How McLaren’s early years set the team on the path to success

Even before Bruce McLaren boarded the ship that was supposed to bear him to England, his was a career in fast-forward mode. Stocky of build and walking with a slight limp, the legacy of a childhood interrupted by Legg-Calvé-Perthes Disease, McLaren looked more like the captain of a rugby team – which he had been before the affliction set in – than a racing driver.

But by the time he became the first recipient of the New Zealand International Grand Prix Association’s ‘Driver to Europe’ scholarship in March 1958, the 20-year-old engineering student had built a reputation as a gritty racer in a series of self-modified ‘specials’, and established connections with the likes of Jack Brabham that would furnish him with more opportunities in the northern hemisphere.

Bruce’s father Leslie, a keen amateur racer, ran a garage in a suburb of Auckland, so Bruce had grown up with oil under his fingernails. What set him apart from his contemporaries on the racing scene, aside from his speed, was an immense natural charisma. Those who worked with him in the early years of his eponymous team followed his lead unquestioningly.

Improvisation came naturally to McLaren. That March in 1958, having loaded his second-hand, ex-Brabham 1750cc Formula 2 Cooper-Climax into the hold of the ship Orantes with a plan to convert it to 1500cc on arrival in Europe, McLaren received word that Jack had arranged for him to contest the non-championship Aintree 200 F1/F2 race in a works Cooper in mid-April.

He would have to disembark mid-journey and fly the rest of the way to get there in time – which he did after locating his car in the bowels of the hold, and removing his custom brake and clutch pedals, along with his St Christopher from the dashboard. Carburation issues consigned him to ninth of the F2 runners but McLaren could feel the greater competitiveness of the new Cooper chassis, where coils supplanted transverse leaf springs in the front suspension.

By the time the Orantes had put into port in the UK, McLaren had brokered the sale of his old car and arranged to buy a new one in kit form to build himself.

McLaren drove a loaned works Cooper at the Aintree 200 F1/F2 race in 1958

Photo by: Autocar / LAT Images via Getty Images

Bruce also imported friends and former on-track competitors as a support network: Colin Beanland and Phil Kerr, the latter of whom would become McLaren’s team manager in the late 1960s. It was an itinerant life in the early months, renting rooms in the Royal Oak pub in Tolworth, around the corner from the Cooper workshop, and travelling around the UK and Europe with the F2 car on a trailer towed by an ageing Ford Zephyr.

For 1959 he became Brabham’s team-mate in Cooper’s works F1 squad, establishing a new record as the youngest grand prix winner, aged 22, at Sebring as Brabham pushed his car over the line for fourth place and took the drivers’ championship. Still McLaren led a relatively humble existence.

“He was famous,” wrote Eoin Young – another chum from New Zealand, later taken on board as secretary and ‘gofer’. “But he did not really feel very famous. He was still working hard to make a success of his career and he displayed none of the trappings of a famous racing driver. He drove a Morris Minor he had bought from Betty Brabham, and he shared a little bed-sitting room in Surbiton with Phil Kerr.

“By comparison Bob Cratchit had it made. On occasions they would be invited out to meals and the high point, when they were at home, was a Sunday roast with the Brabhams” Eoin Young

“The bathroom was on the landing to be shared with other tenants. Their daily menu included cornflakes and coffee for breakfast, lunch depended on where they were and whether they could afford it, and the evening meal was always at Nick’s Cafe in Kingston down by the coal yards beside the Thames. Their standard order was sausages, bacon and baked beans for one and ninepence. They made themselves instant coffee when they got back to the bedsitter.

“By comparison Bob Cratchit had it made. On occasions they would be invited out to meals and the high point, when they were at home, was a Sunday roast with the Brabhams.”

If the literary allusion to the lives of the Dickensian working class is a bit of a stretch, this remains a potent portrait of the life of a professional racer in that era – or, rather, one of that segment who had not been born into wealth and had to create their own opportunities. Cooper’s star was destined to shine only briefly in F1 as the category entered a phase of continuous technological development, fundamentally incompatible with ‘Old Man’ Charles Cooper’s predilection for keeping his wallet in his pocket.

Aged 22, McLaren became the youngest grand prix winner at Sebring in 1959

Photo by: Bettmann Archive

Bruce, along with Jack Brabham, contributed to the engineering of the new ‘Lowline’ Cooper T53 for 1960, but this was accomplished in the teeth of opposition from the boss – to the extent that a second chassis had to be built in secret.

