#MCLAREN F1 GT SERIES#
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. The current team principal, Zak Brown, grew up as a fan of McLaren and is an enthusiastic historian of the sport. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties.
The team have enjoyed enormous success here: second only to Ferrari in victories, they have 11 at the grand old Autodromo. It is fitting that Monza should host the anniversary. 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.’” “What I have said is everywhere but it bears repeating. “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. A fledgling operation yet everyone was absolutely committed to the man in charge from then and as McLaren grew.
#MCLAREN F1 GT DRIVER#
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. They had driven down, towing the car on a trailer behind a Ford Fairlane estate. Ganley was there but it was still a skeleton crew. By June 1965 they were working on what would become the team’s first F1 car, the M2B, which made its debut at Monaco. 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. They would move to Colnbrook, near Slough, in 1966, which became the team’s home until 1981.īefore then, great things were already afoot. “We actually had a lathe by then, we had really gone upmarket,” Ganley recalls with a laugh. They moved to a place in Feltham, an old munition works but which had a painted floor, work benches and proper lighting.
I said it was me and Bruce said: ‘You aren’t the go-fer any more, you are now the fabricator.’” “Bruce and Wal and Tyler all came in and asked who had done it. 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. “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.”
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“Initially the other two guys weren’t sure I knew how to thread a nut on the end of a bolt,” he recalls. Photograph: McLaren F1Īt the time the inexperienced youngster still had a way to go to prove himself. Howden Ganley was one of the first employees at McLaren and likes the direction the team are going now. In the workshop were Wally Willmott and Tyler Alexander, making Ganley their third mechanic. 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. 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.”Īlongside the rudimentary workshop the team, which nowadays have almost as many as 1000 personnel, was just six. The floor may have been concrete at one time but it was broken up so it was almost just dirt. “We had a portion of a contractor’s shed so we were working among the bulldozers. “We started in a little workshop in New Malden,” he says. 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. 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. In 1964 he was 23 when McLaren offered him a job as a mechanic at his newly formed team. Witty and engaging, he has never shaken his lifelong love of motor racing.
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