Bruce McLaren's last Formula 1 car

Bruce McLaren prided himself on the inventiveness and sheer industry of his small team. But by the turn of the 1970s, the strain was beginning to show as McLaren and team-mate Denny Hulme contested both the full Formula 1 championship and the US-based CanAm sportscar series, then added an Indianapolis programme to the company portfolio.

Lucrative though these peripheral activities were, they entailed a considerable division of labour in McLaren's busy industrial unit on David Road, Colnbrook, under the Heathrow flightpath. In 1968, Bruce had followed in the wheeltracks of his old Cooper team-mate Jack Brabham and won a grand prix in a car bearing his own name but, while the M7 family of F1 cars was neat and compact, development suffered for the dilution of resources - and Bruce's tendency to doggedly pursue his engineering flights of fancy.

While McLaren's CanAm cars raked in cash, both from prize money and the long list of orders from customers (which had to be fulfilled by an outside contractor, Trojan, later an F5000 and F1 entrant in its own right), the travel schedule for the drivers was brutal and the conflicting demands left the team in a spin.

Rarely more so than when Hulme, still in mathematical contention for the 1968 world drivers' title, crashed his M7A at the penultimate round at Watkins Glen - leaving just 19 days for the remnants to be flown to England and rebuilt at Colnbrook by a skeleton crew while the team's leading lights stayed in the US for the CanAm rounds at Laguna Seca and Riverside.

Flight diversions caused by fog nearly caused the repaired car to miss its vital rendezvous with the rest of the F1 freight, en route to Mexico via a notoriously protracted customs process.

Outside pursuits were obstructing F1 development at a particularly febrile time, as the Ford-Cosworth V8 engine became ubiquitous and rival teams scrambled to find the proverbial 'unfair advantage' over one another. Bruce waded in with a number of peculiar ideas which he would see through to a conclusion no matter how flimsy the premise, such as fitting fuel tanks in panniers to improve weight distribution.

In 1969 he directed a sixth of the team's annual budget into the development of a four-wheel-drive F1 car which ended up racing only once. He later described the driving experience as "like trying to sign your name with someone jogging your elbow".

As the new decade approached, it had become clear that wings and aerofoils, in tandem with rapid advancements in tyre technology, offered much more development road and were more weight-efficient than ponderous 4WD hardware.

Politically the IndyCar project was important, since it had been a condition of Goodyear's sponsorship deal with McLaren.

Neat as the M14A was, though, this was not a time in which evolution and chipping away at details yielded victories in F1

With lead designer Gordon Coppuck assigned to that task, responsibility for the 1970 M14A fell to the young ex-Lotus engineer Jo Marquart, who had co-designed the ultra-successful M8A CanAm car with Coppuck and been saddled with the unenviable task of drawing the M9A 4WD F1 curio.

Lack of torsional rigidity was perceived to have been the chief weakness of the M7 family, believed to have been largely addressed with the one-off M7C variant Bruce raced through 1969, featuring a full monocoque 'cigar tube' body rather than the 'bathtub' shape of the original M7. Given the shortage of time and resources, Marquart focused on adapting the M7C concept, adding strength while cutting weight by simplifying and neatening the design.

Like the M7C, the monocoque was combination of 18-gauge aluminium bonded and riveted together with mild steel bulkheads.

New suspension geometry - particularly at the front, where rear-facing links had required an additional bulkhead for anchorage on the M7 family - unlocked a series of weight savings and allowed for a longer, slimmer void to accommodate the fuel tanks. New uprights all round and inboard-mounted rear brake rotors reduced unsprung weight, while 15-inch wheels replaced 13-inchers, allowing for larger brakes with theoretically greater stopping power.

Fibreglass bodywork in non-structural areas such as the nose cone was entirely conventional, as was the use of the DFV as a stressed member of the chassis, bolted directly to the tub. What had been ground-breaking just three seasons earlier, with the seminal Lotus 49 (on which Marquart had worked), was now the norm; of the leading teams, only Ferrari persisted with a semi-monocoque chassis.

Neat as the M14A was, though, this was not a time in which evolution and chipping away at details yielded victories in F1.

Engine power had spiked with the displacement doubling of 1967 and continued to climb through development. Getting all that power down had been the problem, hence all that energy expended in dead-ends such as 4WD.

Bruce had been onto something with his pannier fuel tanks, though. Weight-effective as aerofoils were in producing downforce, aerodynamic science was still relatively immature in motorsport. Shifting a car's weight balance rearwards was another lever engineers could pull to gain traction, along with ever-improving rubber produced by competing manufacturers.