Having grown disenchanted with progress after his second world championship, Brabham cautiously disconnected himself from Cooper and set up on his own, initially under the anodyne name of Motor Racing Developments. Come the official separation, McLaren became Cooper’s number one driver for 1962, but by the following season his career momentum appeared to be stalling in a flurry of failures to finish grands prix.

Cooper’s position as pre-eminent supplier of cars across most of the popular racing categories was coming under increasing threat from the likes of Lotus and Lola. Still Charles was disinclined to spend, cancelling a monocoque chassis project; son John, traditionally the company’s wonga wangler, was still in recovery after sustaining serious injuries in a road accident while testing his twin-engined Mini.

All this fed into Bruce choosing to follow his former team-mate’s path, the tipping point coming in a disagreement with Charles Cooper late in 1963 over planning for the winter’s Tasman campaign. Charles, not wanting to build a one-off chassis, insisted an F1 car with an engine upsized to 2.5 litres would be fine; Bruce disagreed, believing the base car to be too heavy and bulky, compromised by carrying fuel tanks with a capacity far in excess of what was needed in a shorter Tasman race. 

Once McLaren had an engineering notion in his head, he would pursue it until its effectiveness could be proved or disproved by performance. The compromise solution they alighted upon was that Bruce would employ a Cooper mechanic, Wally Willmott, to convert a T66 F1 car according to his own wishes and run it as a non-works project.

McLaren, along with Edward ‘Teddy’ Mayer, brother of his new American team-mate Tim, found premises in the unpromising form of a dirt-floored corner of a large shed in New Malden that was otherwise full of earth-moving machinery, and Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd entered the books at Companies House.

Construction of a second ‘Lowline’ Cooper T53 had to be done on the quiet

Photo by: GP Library / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Wilmott and Tyler Alexander would be the first employees, building up two cars (designated T70) for a Tasman campaign that was by turns triumphant and tragic. McLaren won three of the four races in New Zealand, opening a championship lead that Brabham then partially ate into by winning the next three races in Australia. 

Longford, a Reims-like triangle of public roads in Tasmania, was the venue of the final round. During practice, Mayer’s car landed awkwardly after cresting a hump, bouncing into a trajectory that carried it off the road and into the trees, where Mayer was violently ejected from the cockpit and killed instantly.

This being motor racing in the 1960s, a fatality did not stop the proceedings and the following day Graham Hill won in his Scuderia Veloce-entered Brabham BT4, McLaren a low-profile second. The championship’s dropped-score mathematics would have worked in McLaren’s favour anyway, even if Brabham had not retired from the lead late on.

Since he was still Cooper’s lead F1 driver, dovetailing this with his involvement in Ford’s GT40 programme, Bruce elected to enter the in-house project in races as a Cooper-Oldsmobile

The newly crowned Tasman champion returned as Cooper’s lead works driver in F1 for the following two seasons while quietly pursuing his side hustle. Before relocating to more commodious premises in Feltham in 1964, he acquired the controversial ‘Zerex special’ sportscar from US racing magnate John Mecom Jr. This had begun life as a Cooper T53 whose brief F1 career ended on lap 15 of the 1961 US GP at Watkins Glen, when driver Walt Hansgen swerved to avoid a spinning Olivier Gendebien and his path took him over the guardrail. 

Fellow Sports Car Club of America stalwart Roger Penske, who had started two places behind Hansgen on the grid, bought the remnants and had it rebuilt in a sportscar-style bodyshell, albeit with the driver still in the centre. This did not wash well with rivals, especially when he began winning races in it. After it was banned, Mecom bought and modified the car into legally acceptable ‘two-seater’ format, and was planning to replace its 2.7-litre Climax engine with a 3.5-litre Oldsmobile V8 when McLaren offered to take it off his hands.

It was McLaren and his coterie who executed the conversion, essentially cutting out the centre section of the chassis and replacing it with a stiffer alternative of their own design. Since he was still Cooper’s lead F1 driver, dovetailing this with his involvement in Ford’s GT40 programme, Bruce elected to enter the in-house project in races as a Cooper-Oldsmobile. Whatever the increasing distance from its mechanical origins, much of the new tubing had been sourced from and bent at Cooper’s works by another new McLaren recruit, Howden Ganley. 

