MCLAREN'S 50 YEARS IN THE MAKING

There is an interesting story about McLaren's 50 years of history and how Bruce McLaren came about to creating this iconic team. This story was written by Alan Henry on the McLaren blog. Alan Henry has been a renowned Formula 1 journalist since the early 1970s. With an illustrious career spanning four decades, he has worked as Formula One correspondent of the Guardian newspaper, Editor at Large of F1 Racing magazine and Grand Prix editor of Autocar magazine.Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite.

McLaren stands poised for a buoyantly optimistic 50th anniversary season as it celebrates its 50th birthday over the coming months, highlighting a superb record of achievement which is sure to resonate across the race tracks of the world. Looking back to the team’s debut under the 'Bruce McLaren Motor Racing' banner in the 1963-64 Tasman Championship it was no surprise that the new organisation was quick to raise the tempo and diversity of its commitment across increasingly broad horizons.

Ironically, BMMR was only established out of Bruce’s frustration over the Cooper team, for whom he was driving in F1, failing to initiate his own plans to build a specially modified car in which to compete specifically in the Tasman contest. Charles Cooper, the authoritarian founder of the Cooper company, believed that one of their standard F1 cars would be more than capable of doing the job. With that in mind, he vetoed Bruce’s plans and thus forced Bruce to go it alone. Looking at it all in an historical perspective, this was the key catalyst which was responsible for underpinning the advance to the situation of pre-eminence now enjoyed by McLaren as a whole. A situation which would lead to the best only just being good enough for Bruce, his colleagues and successors over the years that followed.

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