I know them virtually by heart now; the words Bruce McLaren wrote in his eulogy to young Cooper teammate Timmy Mayer, killed in a horror crash in practise for the final round of the 1964 Tasman Series at Longford in Tasmania.
“The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us. But who is to say that he had not seen more, done more, and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.”
No disrespect to Mayer, but the reason I know the words so well is because just six years later they were being used as an epitaph after Bruce’s own death; in his case in a horror testing crash at the Goodwood circuit in south-west England on June 02 1970.
To say that Bruce cast a long shadow is an understatement. Yet true to his words, it is his achievements history largely remembers him by, as this now 10-year-old YouTube clip is proof enough:
I was way too young at the time – in 1970 I was all of, what, 10 years old – to even grasp the fact that Bruce had died, though that is not to say he had not already had an impact on my life.
As a voracious reader I had already cottoned on to the fact that the Gore Coronation library had a subscription to what at the time was the ‘Bible’ of Formula 1 and other top-line motorsport events around the world, Motorsport magazine.
So it was from that magazine – albeit usually a good six months behind the times thanks to the three months it took copies to arrive here by sea-freight, and another two to three for the covers to be hard-bound so that they would last longer than a single loan period – that I followed what the Americans dubbed the ‘Bruce ‘n Denny Show’ aka the Canadian-American Challenge Cup or Can-Am Series for short.
At the time of course I could only imagine what it was like ‘being’ Bruce McLaren.
As I got older – and read then re-read the various books his great mate Eoin Young wrote either with and about him, or after his death and about his legacy – the sheer enormity of his achievements started to resister.
But it was only once I had turned 30 and was still ambling along on my ‘I’m gunna give car racing a go……one day’ course that Bruce’s legacy really hit home.
It was while reading another book borrowed from a library, this time the Auckland Central one behind the old St James picture theatre, that it hit me – literally like one of those ‘blows to the solar plexus’ you read about in thrillers.
The book was Bruce McLaren – The Man and his Racing Team, penned by Eoin Young and released the year after his death, in 1971. In it Eoin chronicled Bruce’s life from its earliest days in Auckland through his invalid years suffering from Perthes disease, then his teenage years establishing himself as both engineer and driver before his career took off thanks to the Driver to Europe scheme and win – at just 22 years-of-age – in the US Grand Prix at Sebring in 1959.
What hit me like a sucker punch though was that Bruce died just 10 years later, aged only 32.
In that time he had, let’s see; won his first F1GP at just 22 years of age in 1959, won the NZGP in 1964, started a F1GP in a car bearing his own name in 1966 (Monaco 22 May), won the 1966 Le Mans 24 Hour race in France driving a GT40 Ford he shared with fellow Kiwi Chris Amon then a year later won the first GP (his fourth) of the season in a car bearing his own name (the Belgium GP at Spa-Francorchamps no less)
In between times Bruce had also joined his other fellow Kiwi, Denny Hulme, in dominating the Can-Am sports car series on the other side of the Atlantic, the pair notching up 5 wins out of 6 races in 1967, 4 of 6 in 1968, and all 11 in 1969, Bruce himself leading home a McLaren 1-2-3 (with Hulme second and top US driver Mark Donohue third) in three of those races.
I must have been knocking on 32 (or perhaps even 33 or 34) at the time, because I know reading and re-reading Eoin’s book made me realise – literally – that ‘time waits for no man’ and that if I was, indeed, going to give motor racing a go myself, I’d better pull finger.
Which I did, and so began one of the most intensive, stressful, yet at the same time rewarding periods of my life.
In retrospect I think I was born more to write about this fantastic sport we all – in so many different ways – know and love. For no better reasons than I have never – even when I was karting – had enough money (either of my own or someone else’s) to devote to running at the level my mind and ego tells me I should be running at.
Nor was I born with the utter single-minded determination to do exactly what I want to do, whenever and wherever I wanted to, a character trait pretty much every single ‘key player’ I have ever interviewed (and that list goes from Bill Gates down) would appear to have.
In saying that I’ve met and interviewed some ‘right ones’ in my time, men (and yes the odd woman) so arrogant, so tied up in their own ‘story’ that I’ve had to go into ‘reporter autopilot’ just to complete my ‘job’ and get the hell out of whatever hell-hole/toxic swamp I was forced to conduct the interview in.
