Bruce at the Brickyard

McLaren are best known to Indianapolis Formula One fans as the team gave Mika Hakkinen his last Formula One victory - and the only McLaren-Mercedes win - at the Brickyard.

But thirty years earlier, in 1970 and 1971, Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd had its most impressive open-wheel success on the oval track at the Indianapolis 500, bringing to Indy a car so novel and so fast that it increased lap speeds over the prior year by an astounding 8-10 mph, a quantum leap in Indy 500 terms.

This is not to say that Bruce McLaren's cars had not been a success in Europe in Formula One before coming to Indy. By 1970, team boss Bruce McLaren and fellow New Zealander Denny Hulme had racked up four wins on the Grand Prix circuits. McLaren had also enjoyed success in North America in big-block, Group 7 Can-Am sports car racing.

But the McLaren team had not yet tried their hands at Indy, where two other fellow Grand Prix constructors - Cooper in 1961 and Lotus in the mid-1960s - had found success by importing and adapting Formula One technology to the Brickyard.

Rear-engined chassis from Europe had finally proved themselves at Indy with Jim Clark's win of the 1965 Indy 500, but other innovations like turbines and four-wheel drive were resisted and had been unwelcome or even outlawed at Indianapolis; the key aerodynamic device of wings also met a frosty reaction from Indy regulars.

Jim Clark, Lotus-Ford, wins the 1965 Indianapolis 500 © Indianapolis Motor Speedway

But while the use of wings for added downforce may have been in a nether zone at Indy, by 1970 wings were gaining popularity and acceptance in Grand Prix racing. Experimentation began in 1968 and 1969 with small aerofoils mounted to the chassis of Grand Prix cars; in going just the opposite direction, at Indy, wings separate from the body were banned by the United States Auto Club (USAC), the governing body that held sway at Indy in the 1970s.

Bruce McLaren's team were always a group to nurture new ideas and were among the very first Grand Prix teams to push the envelope as to wings, installing a smallish aerofoil on Denny Hulme's McLaren M7A for the 1968 Canadian Grand Prix, which Hulme won, with team leader Bruce McLaren finishing second.

By 1969, in his Grand Prix car, Bruce McLaren was testing a huge out-sized wing mounted high up and towards the rear of the McLaren M7C. The McLaren four-wheel drive car called the McLaren 9A, also with a wing, was another stab at going faster and handling better but that concept proved to be a disappointment and appeared briefly, in only one race - the 1969 British Grand Prix.

Although a smallish team, Bruce McLaren's secret as a team boss was the quality and diversity of the people he attracted to work around him. It was a motley and international crew that had the vision and talent to bring the latest cutting edge technological advances to the team.

McLaren's team included Kiwis, of course - like Bruce McLaren himself, Hulme, chief mechanic Alastair Caldwell, and then-gofer and future Grand Prix driver Howden Ganley - but also a trio of Americans like Teddy Mayer and his older brother Tim Mayer (a driver who was tragically killed in 1964 at Longsford in Tasmania) and Tyler Alexander (an aircraft engineer by training).

British engineers rounded out the team, including recruitment from aerospace backgrounds like Robin Herd and Gordon Coppuck. Later on, a Swiss-born designer, Jo Marquart, joined McLaren, and later still an Australian designer, Ralph Bellamy.

A consistent ingredient in the evolution of Bruce McLaren and his cars was American Grand Prix driver Dan Gurney who, almost single-handedly, began the rear-engine revolution at the Indianapolis 500, first as a driver, then as an "idea man" and ultimately as a constructor himself.

In 1962, Gurney did the unthinkable for a driver - then or now - by paying Lotus constructor Colin Chapman's airfare to see the 1962 Indy 500 so that Chapman could observe first-hand how Grand Prix cars could be converted to race successfully at Indy.

Also in 1962, Gurney qualified Mickey Thompson's innovative Buick-powered rear-engine special on the third row, higher than Jack Brabham had qualified his Cooper-Climax in 1961. Gurney would go on after the 1962 Indy 500 to facilitate Ford Motor Company and Lotus doing business together and would become a teammate to Jim Clark in the 1963 Indy 500 when the Lotus-Ford effort began its ultimately successful assault on Indianapolis.

Dan Gurney chats with spectators © LAT

In Grand Prix racing, Dan Gurney and Bruce McLaren were sometimes teammates, sometimes competitors, and always friends, with McLaren driving an Eagle for Gurney when the Grand Prix McLaren was laid up for some reason and Dan Gurney substituting as a McLaren driver on occasion when Gurney's Eagle was not flying .

