Few Formula One teams can boast a history lasting decades but on Saturday McLaren will complete their sixth. It is a moment they have every reason to savour given struggles in recent years and their latest upturn in fortune. What is perhaps most striking about this anniversary is not only how far the team have come but how revered their founder, Bruce McLaren, remains despite his death in 1970.
The New Zealander was killed aged just 32 when he crashed while testing his team’s M8D sportscar at Goodwood. It was just seven years since he had formed McLaren on 2 September 1963 and only four years after they made their F1 debut at Monaco, while McLaren himself had claimed their first F1 win at Spa in 1968.
What is remarkable about this period is just how far this team had come in such a short time, a tribute to McLaren’s leadership, his character and his ability to inspire everyone around him. He is remembered fondly and with great respect by the man who was the third person to join the team at their workshop only months after McLaren had founded it.
Howden Ganley is 81 now. Witty and engaging, he has never shaken his lifelong love of motor racing. In 1964 he was 23 when McLaren offered him a job as a mechanic at his newly formed team.
Ganley, a fellow Kiwi, had followed McLaren to England hoping to pursue his career as a driver and make it to F1 but, with a lack of money and lack of drives, leapt at the chance to work with a man he already admired. Yet for all that McLaren would become second only to Ferrari both in terms of being the most successful F1 team measured by race wins and in terms of continuous participation in the sport, what Ganley found when he got there was the humblest of beginnings.
“We started in a little workshop in New Malden,” he says. “We had a portion of a contractor’s shed so we were working among the bulldozers. The floor may have been concrete at one time but it was broken up so it was almost just dirt. There was a wooden work bench with a vice on it, a drill press and some welding bottles, the bare minimum of what we needed.”
Alongside the rudimentary workshop the team, which nowadays have almost as many as 1000 personnel, was just six. There was McLaren as boss, driver and designer, his wife, Patty, was his assistant and the team’s timekeeper, and Eoin Young as general manager. In the workshop were Wally Willmott and Tyler Alexander, making Ganley their third mechanic.
At the time the inexperienced youngster still had a way to go to prove himself. “Initially the other two guys weren’t sure I knew how to thread a nut on the end of a bolt,” he recalls. “So they told me you can’t be a mechanic until we see how you go, so now you are the ‘go-fer’, as in you go-fer this and go-fer that.”
He proved himself when asked to go-fer some tubing to weld into chassis stands – McLaren were balancing their cars on wooden engine crates up until that point – and a dab hand with a torch, he welded them himself. “Bruce and Wal and Tyler all came in and asked who had done it. I said it was me and Bruce said: ‘You aren’t the go-fer any more, you are now the fabricator.’”
The team too were advancing. They moved to a place in Feltham, an old munition works but which had a painted floor, work benches and proper lighting. “We actually had a lathe by then, we had really gone upmarket,” Ganley recalls with a laugh. They would move to Colnbrook, near Slough, in 1966, which became the team’s home until 1981.
Before then, great things were already afoot. By September 1964 they were building what was the first McLaren car proper, the M1, which was so successful shortly afterwards it was being manufactured and sold as the M1A. By June 1965 they were working on what would become the team’s first F1 car, the M2B, which made its debut at Monaco.
Ganley was there but it was still a skeleton crew. They had driven down, towing the car on a trailer behind a Ford Fairlane estate. There were two mechanics, Alexander as an engineer, Robin Herd the designer of that first F1 car, McLaren the driver and, again, Patty the timekeeper. A fledgling operation yet everyone was absolutely committed to the man in charge from then and as McLaren grew.
“He was the greatest leader of men I have ever met in all my life,” says Ganley, who is the source of the oft-quoted description of how inspiring McLaren was. “What I have said is everywhere but it bears repeating. If Bruce had come to the shop one day and said: ‘Men, we are not going to work on race cars today, we are going to march across the Sahara desert.’ All of us would say: ‘OK Bruce, if that’s what you think, off we go.’”
It is fitting that Monza should host the anniversary. The team have enjoyed enormous success here: second only to Ferrari in victories, they have 11 at the grand old Autodromo.
The current team principal, Zak Brown, grew up as a fan of McLaren and is an enthusiastic historian of the sport. Indeed he owns and races the M8D sportscar that Dan Gurney raced and won with in the first round of the 1970 Can-Am series just days after McLaren was killed. It is the same model McLaren had been driving that would go on to win nine of the 10 Can-Am races that season. That the team continued at all, let alone so soon after his death, is extraordinary and its significance is not lost on Brown.
“I know after he was killed everyone showed up for work the next day because that was what Bruce would have wanted and I really understand that,” he says. “His career and history is inspirational. It makes it a personal brand, it’s not just a company. We feel Bruce’s presence and his legacy in being racers, innovators, in humility, and being brave, those are all things we carry forward from him.”
This weekend Lando Norris and his teammate Oscar Piastri are hopeful they will be at the sharp end of what is the beginning of a McLaren resurgence. Their car is now regularly competing to be the second-quickest behind Red Bull and with their new wind tunnel on stream they remain set on their target of competing for wins again by 2025.
Their factory and headquarters, the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC) in Woking, is a shining example of F1 modernity, a workplace designed with the express intent of of facilitating both the art and science of going racing. It could not be further from where the team began 60 years ago today and Ganley thinks his old boss would have approved.
“The MTC is absolutely amazing,” he says. “People ask me what Bruce would say if he could see it. I think he would probably say: ‘Yeah, this is about right, this is where I was heading.’”
In practice at Monza, Max Verstappen was quickest in the first session with the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz in second. In the afternoon session Sainz was on top, in front of Norris with Verstappen in fifth.
• This article was amended on 3 September 2023. An earlier version said that Eoin Young’s first name was Ian.
