A Brief History Of McLaren

Bruce McLaren started to drift away from Cooper in the mid-Sixties, partly because he was being excluded from the design of
the cars, partly because the team was no longer as competitive as it had been, and partly because it wouldn't run the cars he
wanted to run in the series he wanted to compete in. He ran his own Cooper specials (see the Cooper page for more
information) in the Tasman series with his own team, and got involved in Group 7 sports car racing with the ``Jolly Green
Giant'', or ``Cooper-Oldsmobile'', a much-rebuilt version of the ex-Roger Penske ``Zerex Special'', which started life as a
Cooper F1 chassis. 

The first ``true'' McLaren was the M1, also known as the McLaren-Elva-Oldsmobile Mark 1 when it was productionised by
Trojan. This was the first in a long line of dominant Can-Am cars, though wasn't initially too successful due to excessive lift from
its bodywork. 

The first McLaren single-seater was a tyre-test car for Firestone, using a simple and immensely stiff Mallite monocoque (Mallite
is an aerospace material composed of plywood and aluminium sheet). A similar car entered F1 in 1966 with a short-stroke 3l
version of the 4.2 Indy Ford V8 engine; it was unsuccessful and only the replacement of this with the equally gutless but
considerably smaller Serenissima V8 brought Bruce his first point as a constructor. In the meantime, Bruce was involved with
the Ford GT programme, and also built the remarkable ``whoosh-bonk'' M3 single seater (so called because ``whoosh'', you
take the suspension from the sports car, ``bonk'', you knock together a spaceframe chassis around it, and you've got a car!)
which was used for hillclimbing and Formula Libre and as a camera car for the film Grand Prix. 

An interim F2-based BRM-powered car (the M4) and one-off BRM V12 (M5) kept the team in F1 before they gained access
to the DFV. With the M7 the team made leaps and bounds and became a force to be reckoned with in the F1 community.
However, they were far more successful in Can-Am, to the extent that it became known as the Bruce and Denny Show
because of the dominance of McLaren and Hulme. McLaren were also a successful manufacturer of F5000 cars. 

1970 was a difficult year for McLaren -- Bruce was killed testing the prototype Can-Am and Denny was badly burned in a
testing accident in the team's first Indycar. They survived, under Teddy Mayer, and by 1971 under designers Gordon Coppuck
(Indycar M16) and Ralph Bellamy (F1 M19) had successful cars in both formulae. 

The team acquired Yardley sponsorship in '72, and with the arrival of the successful M23 in '73 became a leading F1
competitor again. For '74 they attracted 1972 World Champion Emerson Fittipaldi and acquired sponsorship from Texaco and
Marlboro -- the team ran two Texaco-Marlboro cars and one Yardley car that season, for legal reasons; the Marlboro link still
survives 20 years later. Championships for Fittipaldi in '74 and Hunt in '76 demonstrated the competitiveness of the M23. 

The team went into something of a slow decline after '76, and its early ground-effects cars (particularly the M28) were rather
embarrassingly bad. They had continued to be involved in Indycar racing with the M24, though as the F1 team faltered this
involvement came to an end. 

In 1980 Marlboro forced a merger between McLaren and Ron Dennis' Project Four Racing, who had a carbon-fibre F1 car
designed by John Barnard on the stocks. This became the McLaren MP4/1 which rescued the team's competitiveness.
Eventually Teddy Mayer left the team he helped to found, leaving Dennis in sole charge; he built McLaren into what was surely
the finest team of the Eighties. Dennis was able to negotiate a dedicated engine financed by TAG and built by Porsche; in the
back of Barnard's MP4/2 chassis this won three World Championships in consecutive years (84-6). As the TAG became
outpaced in '87, Dennis acquired a Honda contract with extraordinary results -- in the last year of turbo F1 McLaren won 15
of 16 races (and would have won them all if it wasn't for a silly accident between Senna and Schlesser). McLaren continued
their dominance in the early years of the 3.5l formula, with Honda V10 and V12 cars winning the 89-91 Championships;
Williams-Renault were catching up, though, and when Honda pulled out at the end of 1992 Dennis was forced into a customer
Ford engine deal. The MP4/8 was more successful than expected, taking Senna to his last GP wins before his departure to
Williams and his tragic death, though in his quest for a works engine deal Dennis tied-up with Peugeot in 1994, a partnership
which failed to achieve the significant success hoped for. For 1995 and beyond, McLaren have joined forces with Mercedes
(Ilmor) in the hope of regaining their domaince of Formula 1. Meanwhile, the GTR became a dominant force in international GT
racing, taking Le Mans at its first attempt. 



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Source: Pete Fenelon

"If McLaren spent less time on their rather excellent web
site they might score more points..."