As a fellow competitor and friend, Gurney was an important part of McLaren's universe. At Indy, the Eagle and McLaren would go head-to-head in the 1970s as they had in Europe in the late 1960s.

By 1970, with Colin Chapman's Lotus 72 dominating in Formula One, both Gurney and McLaren as open-wheel constructors were re-focusing their efforts on winning the Indy 500. Gurney's Eagles were no longer racing in Formula One but were becoming a big factor at Indy and Bruce's "McLaren Cars" team was following suit in taking on the Brickyard.

And it was a good thing that McLaren oriented his efforts toward Indy. No one knew it

at the time but the McLaren team in Formula One was about to enter into the doldrums on Grand Prix circuits, winning the 1969 Mexican Grand Prix with Denny Hulme in the McLaren 7A-Ford, but not winning again until Hulme in the McLaren M19A won the 1972 South African Grand Prix at Kyalami.

Hulme was also about to encounter hard luck at Indy though he had done well there in prior years, having finished in fourth place in Gurney's Eagles in 1967 and 1968. On May 12, 1970, during practice for the Indy 500, the New Zealander suffered second and third-degree burns on his hands and feet when he bailed out of his 1970 McLaren M15 when its fuel cap flipped open and the car caught fire. Hulme's burns sidelined him from both the 1970 Indy 500 in America and the 1970 Belgian and Dutch Grands Prix in Europe.

Scratch one of the three M15s built by McLaren Cars for its assault on Indy.

What did the McLaren M15 Indycar look like when it first came to Indy in 1970? The engine was all Indianapolis, a 2.6 litre 4-cylinder Offy turbo. The monocoque tub was painted the orange Papaya color used in the McLaren Grand Prix and Can-Am cars of the time and was skinned with 16 gauge Reynolds Aluminum sheet; the earliest pictures at Indy show Bruce McLaren in the M15 and only two sponsor stickers, Reynolds Aluminum and Goodyear, along with the familiar Kiwi symbol placed high up on the body by the cockpit.

The most significant engineering detail on the 1970 McLaren M15 was the cockpit surround engine cover and chassis-mounted aerofoil above the engine that was located right behind the roll bar; the aerofoil is hard to make out in pictures of the time and was designed to be "sold" to the sporting authorities as an integral part of the engine cover because USAC rules did not yet permit standalone wings.

Designed by Gordon Coppuck based upon the successful McLaren Can-Am car, the McLaren Cars M15 showed well but did not win the 1970 Indy 500; but the team did win the prestigious award for engineering excellence - quite a tribute for a team in its exploratory year at Indy.

Indeed, the substitute driver for Hulme, Carl Williams, finished a credible ninth in the McLaren M15 in the 1970 Indy 500, the same position Jack Brabham achieved in the Aussie's first trip to Indy with the Cooper that started the rear-engined revolution in 1961.

Peter Revson pits for adjustments in the 1971 Indianapolis 500 © Indianapolis Motor Speedway

With the McLaren team experiencing a lull in their Grand Prix performance in 1970 and 1971, at Indianapolis it was an entirely different story as the M15 Indycar and the subsequent upgrade, the fully sorted McLaren M16, would turn the tables on the Brickyard regulars in the decade of the 1970s as Clark, Chapman and Lotus did in the decade of the 1960s.

How did the McLaren M16 come to dominate Indy? With Formula One-based technology like wings, its chiseled wedge-shaped "flying doorstop" nose and bodywork (borrowed from Colin Chapman's Lotus 72) and its hip-located radiators, all of which permitted a low frontal area, cheating the wind and creating the kind of downforce that left everyone else wondering how the Kiwis did it.

But McLaren Cars also relied on Yankee innovations at Indy. Then, as now, it was a good idea for an outsider at the Indy 500 to associate with Roger Penske, who had been running Mark Donohue at Indy since Donohue's rookie year in 1969. In 1969 and 1970, Penske had run an immaculate Lola-Offy in blue and yellow Sunoco-Simoniz colors under the team name US Racing Inc.

By 1971, Penske was ready to switch from Lola to the McLaren M16 and, in effect, became the customer team for McLaren at Indy, running the new M16 McLaren next to the works McLaren M16s to be driven by the now-recovered Denny Hulme and American Peter Revson, heir to the Revlon fortune who was also making a name for himself in Formula One.

