won the Italian and Canadian GPs in McLaren-Fords.
During all this time, the planning was going on inside the heads of Bruce and Teddy Mayer which was to lead to the pinnacle of his overall career - the Can-Am Challenge Cup series for Group 7 sports cars. It was in this category of powerful sports car racing where McLaren's design flair and ingenuity were graphically demonstrated. Bruce McLaren Racing Ltd. won support from Chevrolet, Goodyear, Reynolds and Gulf and produced the McLaren car that won five of six races in the 1967 series, four of six in 1968 and all 11 in 1969.
Affectionately the Can-Am series became known as the 'Bruce and Denny Show', such was their domination. Overall, McLaren Can Am cars won 56 Can-Am races.
The mighty 7-litre McLaren M8A of 1968
This superb domination of the series had many rewards and just before Bruce's death, the Royal Automobile Club announced its presentation of the Seagrave Trophy to him for these outstanding performances.
McLaren in full flight in the Monterey Grand Prix, California, in 1968
Bruce McLaren was arguably at this time one of the most loved and respected names in Motor Sport, and he is one who never seemed angry, and indeed was famous for his smile even in down times. As a man he had always had the respect of his fellows and race enthusiasts the world over.... as a combination of driver and brilliant engineer/designer he arguably had no equal.
Out of interest, Bruce's last race in New Zealand was during the '68 Tasman Cup at the Teretonga circuit (South Island) on 28th January 1968...... he came 1st driving a McLaren M5A V12 B.R.M finishing just ahead of Jimmy Clark.
The Bruce McLaren Memorial at Goodwood. 
In Bruce's own words after the some years earlier death of his friend Timmy Mayer: "The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile, that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one's ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone."
* The Bruce McLaren Intermediate School in West Auckland was named after him shortly after his death. It was originally going to be called Henderson South Intermediate.
* In 2000 Motorsport NZ and the Prodrive Trust created The Bruce McLaren Scholarship to help up and coming New Zealand racing drivers.
* Inducted into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in 1990.
* Inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1991.
* Inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1995.
* The Bruce McLaren Trust, based in Auckland, New Zealand, perpetuates his memory and runs a small museum from where Bruce grew up
* The University of Auckland Formula SAE team, use Bruce's racing number 47 as their car number in memory of Bruce.
RIP Bruce McLaren.Some of the earlier McLaren F1 cars, from the first one through to 1970. I used to adore the Orange (papaya) that became so associated with McLaren until the days of sponsorship took us into the Marlboro and Texaco colour scheme.
The 14A in the previous pic was a DFV powered chassis, driven by Denny Hulme.
This 14D (below) was a one-off car built halfway through the 1970 season to accept an Alfa-Romeo T33 V8 engine, the car driven by Andrea de Adamich.
Another pic of the M9A 4WD car
McLaren Racing's Jo Marquart's experimental design employed four-wheel-drive during the 69 season. The cars used a Cosworth-Ford DFV engine turned back to front driving through to a McLaren-designed 4wd transmission. Despite exhaustive testing the car was raced only once and as with other manufacturers, 4wd projects were abandoned.
