When McLaren nearly went to Indycar

The idea of a car bearing the word 'McLaren' on orange-liveried flanks racing in this year's Indianapolis 500 would have sounded preposterous a little more than a month ago. The prospect of the same Formula 1 team competing at the Brickyard 30 years ago would have seemed just as ridiculous.

Yet there was a plan for McLaren to race Indycars full-time in the mid-1980s in a different hue of orange - the familiar lurid orange-and-white of Marlboro.

The plan belonged to Marlboro parent Philip Morris rather than McLaren. Its representatives in both the US and Europe spent considerable time and effort through 1985 trying to persuade a team that had dominated F1 with Niki Lauda and Alain Prost in '84 to double up on its racing programme and enter the CART Indycar series in '86.

Marlboro was making its first significant steps into the CART arena in 1985. It had renewed its relationship with Emerson Fittipaldi, the driver who had brought the cigarette brand to McLaren 11 years before.

There were also further personal sponsorship deals with Danny Sullivan and Al Unser Jr under the 'Marlboro World Championship Team' banner that will be familiar to anyone with a collection of Marlboro F1 event stickers. Bruno Giacomelli, who completed a limited CART programme with Patrick Racing that season, had a separate deal with Philip Morris International in Europe that had carried on from his days in F1.

The company's plan was to ramp up big-time in 1986. The Marlboro Pole Position Award came on stream, eventually helping to spawn the end-of-season Marlboro Challenge non-championship race run from 1987 until '92. But central to the ambitions of Philip Morris was getting its colours on the side of a car in the series. And who better to run it than McLaren?

It would have been a natural call, and not only because McLaren was riding the crest of a wave after taking both the F1 drivers' and constructors' titles in 1984. The team, albeit in a previous incarnation, had Indycar form.

Its chassis had taken a trio of Indy 500 victories in the 1970s, and it was the team's US operation that had kept McLaren solvent in the early '70s before Fittipaldi arrived with Marlboro's millions. It had effectively subsidised the F1 team until that point.

McLaren technical director John Barnard was also no stranger to Indycars. He'd spent five years across the Atlantic, designing first the race-winning Parnelli-Cosworth VPJ6 in the United States Automobile Club era and then the Chaparral 2K that went on to dominate the second season of the new CART series in 1980 with ex-McLaren driver Johnny Rutherford (Barnard had left by then after a dispute with Chaparral boss Jim Hall over who should be given credit for the design).

The initial discussions designed to take McLaren Stateside were set up by John Hogan, who ran Philip Morris International's sponsorship operations from Lausanne in Switzerland.

"I was privy to it and instrumental in it," says the man who four and a half years earlier had brokered the deal for McLaren to merge with Ron Dennis's Project 4 Racing squad, which had been gearing up for an F1 entry with a Barnard design.

"The 1984 season was a seminal one for McLaren and Marlboro. We had hit the ground running with the TAG turbo engine after years of disaster and the thinking in North America was, 'Why can't we do that here?'

"Philip Morris in Europe was asked to review the proposition of getting McLaren involved in Indycar racing. I was being politically ambitious in that I could see a bigger slice of the cake within Philip Morris coming into my department. I was all for it."

The first meeting about the potential Indycar programme took place in Woking in March 1985. Present were former Long Beach Grand Prix marketing boss Brian Turner, who had been retained as a consultant by Philip Morris USA, and Hogan. Their recollections of that meeting are very different, however.

"Ron didn't seem very excited about the plan and ummed and ahhed about it and finally agreed that he'd do a proposal, which he put to us in New York in July," says Turner.

Hogan, conversely, says that the then-McLaren boss was keen on the idea.

"Ron's initial reaction was to say yes - he was very positive," he recalls. "He spieled the spiel and said they could run a March chassis in the first year, tidy it up and make it better, and then come with their own car in 1987."

Dennis did put a proper proposal forward in July, but it wasn't what the Marlboro men had been hoping for.

Internal Philip Morris USA documents, freely available from the University of California, San Francisco 'Truth Tobacco' legacy library, reveal that Dennis had backed away from the idea of running a customer chassis in year one of the programme.

"A formal presentation was held on July 30, at which time McLaren proposed a two-year association with the objective of having a competitive Marlboro entry in CART in 1987," reads the memorandum dated September 4 1985.

"This one-year delay is based upon both technical and political issues, which must be overcome before McLaren can realistically compete with a purpose-made engine and car."

