McLaren Page #9

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WALLY:
It's...

You build a pretty close relationship

with a driver. He's got to trust you.

And...

Yeah.

Yeah, a very sad day.

PATTY:
I wanted the boys to carry on,

and I wrote a letter to the team,

the boys as I always called them.

My boys.

CARY:
What happened should never have.

At, say, 180 mile an hour, with the

rear wing set at a fairly high angle,

the rear section of the car lifted.

PHIL:
Unfortunately, there was

a marshal's post, due for demolition,

hadn't been demolished,

right in the path of the car.

Teddy and I decided we would get

everybody in the factory together,

and we said to them, "Take tomorrow off."

The next day everyone turned up.

Yeah, we decided to carry on. I mean,

that's what he would've wanted us to do.

PHIL:
Eoin Young, Patty McLaren and

myself would fly out to New Zealand

for his funeral.

The funeral procession

left to drive to the cemetery.

At every intersection,

there was a traffic officer

making sure the lights were overridden,

so that the cortge

was never going to be slowed down.

All of the traffic officers

stood to attention

and saluted as we went through.

We got a huge photograph of Bruce,

and we put it up on the far wall

of the factory, in the prototype shop.

Denny was there virtually every day,

other than the days that he had to go

and see the specialist,

and he took over the mantle

of team leader.

CARY:
At the back of everyone's mind,

of course,

was here we are due to be on Mosport,

first Can-Am race, June 14th.

Within two weeks.

And so another car had to be built

very quickly

if we were

a functioning motor racing team.

PHIL:
They quickly designed

a whole new system of struts

to hold the bodywork and the rear wing.

Denny said,

"I'm going to drive at Mosport,"

because he said

we've got to be there with two cars.

And we said, "No, you're not. You can't."

"The doctors have all said to you that,

you know, your hands are so bad."

CARY:

Denny certainly made it very obvious that,

come what may, he was driving.

The immediate thought was who can

we approach to drive the second car?

COMMENTATOR:
The McLaren team is here,

dedicated to winning

in the memory of their boss.

Dan Gurney, a close friend of Bruce's,

has volunteered to drive

the second McLaren.

DAN:
I drove a Can-Am car for McLaren

under the worst sort of circumstances,

when Bruce left us.

I felt as though my old friend would

probably be honored if I could do well,

and so I said yes.

COMMENTATOR:
He joins Denny Hulme,

whose hands have been badly burned

in testing for the Indy 500.

Against doctors' orders,

and with his hands heavily bandaged,

Denny will race.

CARY:
So on the grid at Mosport,

there's Denny with extremely painful,

burnt hands,

and then that left hand

went onto the wheel,

and we had to sort of mould it

round the wheel so he could hold on.

PHIL:
Unbelievably the doctors

at Mosport allowed him to start.

Denny led for most of the way,

until he had gearbox problems.

Dan won the race.

Denny finished third.

DAN:
It was a great opportunity

to do something for Bruce

to keep things going.

PHIL:

McLaren went from success to success.

Teddy won the Can-Am Championship in 1970.

We'd won the Indy 500 in the new M16

with Mark Donohue.

In 1974, we achieved our ultimate goal,

we won the Formula 1 World Championship

with Emerson Fittipaldi.

We won the Indy 500 with the works car

with Johnny Rutherford.

Repeated that in 1976

with James Hunt in Formula 1,

Johnny Rutherford again at the Indy 500.

And McLaren became

the only team in history

to have completed the World Championship

Indy 500 double for two years.

The legacy of Bruce McLaren lives on.

I've always said that if Bruce had come

into the factory one morning and said,

"OK, men," because he always

addressed us collectively as men,

"OK, men, we're not gonna work

on racing cars today,

we're gonna march across

the Sahara Desert,"

we'd have all said,

"OK, Bruce. You know, no problem."

I remember my first actual race.

It was on a beach at a place called

Muriwai, in New Zealand.

And I was about 16.

It was probably the shortest,

slowest race I'd ever win.

Certainly there was no prize money.

In fact, I might have got a certificate,

which says,

"This hereby declares that B. McLaren

won a up to 1500cc all-comers

handicap race."

But I was certainly excited by it.

INTERVIEWER:
They tell me that there

have been quite a few modifications

carried out on this car of yours.

What would some of those modifications be?

I believe, for a start,

you're using a bamboo space frame.

BRUCE:
That's correct.

It's a bamboo space frame.

And we're also using,

the most sensational development

is of course the square wheel.

That gives us more tread area

when the car is going sideways.

That's tread area on the ground,

as you must of course understand.

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