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Every driver's dream is to build and race his own car. New Zealand's Bruce McLaren, 31, has carried that dream several fancies farther: practically everyone else is driving his cars too. In this year's six-race Canadian-American Challenge Series for Sports-Racing cars, 16 drivers in a field of 40-including McLaren and his countryman Denis Hulme, 32-are piloting sleek, slope-nosed McLaren-built machines. Last month, in the fourth race of the series at Monterey, Calif., McLaren cars swept the first six places, with Hulme finishing second and McLaren fifth. This...
Light and Subtle. McLaren may sell cars to his rivals, but the ones he and Hulme reserve for themselves are some thing else again. Last year McLaren and Hulme completed a one-two sweep in the Can-Am marathon, winning five of six races and $165,000 of the total $472,720 award money. Only then did McLaren have 34 of his victorious Mark 6A racers reproduced and sold to competitors-including Dan Gurney, who has quite a reputation as a car builder himself. With that, McLaren set out to build a 1968 model that would show its tail pipes...
Called the Mark 8A, McLaren's new car looks like its predecessor. "I think a lot of people were disappointed that we did not come up with something revolutionary," says McLaren, "but we never do anything completely different." Both cars, for example, have an airplane-type monocoque, or frameless chassis, to get maximum strength from minimum weight. Still, there are subtle yet important differences. While the Mark 6A weighed 1,520 Ibs., the new car weighs only 1,450 Ibs.-less than a Volkswagen. The weight-saving was mainly accomplished by completely eliminating the chassis behind the driver...
Though the cars cost $40,000 to develop and build, they are paying rich dividends. In this year's first and third Can-Am races, at Elkhart Lake, Wis., and Edmonton, Canada, Hulme and McLaren drove to first-and second-place victories. In the Canadian race, both averaged over 100 m.p.h...
Hand and Foot. The son of an Auckland garage owner, McLaren started tinkering with cars at 15, after a horseback-riding injury ruled out the usual boyhood sports. That same year, he entered his father's Austin in a hill-climbing race and finished second in his class. By the time he was 21 he had established himself as his country's foremost driver; so off he went to Europe to try his hand and foot at big-time racing. For the next five years, he learned his craft as a member of the Cooper factory team, working...