The Philip Morris strategy called for a car to be up and running in Marlboro colours in 1986. McLaren was asked to reconsider, but at a subsequent meeting at the end of August reiterated its position.

The team believed, according to the document, that "a 1986 McLaren effort in CART using a 'kit-car' [ie a March or Lola] would be detrimental to their company and counterproductive to their future involvement in CART".

Philip Morris therefore began to make alternative arrangements and agreed a deal with Patrick Racing to sponsor Fittipaldi's car from 1986. It had an option with the team that had to be taken up by September 30, but less than two weeks before that Dennis got back in contact asking if he could again pursue the idea of joining the CART ranks in '86.

The documents from the legacy library suggest that senior Philip Morris executives were waiting by the phone in a New York office on October 10 for a call from Dennis to confirm that the 1986 plan was on. The phone never rang. Instead a telex arrived calling the whole thing off.

Hogan believes that Barnard, ever the perfectionist, ultimately scuppered McLaren's expansion into Indycar racing.

"John was hostile to the whole idea; he did not want to do it," he says. "He didn't want to run someone else's car in year one and was only interested in doing a full-carbon car like the F1, and the regulations didn't allow that [and wouldn't until 1991]."

Getting McLaren's side of the story is nigh-on impossible. Dennis's office didn't reply to Autosport's requests for an interview (he declines, as a rule, to talk about the past) and Barnard has absolutely no recollection of Marlboro's plans. He is insistent that Dennis never discussed it with him. But he does say that he would have been against it. Hostile, in fact, just as Hogan says.

"I have a take on this, which is that Ron would have known that I was anti doing anything outside of F1 at that time," Barnard explains. "We had a few people come along talking about road cars and this and that, and I always resisted. Firstly, we just didn't have the capacity and, secondly, Ron and I couldn't divert our attention away from F1."

Barnard points out that McLaren at the time would have been incapable of undertaking a second project without a significant expansion.

"Don't forget that we won the 1984 championship with Niki with a total staff of, I think, 74 people," he explains. "I remember that because there is a big picture somewhere of everyone lined up in Boundary Road [the team's factory location at that time] for the cameras. The design office was six people and me.

"We would've had to bring in a new group and I knew good people over in America from my time there. But I would've been in charge of the design group, so it would still have been a distraction."

Put it to Barnard that Dennis might not have told him of the Marlboro approach for fear of his reaction, and he replies: "I wasn't known for my subtlety, let's put it this way, so the answer is probably yes."

Dennis wouldn't have been obliged to tell Barnard. McLaren's technical director had sold his 40% stake in the company to Mansour Ojjeh, who had previously funded development of the Porsche-built TAG twin-turbo V6, at the end of 1984. "If you ask me why I did it, I can't tell you," he says. "I decided that I wanted to get rid of my shareholding, cash it in if you like."

Barnard does, however, remember an earlier approach for McLaren to build an Indycar. It came from his old employers Vel Miletich and Parnelli Jones. It, too, was rebuffed.

"It must have been 1982, possibly '83, and I remember Ron booking a meeting room at a hotel at Heathrow," recalls Barnard. "We had the talks, but Ron said, 'I don't think this is right for us.' That's as far as it went. Vel was a great big guy and Parnelli a crazy, bull-necked ex-driver. I don't think they were Ron's kind of people."

The surprise telex from Dennis forced Philip Morris to go back to the drawing board and back to Patrick. The problem was the team had already signed a deal for Fittipaldi to be sponsored in 1986 by 7-Eleven after Marlboro failed to take up its option. Kevin Cogan was to be the team's second driver, but Philip Morris didn't want him: it wanted the driver who'd given Marlboro its first F1 world title in 1974.

"I had to go back to Patrick and buy out Emerson's contract with 7-Eleven," recalls Turner. "He ended up racing the Marlboro car and Cogan drove the 7-Eleven car."

Fittipaldi continued to win races with Patrick, now with his March decked out in Marlboro colours and powered by a Chevrolet engine, in 1986. A switch to a Penske chassis in '89 yielded the Indy 500 and CART title double. That was also the first season that a Penske-run car appeared in Marlboro livery, on Al Unser Sr's car at the Indy 500.

Philip Morris got on board with Penske full-time the following season and didn't do too badly in both CART and the IndyCar Series before tobacco sponsorship was outlawed, while in F1 McLaren and Marlboro continued racking up world titles.

They were won with and then without Barnard, and without the distraction of a second racing programme on the other side of the pond.