All these people knew each other from Grand Prix and Can-Am racing. Revson would win the 1971 Can-Am Championship for McLaren and by the 1972 Grand Prix season, Revson would join the McLaren Grand Prix team.

For their part in the cross-pollination of Indy and Grand Prix racing, Penske and Donohue formed a Formula One team by the 1974 season. And it was Mark Donohue, not Revson or Hulme, in Donohue's No. 66 McLaren M16 in 1971 that recorded Indy's first 180 mph lap in testing for the 1971 Indy 500.

In the race, Donohue was well on his way to winning the 1971 Indy 500, having lead 52 laps and turned the fastest lap of the race at 174.961 mph on lap 65, when his transmission gave up and the No. 66 McLaren M16 retired on lap 66.

Peter Revson, driving for McLaren Cars and having qualified on pole in the McLaren M16, 4-cylinder turbo-Offy, salvaged McLaren's efforts by finishing second. McLaren and Penske cured the gearbox gremlins that plagued Donohue's McLaren in the 1971 Indy 500 by specifying aircraft quality steel for the gears, solving that problem.

In 1972, the McLaren M16B would finally win the Indy 500 for the first time, predictably in the hands of Roger Penske Enterprises and Roger's favorite driver, Mark Donohue. In 1972, the front row was all Eagle and McLaren, with Bobby Unser qualifying his Eagle-Offy on pole, Peter Revson for McLaren Cars qualifying in the middle of the front row, and Mark Donohue in Penske's Sunoco McLaren on the outside of the front row.

By 1972, USAC was allowing wings not attached to the bodywork, so the inherent advantage the McLaren car enjoyed when it first came to Indy in 1970 was disappearing. With downforce at an all-time high, several cars, not just the McLarens, exceeded 190 mph in the testing in April pre-Indy.

By mid-April, Bobby Unser in Dan Gurney's Eagle-Turbo Offy ran 194.721 mph. By late May, Unser's pole position in the Eagle was a mind-boggling 195.940 mph, edging out Revson's McLaren at 192.885 mph.

Mark Donahue and Peter Revson duel in the 1972 Indianapolis 500 © LAT

But the 1972 Indy 500 was a race destined to go to the best team, not necessarily the fastest car for one lap, and with four mandatory pitstops required, the savvy and, by now, experienced Penske team was well positioned to win.

Unlike the 1971 Indy 500, when Donohue had been the rabbit out front and had led 52 laps, in the 1972 Indy 500, Donohue held back, letting others like Eagle teammates Bobby Unser and Jerry Grant and especially Donohue's Sunoco McLaren teammate Gary Bettenhausen dominate the lap leader statistics.

On lap 182 of 200 laps, with victory in sight, Bettenhausen's Sunoco-McLaren went out after developing engine trouble and then ignition failure. When Jerry Grant's No. 48 All-American Racers Eagle pitted late in the race on lap 188 for fresh tyres and a stop-and-go splash of fuel, Grant overshot his pit, was refueled from the wrong fuel tank (teammate Bobby Unser's pit) and by the time Grant's Eagle got back on the track, Donohue's Sunoco-McLaren was in the lead for the first time all day.

Donohue led only 13 laps in the 1972 Indy 500, but they were the right 13 laps and his cool-headed performance secured Penske's and McLaren's first victory in the Indy 500, the beginning of two tremendous winning traditions in motorsports - Penske and McLaren.

Today, Roger Penske's team has won 13 Indy 500s (and one Grand Prix, the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix at the Osterreichring with John Watson driving the red, white and blue First National City Bank-sponsored PC4-Ford DFV) and McLaren has won 150 Grands Prix and 8 constructors championships.

But for all the happiness in the pits that day in Victory Lane at Indianapolis in 1972 as Donohue stepped out of the No. 66 McLaren M16, there was an underlying sense of loss.

Bruce McLaren did not live long enough to see the cars bearing his name win the Indy 500, which ultimately McLaren did three times: in 1972 (Mark Donohue), 1974 and 1976 (Johnny Rutherford, both years); one of these winning McLarens, Donohue's Sunoco blue McLaren M16, is still on display at the Hall of Fame Museum; the cars driven by Rutherford are in private collections.

On June 2nd 1970, Bruce McLaren, always a hands-on tester, had left Indianapolis after seeing his M15s do well in their shakedown runs for the 1970 Indy 500, and was killed while testing his 650 bhp Chevy-engined McLaren M8 Can-Am sports car at the Goodwood circuit in England.