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Bruce Leslie McLaren (30 August 1937 – 2 June 1970) was a New Zealand racing driver, automotive designer, engineer and motorsport executive, who competed in Formula One from 1958 to 1970. McLaren was runner-up in the Formula One World Drivers' Championship in 1960 with Cooper, and won four Grands Prix across 13 seasons.
The newspaper headlines on Wednesday, June 3, 1970 simply stated that Bruce McLaren had been tragically killed the previous day while testing his new McLaren M8D Can-Am car at the Goodwood circuit in West Sussex.
In 1968, Bruce took the first of the McLaren marque’s 182 Formula 1 wins – an achievement second only to Ferrari in grand prix racing’s all-time victory list. More would quickly follow, as Denny Hulme racked up two further victories before the end of the ’68 season.
Throughout his short 32-year life, Bruce drove plenty and worked on just as many. Since his passing in 1970, we've produced, driven and raced even more – the most successful of which can be seen as you walk the floor of the MTC Boulevard. But what were the key cars of our founder's lifetime?
That's what people remember most about our founder, Bruce McLaren. It was alive deep within him even as a 15-year-old schoolboy – driving him to rebuild an old Austin 7 from a box of bits, and compete in his first race. The passion for cars, for racing, had been ignited.
Bruce McLaren was the first New Zealander to win a Formula One motor race, and the first to found his own racing team. After enjoying great success in Can-Am sports car racing in North America in the late 1960s, McLaren was destined for a stellar career as a car constructor when he died at the age of 32 while test-driving a sports car.
Bruce McLaren was a New Zealand-born automobile racing driver, the youngest to win an international Grand Prix contest for Formula I cars (the U.S. race in 1959, when he was 22), also noted as a designer of racing vehicles. From 1959 to 1965 McLaren drove for Charles Cooper, a British racing car.
Jun 2, 2023 · On the 53rd anniversary of his passing, learn more about our incomparable founder.
Bruce was the youngest driver to win an F1 race – a record he held for nearly 50 years. He was 22 years and 104 days old when he took the win at Sebring, USA, on December 12th, 1959. Bruce’s victory at Sebring in 1959 also made headlines back home, as he became the first New Zealander to win a Formula One motor race.
Bruce McLaren made the team's Grand Prix debut at the 1966 Monaco race (of the current Formula One teams, only Ferrari is older [27] [a]). [16] His race ended after nine laps due to a terminal oil leak. [29] The 1966 car was the M2B designed by Robin Herd, but the programme was hampered by a poor choice of engines: a 3.0-litre version of Ford's Indianapolis 500 engine and a Serenissima V8 were used, the latter scoring the team's first point in Britain, but both were underpowered and unreliable.