1964 Tasman crown was won under the shadow of team-mate Tim Mayer’s death

Photo by: GP Library / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Cooper-Oldsmobile’s first outing, ambitiously, was to be the Player’s 200 at Mosport, the sinuous track in the countryside north of Toronto, Canada, two weeks before the Le Mans 24 Hours. The opposition included the likes of AJ Foyt and Dan Gurney as well as Penske, now driving a Chaparral, but they fell by the wayside and Bruce won with a lap in hand over a Cooper-Ford piloted by Augie Pabst, who had famously driven a hire car into a hotel swimming pool in California to settle a bet with Penske and Hansgen. 

The move to Feltham freed up space to work on a plethora of new projects, including a clean-sheet sportscar and a new conversion for the Tasman series next winter. Bruce engaged former Cooper designer Owen Maddock, now working freelance, to assist with the Mk1 sportscar, later rechristened the M1A, creating a distinctively low-slung spaceframe clothed in fibreglass bodywork, and conceived from the ground up to be propelled by a substantial US-sourced big-banger engine.

By the winter of 1964 it had raced competitively enough to warrant series production for customers but, still lacking the capacity to meet demand, McLaren and Teddy Mayer did a deal to outsource manufacture to Elva Cars in Kent.

Bruce’s Ford connections also wrought a development deal with Firestone. And while the first result of this was the scuppering of the Tasman campaign, since the cars’ suspension geometry had been conceived for 13-inch wheels and Firestone only had 15-inch boots available, the US company was keen to expand into F1 and effectively commissioned McLaren to build a test car for tyre evaluation.

This coincided with more unfortunate developments at Cooper. Following the death of Charles, the company was sold to the Chipstead Motor Group, holder of the UK Maserati import concession. With the ‘return to power’ in the offing for 1966, there was little interest in investment through the 1965 F1 season, and Bruce and new team-mate Jochen Rindt had to muddle through with a T77 chassis that was little different from the T73 with which McLaren had laboured to seventh in the championship the previous year.

McLaren had already made up his mind to go it alone, but the thin competitive gruel placed in his hands by Cooper that season confirmed his decision was the right one.

The ‘Zerex special’ sportscar started life as a wrecked Cooper T53 F1 car

Photo by: National Motor Museum / Heritage Images / Getty Images

In the early months of 1965, Bruce and Teddy expanded the company’s design and development capacity, recruiting Robin Herd to design the M2A F1 prototype while McLaren was contesting the Tasman series.

Herd, a senior scientific officer at the National Gas Turbine Establishment at Farnborough, had a double first in physics and engineering at Oxford, and had worked on the Concorde supersonic transport project. He was also one of the few early McLaren employees not to be drawn from the expat Kiwi community, making contact via former classmate Alan Rees, the up-and-coming F2 racer with whom he would later co-found March Engineering.

“I had a great job but I wanted something more challenging,” Herd would recall in a later interview with Autosport. “I got a message to phone Bruce. We met that evening, and that was that. McLaren were doing F1 and I was designing racing cars.

“I had a great job but I wanted something more challenging. I got a message to phone Bruce. We met that evening, and that was that. McLaren were doing F1 and I was designing racing cars” Robin Herd 

“To be told we’ve got to have this car on the grid at Monaco next year, when I hadn’t actually designed anything other than engineering exercises, showed an extraordinary degree of faith or stupidity on his part, and a similar arrogance or stupidity on mine. But I wanted to do it so much I wasn’t going to let anything stand in my way.”

Faith, arrogance, stupidity – call it what you want, but Herd’s F1 prototype demonstrated a freewheeling determination not to be constrained by convention. For the monocoque, rather than sheet aluminium riveted together into box sections, he used Mallite, an aerospace-grade laminate composite material in which balsa wood was faced with sheet duralumin, an alloy of aluminium and copper. Mallite offered similar weight and tensile properties to plain aluminium but was more resistant to torsion, which Herd felt lent itself to racing applications.

The downside of Mallite was that it could not be bent or worked into complex shapes, though by working with the manufacturer to employ different material hardnesses on each side it was possible to roll it and create D-section side ‘pontoons’. These were bonded to fabricated steel bulkheads.

M1A, pictured here at Nassau in 1964, was McLaren’s first ground-up design

Photo by: Bernard Cahier / Getty Images

While the finished chassis was stiffer than a conventional F1 car of the time, it would have been difficult and more costly to repair after a crash, which informed Herd’s decision to make Wally Willmott’s life easier and specify Mallite only for the inner and top skins of what would become the M2B.

