Bruce McLaren

The McLaren badge sits on Formula One cars and road-going supercars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet the name belongs to an Auckland racing driver who died before he turned thirty-three. Bruce McLaren built the team that carries his name, and he did it as a Kiwi engineer who preferred to make his own cars rather than drive someone else’s.

From Auckland to the Grid

McLaren was born in Auckland in 1937 and grew up around the family service station and workshop in Remuera. As a boy he was diagnosed with Perthes disease, a hip condition that left him in traction for two years and one leg shorter than the other. He came back to tinker with cars in the family garage, started hill-climbing and racing in his teens, and won a place on the New Zealand “Driver to Europe” scheme that sent him to compete internationally.

In 1959, at the United States Grand Prix at Sebring, he became the youngest driver to win a Formula One world championship race, a record that stood for decades. He spent the early 1960s driving for the Cooper works team and building a reputation as a thinking driver, as comfortable with a slide rule as a steering wheel.

Founding McLaren

In 1963 he set up Bruce McLaren Motor Racing and began designing and building his own cars rather than racing other people’s. The operation grew fast. In North America his orange sports cars dominated the Can-Am series, the “Bruce and Denny show” he ran with fellow New Zealander Denny Hulme, and the team entered Formula One under its own name. He was an engineer and a team owner as much as a driver, the rare racer who built a business that could outlast him.

Goodwood, 1970

On 2 June 1970 McLaren was killed testing one of his own Can-Am cars at the Goodwood circuit in England when the bodywork failed at speed. He was thirty-two. The team he had founded chose to keep racing, and keep his name on the car.

The Legacy

McLaren went on to become one of the most successful names in Formula One history, winning multiple world championships across the decades that followed, and later a maker of road-going supercars through McLaren Automotive. It is one of the largest businesses ever founded by a New Zealander, and it still runs under the name of the Auckland boy who built his first cars in a family garage.

Bruce McLaren features in our guide to the most famous New Zealand entrepreneurs.