The McLaren that rendered its Indy rivals obsolete

Handsome in all its guises, a winner in all its guises, and, being one of the greatest McLarens, therefore one of the greatest racing cars of all time. The M16 - along with the various M8 Can-Am bruisers and the M23 Formula 1 car - upgraded McLaren to the race car constructor elite.

Tragically, founder Bruce McLaren didn't live to see his team make this leap in status, but his legacy was a company made in his image, perfectly blending ambition and adventure with a solid methodical engineering ethos. And it was from this environment that the M16 originated and evolved.

It came from the pen of Gordon Coppuck, who had joined McLaren in 1965, and had been a leading draughtsman at the National Gas Turbine Establishment. This was the nationalised entity formed by the merger of Power Jets - the company set up by Britain's jet-power pioneer Sir Frank Whittle - and the Royal Aircraft Establishment's turbine team. There, Coppuck had worked closely with a 'Scientific Officer' by the name of Robin Herd, later to become the 'H' of March Engineering, which would find some success in F1, but much more in Indycars, Formula 2 and sportscars.

"Three months after leaving to join Bruce's, Robin realised that proper technical drawings was where he needed some help," recalls Coppuck, "so he contacted me. McLaren was very small at the time - I think Robin and I were respectively the 12th and 13th employees.

"Things mechanical were always part of my life, but what I knew about motor racing was negligible, and when Robin handed in his notice around Christmas in 1967, I felt very lonely because his knowledge had been better than mine!"

Modesty notwithstanding, Coppuck had learned plenty working with Herd on the M7A F1 car, which would score three grand prix wins during the 1968 world championship. He set to work designing the M10 Formula 5000 car while also evolving the M7A into 'B' and 'C' models for 1969.

PLUS: Bruce McLaren's last Formula 1 car

With F1 teams going through early experiments with wings at this stage - from the low and mighty to the high and flighty - it was a labour-intensive couple of years for Coppuck.

"Yes, very busy," he recalls, "but there was a very good infrastructure in the team at that stage, and Bruce was still alive to help things run smoothly. I had been designing the M14A F1 car [for 1970] and then Bruce came to me in the winter of 1969-70 to say we were going Indycar racing."

Coppuck's first stab at an Indycar was the M15, which was smooth for its time, sleeker looking than many of its 1970 rivals. But like all Indycars and all but one F1 car that year, the front-mounted radiator obliged the designer to shape the nose around an aperture that resembled a nozzle attachment on a vacuum cleaner.

Bruce McLaren chose to make his team's Indycar debut at the Indianapolis 500 with his New Zealand compatriots Denny Hulme and Chris Amon as drivers, but there would not be a happy start to the Colnbrook, UK-based squad's first visit. Hulme suffered a methanol fire during practice that sent flames into the cockpit, and the 1967 F1 world champion's hands were left severely burned. Meanwhile Amon, pretty much as fast as anyone in F1 at lapping a perilous road course, was intimidated by Indy's concrete walls and couldn't get up to speed.

"The minute I saw it, I knew they already had a better package than we were discussing with Eric [Broadley]. I quietly marvelled at their guts, to come up with such a new concept" Mark Donohue

So in came Peter Revson, who the previous year had driven a Brabham from the back of the field to finish fifth, and experienced sprint car driver Carl Williams. In the circumstances, the pair did well to qualify mid-grid, but on race day Revson's engine blew
before half-distance, and Williams finished three laps down.

Just three days later Bruce McLaren was killed when his Can-Am car crashed during a test at Goodwood. Team members wereleft emotionally reeling, but team manager Teddy Mayer rallied the troops in a collective determination to pay tribute to their fallen leader by pushing on.

Gordon Johncock, who would eventually score two Indy 500 wins, was at that point a team owner/driver and he chose to use a McLaren M15 for three more races in 1970. He was dominating at Michigan's two-mile oval until his right-rear wheel fell off with nine laps to go.

While the M15 was good, it was now time for Coppuck to make the next step in Indycar design, and the M16 would caused a huge stir in Indycar circles at the ovals. The Lotus 72 had shown everyone in F1 that shifting the radiators to a side-mounted position would allow a spectacularly sleek nose. Windtunnel work persuaded Coppuck that the same could be applied on an Indycar. Rather than try it out in USAC's Phoenix round, two months before the 1971 Indy 500, the McLaren team decided its debut would be on the biggest stage of all.

"Yes, we weren't very sophisticated!" chuckles Coppuck, "and the budgets compared with today were in a different world. We had to really marshal our resources. I remember when Bruce had won Le Mans in 1966, he told us, 'Well I had to bloody win, or you guys weren't going to get paid next week!' That tells you how small our operation was and how much he and Teddy had to do to keep our heads above water."

