Bruce McLaren

Individual Presentation Talking Points

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

Slide 2: Perthes Disease

Growing up, Bruce was a fairly typical New Zealand boy with a healthy appetite for sport
and the outdoors. That all changed suddenly for him at the age of nine when he “felt pain in
[his] left hip and developed a bit of a limp.” The initial diagnosis was polio, but when
treatment for that did not work x-rays were taken and the McLaren family were introduced to
Perthe’s disease.

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.

Slide 7: McLaren Technology Centre

In 1965 McLaren left Cooper at the end of 1965, and announced his own GP racing team,
with co-driver and fellow Kiwi Chris Amon which would spawn a legacy of champions.

Slide 8: 1966 Le Mans Fiasco

This is one of those situations where there really is no clear winner of the argument.
Everyone involved in that dead heat holds a slightly different viewpoint of the event. That’s
just the way memory works. As time passes, we start to layer an event with interpretation and
meaning, until it becomes obscured. It’s likely that Miles’s death soon after Le Mans
contributed to the belief that he deserved to win, since he’d never have another chance to do
so. Had Miles lived, we might be telling a different story. Collectively, we might remember it
differently.

Slide 9: Can-Am Series

In the Can Am Series, in 1967, they won five of six races and in 1968, four of six.
The following year, McLarens proved unbeatable, winning all 11 races. In two races, they
finished 1–2–3.

Slide 10: 1970

At the beginning of the 1970 season, he confided in friends that he would hang up his helmet
at the end of the year and focus all his efforts on the business.
On June 2nd, while testing the team’s thunderous new Can-Am car a fortnight ahead of the
opening race of the new series, he lost control when the rear bodywork came loose.
The loss of aerodynamic downforce destabilised the car, which spun, left the track, and hit a
bunker used as a flag station.
The car crashed into a marshal’s post and Bruce was killed instantly.
With the motor racing world still in shock, and with the shattered McLaren team slowly
picking up the pieces, the grieving mechanics grimly packed up two Can-Am cars for that
season-opener in Canada.
Despite the heartbreak, and the stinging pain of their loss, the team did what only it could…
It went racing.
And it won.
Motorsport author Eoin Young said that Bruce McLaren had "virtually penned his own
epitaph" in his 1964 book From the Cockpit. Referring to the death of teammate Timmy
Mayer, McLaren had written:
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.

Slide 11: Thank You

It is the inspiring story of a short life lived to its absolute fullest.
Thank You.