Contrast this sort of petty grandstanding by some minor actor, businessman or stick and ball sportsperson usually only – reluctantly at that – doing the rounds of the local press circuit because they have something (a movie, book, or line of gumboots) to sell, with the quiet determination, and modest effacing manner – by all accounts – of a bloke like Bruce, and well, all I can say I wish I had been around at the time.
Because I wasn’t, I’d feel like a bit of a fraud going on and on about what a great – ‘inspiring’ is a word that keeps popping up – guy he was.
So, I flicked through some of the books I have bought over the years written by people who were ‘there at the time’ and pulled out a couple of quotes which do the job for me.
George Begg might, himself, be better known as a constructor of racing cars, himself, but his late life ‘detour’ into writing books proves he was a fine judge of character as well.
George actually worked for Bruce in 1968 when he took a kind of mid-life sabbatical to satisfy his own curiosity for life in ‘the fast lane’ of world level motorsport.
As such he was perfectly placed to ‘learn from the master’ as it were. And in his book, Bruce McLaren, Racing Car Constructor (published by Begg & Allen in association with the Bruce McLaren Trust) he had this to say about the ‘top-flight Grand Prix driver with a gift for engineering, who decided in 1963 to add racing car design and construction to his driving expertise.’
“Bruce,” George said, “was a remarkable man (who) led a remarkable team. He was the instigator, the planner, the driving force (and) the genial front man that everyone liked.”
I remember talking to one of New Zealand’s other great driver/engineers, Graham McRae, when he had finally returned ‘home’ after a lifetime living out of suitcases in the UK, the US and finally Australia to build a run of gorgeous -and now seriously sought after – James Dean-style Porsche 356 Speedster replicas in a modest workshop unit behind the Milford shops on Auckland’s North Shore.
Despite being a bit of a McRae ‘fan boy’ I remember asked Graham if he regretted not ‘making it to the top in F1’ after an ultimately ill-fated one-off opportunity to race an Iso-Marlboro car for Frank Williams in the 1973 British Grand Prix.
Instead of fobbing me off, to his eternal credit Graham laughed and admitted hat if he hadn’t been so scathing of the way the car was designed, built, prepared and run he might have stood a better chance.
“If there was a class, though, where you had to design, build AND drive your own car…that’s where I think I’d do fairly well (or words to that effect),” he said,.
Which neatly brings us back to Bruce Leslie McLaren, born just three years before McRae but – because of a much earlier start and meteoric rise through the ranks immediately afterwards – the pair raced in completely different eras.
Like his mentor Jack Brabham before him, Bruce is one of the only racing drivers to win a race – let alone an F1 race – in a car – and run by a team – under his own name.
To do that would have been a big enough deal in his home country. But to do it from an adopted home on the other side of the world, and in more than one category of absolutely top-line racing against storied names like Ferrari, Lotus, Matra, Tyrell and BRM in F1, Ferrari and Porsche at Le Mans, the various Vals-Parnelli Jones and Penske cars at the Indianapolis 500 in the early 1970s,and Lola, Ferrari, March, BRM, Chaparral and UOP Shadow in Cam-Am really defies belie.
Or does it?
Ever the pragmatist, George Begg observed, rather that Bruce was a natural-born leader. And as such; ‘recognised that he could not do everything from designing and constructing a racing car, to running a racing team on his own. He would need help, perhaps not from those who were already experts, but from intelligent enthusiasts who were keen enough to digest the expertise and craftsmanship required for such work when they were introduced to it.
This, in a nutshell, was Bruce’s ‘secret weapon,’ his ability to ‘attract such people to his cause, then infect them with the enthusiasm to the point where they became totally dedicated….’ or as fellow Kiwi F1 ace Howden Ganley was memorably quoted as saying in the recent biopic (check out the trailer for it below) on Bruce’s life, McLaren, by acclaimed Aussie-born ‘Kiwi’ director Roger Donaldson; “If Bruce had come into the factory one morning and said, ‘OK men, we’re not going to work on racing cars today, we’re going to march across the Sahara Desert, we ‘d all have said, OK Bruce, no problem!
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