During this process, Bruce himself had an incredibly busy 1965. From 9 January to 1 March he contested the seven-race Tasman series, winning the final round; on 1 January he had finished fifth for Cooper in the South African Grand Prix. From March through to May he squeezed in the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, the Senior Service 200 at Silverstone (in the M1A), the Sebring 12 Hours, Monza 1000km, Nurburgring 1000km and the Le Mans test for Ford in the GT40, two further non-championship F1 races at Silverstone and Goodwood, and three more national sportscar races in the M1A.

Between Sebring and the Le Mans test he made use of his Ford contacts to set up a meeting to see if the Blue Oval could be persuaded to build or at least fund a three-litre F1 engine. It was a good idea, given Ford’s sizzling on-track rivalry with Ferrari in sportscar racing, but nothing would come of it via this route.

Over the rest of the year Bruce competed in nine world championship grands prix, the Le Mans 24 Hours, two national sportscar races and two Canadian ones in the M1A before launching the M1B in September and campaigning it in five races in Canada, the USA and the Bahamas. In between he was busy testing the M1B and M2A, and found the time to scope out new premises for the team at Colnbrook. His daughter Amanda was born during a very rare break in the travel schedule. It was a racing itinerary of which Max Verstappen would be deeply envious.

A scoop photo of the M2A testing at Zandvoort did the rounds of the specialist press in September but Cooper paid it no heed, believing it was ‘just’ a Firestone test hack – a perception helped by the presence of a 4.5-litre Oldsmobile V8 in the back. Just a couple of weeks after the Nassau Trophy in December, Bruce held a press event at the Colnbrook works where the M2B was unveiled and McLaren’s entry into the F1 world championship was confirmed.

Unfortunately there was a problem in the engine bay. McLaren wasn’t unique in having to scratch around in the ‘return to power’ – Coventry Climax had signalled its withdrawal, BRM’s ambitious H16 wasn’t ready, and even Ferrari had skimped, downsizing a sportscar engine rather than designing a bespoke one.

Raucous M2B was retired at Monaco in ’66, although the car was a movie star in the guise of the fictional Yamura racer

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

McLaren’s Ford connections enabled him to buy five examples of the 4.2-litre DOHC V8 that had propelled Jim Clark to victory in the 1965 Indianapolis 500, with a view to downsizing it to three-litre form. But despite the ministrations of McLaren’s engine whizz Gary Knutson and regular sportscar collaborator Traco Engineering, it fell well short of the anticipated 340-odd horsepower.

“We worked out that the engine and gearbox together weighed about the same as the whole Brabham [F1] car,” Ganley later told Autosport. “It [the M2B] was a very good chassis, probably the stiffest monocoque of the time, but had nothing to propel it. We were going to run two cars, but it was enough of a scramble getting one together.”

The perennially unfortunate Chris Amon had been lined up to drive the second McLaren but F1 was not to be among his career highlights of 1966. His entry for the Monaco F1 season opener was scratched late in the day and, though Bruce managed to qualify 10th, it took everything he had since the four-speed ZF gearbox didn’t suit the Ford’s frustratingly narrow power band. Still, the car drew the eye – and the ear…

The weekend had not been a complete disaster, since Bruce had negotiated a fee to paint the M2B in the colours of the fictional Japanese Yamura team for John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix movie

“The V8 engine has the most enormous air intakes,” wrote Autosport’s legendary technical editor John Bolster, “with butterflies situated between the cam covers, and the exhaust system situated in the middle of the Vee is also of heroic proportions. Quite how the gas velocity is kept up to an acceptable figure for acceleration is not clear, but the plumbing looks immense compared with that of Jack Brabham’s Repco engine. The noise practically shatters the eardrums!”

When oil leaked onto his shoes in the cockpit, McLaren parked the car rather than blow the engine. The weekend had not been a complete disaster, since Bruce had negotiated a fee to paint the M2B in the colours of the fictional Japanese Yamura team for John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix movie, which was capturing footage at several grands prix that season. But it was obvious, as he noted in his post-race ‘From The Cockpit’ column for Autosport, that “we’re going to have to make some fairly drastic moves in the engine room”.

By the time the magazine had gone to press, not only had the decision been made, but a deal done: Serenissima, the fledgling Italian marque, would furnish a supply of V8 engines and have each block blessed by a local priest as it was loaded onto the trailer. It took Ganley and John Muller two days to tow the M2B back to Colnbrook, whereupon Mayer emerged from the factory door. 

“Don’t unload the car,” he said, “You’re taking it to Modena tonight…”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the June 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

L-r: Alexander, McLaren, Mayer and Kerr at Colnbrook premises in 1970

Photo by: David Phipps / Sutton Images via Getty Images