Although the M16's race debut would be at Indy, the car was tested elsewhere before arriving at The Racing Capital of the World. Revson and Hulme ran the works cars at California's Ontario Motor Speedway in January of 1971, and one of those cars was then handed over to McLaren's newest customer, Roger Penske, for a test at Phoenix.

Late in 1970 Penske and Mark Donohue had been visiting the UK primarily to see their then-current supplier, Eric Broadley of Lola, but the pair had taken a diversion to Colnbrook. In his classic book, The Unfair Advantage, Donohue wrote: "The minute I saw [the M16], I knew they already had a better package than we were discussing with Eric. Gordon Coppuck had designed it with the best features from their experience at Indy in 1970, and some ideas from the Lotus 72. It had a long, flat, wedge shape, with side-mounted radiators and integral front and rear wings.

"They had obviously learned a lot about wings in Formula 1 and were applying that knowledge to Indy - as we were planning to do. But they had gone farther, by making it a clean complete package, where our Lola conversion would have been cobbled together. I quietly marvelled at their guts, to come up with such a new concept..."

Urged on by Donohue, Penske had come to an agreement with Mayer, and so at Phoenix the Penske team led by engineer Don Cox stripped the wings off the M16 so he and Donohue could learn about the new car's chassis dynamics. That done, they remounted the wings and experimented with them at various angles.

Then at a tyre test at Indy in March the car hit 172mph, a 1mph advantage over the opposition, who grumbled about the car's wings, which were theoretically disallowed. But the Speedway's technical inspector agreed that rather than being appendages, these wings were integral to the front and rear bodywork.

"At that point," wrote Donohue, "the McLarens obsoleted every other car at the track..."

The return to the Speedway in May proved his point: the works McLaren of Revson took pole at more than 178mph, Donohue's Penske-run car lined up second at 177mph, and only a typically brave effort from Bobby Unser in an Eagle prevented Hulme from completing a McLaren front-row sweep in the second works car.

Then it all went wrong for the marque on race day; Revson was never a factor, and instead it was Donohue who gained pre-eminence, dominating the first quarter of the race until coasting to a halt with a broken gearbox.

Recalls Coppuck: "The sheer frustration about the gearbox was that it turned out it was made of mild steel, whereas we had specified aircraft quality. So from then on, Mike Hewland [founder of the legendary gearbox company] really hated it, because between us and Penske we would buy the ingots from which our gears had to be made so that we would never have a repeat thereafter!"

The problems for Penske and McLaren that day weren't over. Donohue had parked his stricken M16 on the inside of Turn 4, and it was struck soon after by an out-of-control machine, causing so much damage that the McLaren had to be shipped back to Britain for repairs. The effort was worth it though. At Pocono, five weeks later, Donohue took pole, led 126 laps and scored McLaren's first Indycar win.

"Things we'd discovered on the M16B and ideas we had in the season were investigated in the winter and went into developing both cars - Indycar and Formula 1" Gordon Coppuck

McLaren was now a winning entity, and already Coppuck was hard at work on the M16B (and the M20 Can-Am car, McLaren's turbocharged response to the incoming Porsche 917/10s). USAC planned to lift its ill-defined and therefore near-unenforceable ban on wings on Indycars, but even before that Coppuck had listened to feedback from the works drivers and Donohue, and felt a new rear suspension design was necessary.

"The car had a tendency to let go under maximum load - lateral forces and acceleration - when exiting a corner, and so I tried to give the car more grip," he says. "As I recall, I also took some angle out of the top surfaces to reduce the drag a little bit."

Penske had expanded his team to run two cars in 1972, and new boy Gary Bettenhausen delivered the M16B's first win at Trenton in April. Had his ignition not failed in the closing stages at Indy (pictured), he would have delivered Penske's - and McLaren's - first 500 win too. Instead that victory went to Donohue, who had run a less powerful turbocharger after suffering multiple engine failures through practice. His burgeoning legend started to solidify that day, but both he and Bettenhausen would suffer sizeable accidents (in other racing categories) later in the year that rendered them temporarily MIA.

So the next McLaren win would come in September at Ontario, when Roger McCluskey drove to victory in Lindsey Hopkins's privateer entry, finishing ahead of Penske's nonetheless impressive 'supersub' Mike Hiss - McLaren's first 1-2 in Indycar. Post-injury, Donohue would return, score a second place at Trenton and a pole position at Phoenix, but then focused only part-time on Indycar in 1973, as Penske didn't believe racing (as opposed to qualifying) on short ovals was his main driver's forte.

So Bettenhausen took over Penske's singleton full-time entry, the McLaren M16C, for 1973 and would score a win at Texas World Speedway, the penultimate race of the season. McCluskey's Hopkins M16B, meanwhile, scored one win but would prove so consistent that he would take the only Indy championship in a McLaren car. That was reward for another busy year at the drawing board for Coppuck.

"The M16C had been under development while I was also designing the M23 for F1," says Coppuck, "and things we'd discovered on the M16B and ideas we had in the season were investigated in the winter and went into developing both cars - Indycar and Formula 1. We were learning new things in the windtunnel and it was quite an exciting time.