Boldness would trump convention in 1970 as the wedge-shaped Lotus 72 with its side-mounted radiators proved to be a game-changer, albeit only after it was shorn of needless complications such as rising-rate suspension geometry. Ferrari's 312B was in the mix, too, thanks to that sonorous flat-12's generous grunt and advantageous balance.

In the season opener at Kyalami in early March, the works McLarens of Denny and Bruce qualified sixth and tenth, with John Surtees in the M7C - now repainted in his own colours - seventh.

Hulme qualified third but slipped out of contention for a podium when his car began jumping out of gear. Bruce barely figured, starting 10th and crashing when his suspension buckled after 19 laps

Bruce retired with engine failure, a malady which also afflicted Surtees and other contenders including Jochen Rindt's Lotus and Jacky Ickx's Ferrari. Jack Brabham won by 8.1secs from Hulme. It was far from disastrous, but then again Lotus was racing its ageing 49C because the 72 wasn't ready yet...

PLUS: Formula 1's great Lotus landmarks - Lotus 49

Bruce shunted the car photographed here, chassis M14/1, in the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch a fortnight after South Africa.

It was rebuilt with a new tub and 13-inch wheels for the Spanish round at Jarama, where Bruce finished second from 11th on the grid, albeit helped by attrition - Hulme had qualified second but was one of 11 retirements.

Rindt's Lotus 72 had proved such a handful pre-retirement that his team reverted to the 49C for the next round at Monaco, while Ickx's Ferrari was gutted by fire after a collision on the opening lap.

Hulme also tried 13-inch wheels, in the non-championship International Trophy race at Silverstone, but hated them (he was beaten by Reine Wisell in an M7A) and at Monaco both works McLarens took on 15-inch wheels with a revised suspension upright design.

Hulme qualified third but slipped out of contention for a podium when his car began jumping out of gear. Bruce barely figured, starting tenth and crashing when his suspension buckled after 19 laps. Up front, Rindt claimed a famous victory when Brabham slithered off at the final corner.

This was 10 May. Events in the coming weeks would hammer the team from every direction.

Two days after Monaco, Hulme was testing the new M15 Indycar at Indianapolis in preparation for McLaren's first works assault on the Indy 500 when high-speed vibrations caused a fuel flap to pop open. Airflow sucked fuel out of the tank, spraying it over the car and engine, where it caught fire. Methanol burns with an invisible flame: within seconds of seeing droplets on his windshield, and while still exceeding 180mph, Hulme felt an intense heat and saw his gloves begin to wilt. He had to leap from the cockpit while the car was still moving.

Hulme's hands were too badly burned for him to continue, and so McLaren drafted in Peter Revson and Carl Williams to complete the 'Month of May' rituals and contest the race on 30 May. Three days after that, with Hulme out of commission, Bruce elected to test the new M8D CanAm car himself at Goodwood.

There a hitherto perfectly ordinary day ended in a tragedy of the cruellest, most random kind: the failure of a catch sent the rear bodywork loose and flailing, and the car, shorn of downforce, ploughed into a concrete bunker used on race days as a marshalling post. Bruce was killed instantly.

This second brutal blow in just a handful of weeks might also have felled the team, but Bruce's friends and colleagues, dazed and emotionally drained as they were, filed into the factory the following day and began to build his legacy. They were too broken to contemplate travelling to that weekend's Belgian GP but were defiantly present at Zandvoort on 21 June, with a Can-Am victory the previous weekend already in the bag.

Hulme had aggravated the welts on his hands in the sportscar race, so he sat out the Dutch GP as Peter Gethin raced his car (and crashed it) while Bruce's friend Dan Gurney (pictured above) took M14/1, though an engine failure put him out on lap two.

A dodgy batch of crankshafts was blamed for many of the Cosworth failures that season and caused a shortage of raceworthy units, which led to Gethin missing the British GP. Gurney also had to take his leave before Germany, owing to one of his sponsors - Castrol - taking exception to him piloting a car carrying Gulf logos.

That opened the door to Gethin returning to partner Hulme in the closing rounds, but there would be no victories for McLaren in F1 that year and the team had to settle for fifth in the constructors' championship.

It would be back to the drawing board - after sorting the Indycar and tying up CanAm again, of course.

Race record
Starts: 30
Wins: 0
Poles: 0
Fastest laps: 0
Podiums: 5
Constructors' points: 35

Specification
Chassis: Aluminium and steel monocoque
Suspension: Double wishbones, coil-over shock absorbers
Engine: Ford Cosworth DFV 90-degree V8
Engine capacity: 2993cc
Power: 430bhp@10,000rpm
Gearbox: Hewland DG300 five-speed manual
Tyres: Goodyear 
Weight: 535kg
Notable drivers: Bruce McLaren, Denny Hulme, Dan Gurney, Peter Gethin