![]() There was a work bench, a drill press, a vice, and a set of welding bottles. Regrettably up the back were the remains of Timmy Mayer’s car. There was just enough room for the Zerex Special, or the Cooper-Oldsmobile as it was renamed, and the Tasman Cooper, the one that Bruce had driven. We were in New Malden, in a corner of a factory with a load of earth-moving machines, with a sort of dirt floor, although there had been a bit of concrete there at one time. Wal said to me, ‘What’s your job?’ ‘Mechanic.’ ‘No, you’re the go-fer.’ And so I was the go-fer when I arrived. I may have exaggerated slightly, because I knew bugger all! When I got there, on the shop floor it was just Wally Willmott, Tyler Alexander, and me. He hired me as mechanic, and he asked me what I knew about it. He needed some more Kiwis, and I was the next Kiwi that got the phone call. He explained to me that he was going to get his team really going, wanted to employ Kiwis, and would I like to come and work for him? He said he had his own workshop now, because they’d worked out of Parnell’s originally, and that he was expanding. Meanwhile Bruce had done the Tasman Series with a pair of Coopers, and in the interim he’d bought the Zerex Special, and he was going to do a lot more. It wasn’t until May 1964 that Eoin Young called me and said, ‘Bruce is here, he wants to talk to you.’īruce said, ‘What are you doing?,’ and I said, ‘Not a whole lot.’ I had managed to blag some rides in Formula Junior, but that had all came to an end when Esso took the money away from all the little teams. I never really thought I would finish up working for him. When I first came over in 1962 and started going to the races I would go and talk to him, at Aintree or Silverstone or Goodwood or wherever. As things went on and Bruce succeeded, that was the example for all the Kiwis – you get yourself on a boat, and you get to England, and just start racing! When I saw Prince Bira I’d decided that I wanted to be a Grand Prix driver, but I had no idea how I would do it. I had already written about him, because I was working for a newspaper, and I remember him saying to me that I had spelled his name wrongly – I wrote M-A-C – and he gave me a little blast about that! The more Kiwi the better Inevitably you get to meet the other drivers, although he was way above my level. He used to come back and race every winter, and that’s when I really got to meet him, in 1961-’2, when I had my Lotus 11 at the same race meetings. And that led to him winning the Driver to Europe, and going to England. My recollection, and I used to go to a lot of events with my father, is that then he got the Cooper ‘Bobtail’ sportscar from Jack, and then a Cooper single-seater. The big star of the day was Prince Bira, and there was a young chap called Jack Brabham.īruce had had an Austin Seven, and at that point he was just starting with his Ford 10 Special. I’d already heard his father’s name, because Les was racing, and he was one of the people behind the New Zealand GP. ![]() ![]() I first saw Bruce race in January 1955 when my father took me to the Ardmore circuit, when I had just turned 14. ![]() In the first part of a two-part story, he recalls the early days of the McLaren team. He first had to pay his dues as a mechanic, becoming one of the original employees Bruce hired in early 1964. Howden Ganley followed in the footsteps of fellow Kiwi Bruce McLaren when he tried to forge a racing career in Europe. ![]()
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