"We would only attend a race meeting if we'd made a reasonably big change to the car, evaluating on the track whatever we'd discovered in the windtunnel, and also seeing if any of our rivals had come up with bright ideas that might be worth investigating. I was mainly in the office, drawing whatever it was we thought we needed to be made to take the next step forward, and then I'd make sure it got made."

On the driving side, Mayer had signed a new full-timer for the works team for 1973. Johnny Rutherford was a 35-year-old, 11-year veteran of the USAC scene who had never before landed a truly front-rank ride.

"Before I joined McLaren, I had always told my wife Betty, 'If I ever find someone who wants to go racing as much as I do, we'll be winners'," recalls Rutherford, "and that's exactly what I found at McLaren." Initially he was not impressed with the M16, however.

"We went to a test in Indianapolis in January or February," he says, "and everything about the team was very good and professional. And I hit it off pretty good with Tyler Alexander, who I consider one of the best team managers and organisers in the business. But the car understeered terribly for my tastes. I always liked a neutral car, and over the two or three days of testing I could not get it to stop understeering. So the team sent the car back to England.

"In the meantime I had to do the first couple of races in the older car and it was OK but it wasn't right. It still understeered. Now, Gordon Coppuck was someone I didn't know until later when I came to England and presented the car, our 1974 Indy 500 winner, to McLaren. Gordon and I had lunch there and I talked with him and I asked him what he did to the car, because the next time I tried it, it was transformed. I couldn't believe it. He said that he had redesigned the rear suspension - and I mean totally.

"The car was terrific to drive and it was the fastest flat-bottom car to ever go around the Speedway" Johnny Rutherford

"It was the first time I'd ever been able to go flat-footed all the way around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and unofficially we ran 200mph. This was just a couple of races before USAC put pop-off valves on the engines to control power outputs, and Roger Bailey, my engine builder, said our dyno read to 1000hp and we were some ways past that.

"We had these huge rear wings that year but we still had plenty enough power to spin up the outside rear. But that M16, now that it had been transformed to be neutral, was a car I felt I could trust. We went on and got a new track record and stuck it on pole position, although during the race we had an exhaust header crack and that dropped us to ninth.

"But as far as the behaviour of the car, everything was great after Indy. The car was terrific to drive and it was the fastest flat-bottom car to ever go around the Speedway. And a couple of other things I'm very proud of: we had the fastest Offenhauser-powered car to ever go around the Speedway and in 1976, when we got our second trip to Victory Lane, it was the last Offenhauser win at the Speedway.

"Anyway, that car was perfect for me. We did a lot of testing and every change we made to the car, it responded, which is always the sign of a good car. We had plenty of good results."

There were two victories in that first season with the M16C, four in 1974 (including the Indianapolis 500) with the M16C/D, one in 1975 (plus a near-miss in a rain-shortened Indy), and three successes (including the Indy 500) in 1976. Those latter two years Rutherford spent in the M16E, a car that incorporated subtle modifications from rising design star John Barnard, under Coppuck's supervision, although the pair of them were also busy modifying the M23, which won the F1 World Championship for Emerson Fittipaldi in 1974 and James Hunt in 1976.

Rutherford was left frustrated that he couldn't emulate such success in the US. Each year the car remained on the front line but didn't quite possess the reliability to nail down a championship. From 1973 through 1976, Lone Star JR's points standings were 3-2-2-2.

"That final year with the M16 was the closest," he sighs. "I really thought that we were going to finally get it done. In the last race of the season in Phoenix, all we needed to do was finish seventh. Well that's exactly where we were running when an oil line to the turbocharger came loose just past two-thirds distance and I had to stop.

"We switched to the M24 for 1977 with the Cosworth engine and it was a good car and we did well [six wins across two seasons], but it was never quite the M16, which was a fun car to drive, and didn't throw any curveballs at you..."

That, and a heavy dose of bravery, is why Rutherford was made for the M16 as much as it was tailored for him.

"Teddy Mayer said to me one day, 'One of the reasons I hired you was that you had always been able to get the car you were in going as fast as it was going to go within five laps'. And I think I was one of the guys who had a feel for the cushion of air up there a couple of inches from the wall, and I could also get the tyres to where the car was just on the edge.

"I remember one time during practice at Indy, I came in after a run and one of the guys came over and said, 'You were close to the wall through Turns 3 and 4, weren't you?' I said, 'Why?' And he showed where I'd scrubbed the Goodyear letters off the sidewall
of the rear tyre. I guess that's one time when I pushed through that cushion of air... But that's the kind of confidence the M16 gave you - to use everything it had to give.

"McLaren was a very special team, and that car was one of the greats. It ran for six years. It was a winner in year one and year six, and all points in between, including three Indy 500s. That's special."