'We gave it our best shot for Bruce': How McLaren rallied after founder's death

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He was the visionary founder, the brilliant driver, and the inspirational leader. Then he was gone. Matt Bishop on how the team regrouped to honour Bruce McLaren with a race victory, just days after his death

Denny Hulme in McLaren M8D at Laguna Seca in 1970

Denny Hulme led from start to finish at Laguna Seca to win the 1970 Can-Am Championship

Henry Thomas/Enthusiast Network via Getty Images

Bruce McLaren was killed in a testing shunt on the Lavant Straight, just before Woodcote corner, at Goodwood, on 2 June 1970. The car he was testing was a McLaren M8D, one of the mightiest of Can-Am cars, and many of them were plenty mighty. It was powered by a Chevy V8, enlarged by drag racer and engine tuner George Bolthoff to 7620cc, and no racing engine has ever sounded more stirringly guttural.

I worked at McLaren – or at McLaren’s as old McLaren men tend to say, just as old Brabham men or old Cooper men tend to say “I worked at Brabham’s” or “I worked at Cooper’s” – from January 2008 to July 2017, and I used to pass an M8D daily on my way from my office to the canteen. I always used to stop, if only for a moment, to admire it. It was not Bruce’s M8D – that had been destroyed in the accident that killed him – but rather that of his mate and team-mate Denny Hulme.

So it is that throughout the month of June my thoughts often turn to those who came before me, who worked at McLaren’s, in the dark days and weeks after the death of the founder.

Denny Hulme with Bruce McLaren

The death of Bruce McLaren (right), brought brief disarray to the team but Hulme (left) continued to race through injury

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Howden Ganley, who began his motor sport career as a teenage race reporter in New Zealand for the Waikato Times and Sports Cars Illustrated, then flew to England in 1963 to work as a mechanic for Bruce McLaren Motor Racing, as the fledgling team was then known, had left to become a racing driver by 1970, but he always held Bruce in the very highest regard. “‘Men,’ he used to say, because he always used to address us that way, ‘Men, I want us to do this.’ And, when he said that, you just did it, because he had that special kind of amazing leadership charisma. If he’d said, ‘Men, I want us to walk across the Sahara Desert,’ we’d have done it. We’d have said, ‘Well, if Bruce says so, it’s got to be the right thing to do.’” Howden, now 81, is a lovely man, by the way.

Another lovely man, also a McLaren stalwart from the very early days, was Tyler Alexander. Unlike Howden, Tyler never hankered to get behind the wheel and, but for a few years in the mid-1980s with Beatrice-Lola, he worked for McLaren until he retired. My first year at McLaren was 2008, and Tyler went to every grand prix that year, enthusiastically embracing the digital age at 68, hunched behind a laptop at the back of the garage, decoding Lewis Hamilton’s and Heikki Kovalainen’s data.

From the archive

I worked quite closely with him, and, despite his often cantankerous mien, in time I was proud to call him a friend. Towards the end of his life, after he had had a stroke, which had compromised his concentration and memory, he was looked after by his loving partner Jane Nottage, in a house near Ascot, Berkshire, that Ron Dennis had made available. Oddly, and I hope unknown to the ever-fastidious Ron, rats used to gambol in its garden. Tyler used to point at them, chuckling. I visited him there a few times, and we always used to go through his photo collection together, for Tyler was and had always been a great amateur photographer. If you can find a copy of McLaren from the Inside: Photographs by Tyler Alexander, buy it. It is a visual celebration of one man’s inside line on a golden age of motor racing.

When Bruce died, Tyler was in Indianapolis, for the Indy 500 had taken place just three days before, and in the great race McLaren had run two Offy-engined M15s for Peter Revson, soon to become a member of the motor sport glitterati, and the less successful and now-forgotten Carl Williams. One day, before he had had his stroke, I asked Tyler to tell me about that time. We were in my office, and we had a coffee each, despite Ron’s ‘no coffee in the offices’ rule. Tyler was in talkative mood, which was not always the case, but today he warmed to his theme.

“We all kind of assumed the dream was over. After all, Bruce was McLaren”

“I was having breakfast at a hotel in Indianapolis. Denny had had a testing shunt at Indy, before the big race, and his hands had been painfully burned, so I was already a bit concerned about that. As I was sitting there having my breakfast, there was a Tannoy message: ‘Phone call for Mr Tyler Alexander’. So I got up, walked to the reception desk, and took the call. It was Teddy [Mayer, Bruce McLaren’s number-two]. He told me that Bruce had bought the farm [a common euphemism among racing folk back then] at Goodwood that day.

“I flew straight to England. I phoned up a few of the boys, and I asked them what they were going to do. Some of them said they might try to get a job at [nearby] Brabham’s or Cooper’s. Others wondered whether their wives would let them move to Norfolk, if Colin Chapman needed anyone at Lotus. We all kind of assumed the dream was over. After all, Bruce was McLaren. He wasn’t only our boss. He was our leader, our mentor, our friend. Now that Bruce had gone, we all kind of assumed that McLaren was gone, too.

“Anyway, despite that, I decided to go into the workshop. When I got there, I found that others had had the same idea. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked them. ‘I don’t know. It just seemed the right place to be,’ they said.

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“Soon Gordon [Coppuck, chief designer] began saying to people: ‘OK, look, I can see that everyone is upset. So if you want to go home and spend a bit of time with your wives and families, feel free to do so.’

“Then Teddy stood up on a chair, asked for silence, and said: ‘Yes, Gordon is right, we’re all upset. We’ve lost a boss. We’ve lost a leader. We’ve lost a mentor. We’ve lost a friend. We’ve lost a driver. We’ve even lost a car. But in a week’s time we’re due to fly to Canada for a Can-Am race at Mosport. I say we give it our best shot. For Bruce. I say we work like crazy to get the car ready, and I’ll try to find us a driver. Let’s go for it.’”

Then Tyler leaned forward, took a sip of cappuccino, and said to me: “And we did; and we won.”

Dan Gurney in McLaren M8D at Mont-Tremblant in 1970 Can-Am race

Gurney won at Mosport, then again at Mont-Tremblant (pictured)

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Those few men, distressed and dispirited as they were, knuckled down to work day and night to build a new M8D. Mayer hired Dan Gurney to drive it. Exhausted, they flew to Canada, and arrived at Mosport, which even then was regarded as a scarily dangerous place. Gurney took the pole. The next day he won the race. Those six words – “And we did; and we won” – have always been an inspiration to me. They express the esprit de corps and grim determination that characterise the way things sometimes have to be done in the sport I love, that you love, that we all love.

Gurney won next time out, too, at Mont-Tremblant. Hulme, whose hands had been badly burned in a fire during practice for the Indy 500, continued to race, in honour of Bruce, even though his doctors had advised him not to, and even though, every time he took off his gloves, he peeled off a fresh layer of skin, painfully delaying his recovery. He won six Can-Am races that year, and became Can-Am champion. His father had won a Victoria Cross in World War Two. The apple did not fall far from the tree.

Denny Hulme with bandaged hand in 1970

Bandaged but unbowed: Hulme’s burns couldn’t stop him winning the Can-Am title in 1970

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Tyler died in January 2016. At the memorial service that we held in his honour at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, which was attended by the great and the good of Formula 1, I told my ‘And we did; and we won’ story. I also recited Tyler’s favourite poem, If, by Rudyard Kipling. A famous couplet in the second stanza reads as follows:

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same

 

At this time of year, 53 years ago, a small number of McLaren men did exactly that.

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