Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Slide 1: Title
Good morning one and all, today I’m going to present about this guy ‘Bruce McLaren’.
Before we go in How many of you are Motorsport Fans? Okay if others get any doubts
during the presentation, you can ask them Bruce McLaren was born on 30 August 1937
Debilitating as this terrible condition was for Bruce McLaren, it had a profoundly positive
affect on his life. His elder sister Pat attributes the compassion and understanding Bruce had
to the ordeal that the disease put him through. While Bruce himself mentions the affect it had
on focusing his mind. “Not many twelve-year-olds like school,” writes Bruce in From the
Cockpit, “but without distractions such as rugby and swimming, I found myself absorbed in
studies.”
When Bruce enrolled in an engineering course at college he was placed in the “A” class,
which he “regarded as a seat of much higher learning than he would ever reach.” He never
believed he would stay there, but once tests showed him to be 2nd in his class, he figured he
was there to stay, and Bruce the designer was born.
Slide 3:1950
Little more than a bucket of bolts at the time, his father, Les McLaren, brought it home with
the intention of making a profit, but Bruce, a mere 13-years-old at the time, convinced him
they could make a race car of the four-cylinder, 750cc engine-powered machine.
The two years he spent restoring the car using second-hand parts, whilst taking it from 72mph
to 87mph, was a rite of passage.
Whilst his father raced the Ulster, Bruce taught himself to drive it, and so when his father
suffered from gallstones one day, a 15-year-old Bruce entered the race under his father's
admission and won it.
In Between
McLaren excelled in engineering at Seddon Memorial Technical College, where he was a
prefect. He taught himself to drive in the family’s back yard, and began racing Les’s Austin
Seven sports car competitively soon after turning 15 and gaining his driver’s licence. In 1956
he began studying engineering at Auckland University College’s campus at Ardmore – near
the aerodrome on which the New Zealand Grand Prix was raced from 1954.
Slide 4: 1957
McLaren finished fifth in his first New Zealand Grand Prix in 1957, and despite a disastrous
race the following year, he was awarded the first ‘Driver to Europe’ scholarship.
His performance in the New Zealand Grand Prix in 1958 was noticed by Australian driver
Jack Brabham (who would later invite McLaren to drive for him).
He raced in F2 and was entered in the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in which F2
and F1 cars competed together. He astounded the motor racing fraternity by being the first
F2, and fifth overall, in a field of the best drivers in the world.
Slide 5: 1959
McLaren joined the Cooper factory F1 team alongside Jack Brabham in 1959 and won
the 1959 United States Grand Prix at age 22 years 104 days,[4] becoming the youngest ever
GP winner (not including the Indianapolis 500) up to that time. This record would stand for
more than four decades until Fernando Alonso's victory at the 2003 Hungarian Grand Prix
Rising Australian star Jack Brabham persuaded the Cooper Car Company he raced for in
Formula One to offer McLaren, his protégé, drives in the second-tier Formula Two series in
Britain and on the Continent. Beanland and McLaren assembled a car themselves.
And in 1960 he followed that with a win in the Argentine Grand Prix, the first race of
the 1960 Formula One season, and he would finish runner-up that season to Brabham.
Slide 6: 1963
In 1963 he followed Brabham’s lead and began building and racing his own cars, founding
Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd with Patty and Eoin Young.