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As the streets of Monaco echo to the roar of engines, history too will resonate long and loud in Monte Carlo this weekend. Allegiance be damned, it would take a heart of stone not to recognise McLaren’s achievement and contribution to the sport when the team that made their debut here in 1966 contest their 1000th grand prix.
Bruce McLaren, the team’s founder, had brought his first F1 car, the M2B, to Monaco in 1966. On Thursday it was on the track once again, driven by their double world champion Mika Häkkinen to mark the team’s milestone race, having taken 203 victories, 13 drivers’ titles and 10 constructors’ championships.
The opening to this striking achievement, becoming the second-most successful and long-lived team in F1 behind Ferrari, had not been enormously auspicious. McLaren qualified his car in 10th and retired with an oil leak after just 10 laps. Yet he was undeterred; his team’s journey was only just beginning.
Even then there was a technocratic imperative to F1. Ever onward. Ever upward. But its history is still rich with stories, not least how McLaren created an F1 titan having brought his car to Monaco in 1966 towed on a trailer behind a Ford Fairlane estate.
The team had begun with just six people: McLaren; his wife, Patty, who was his assistant and official timekeeper; Eoin Young, who was general manager; and the workshop was in the hands of Wally Willmott and Tyler Alexander, with the newly appointed 23-year-old New Zealander, Howden Ganley, as their third mechanic.
When McLaren founded the team in 1963 they really were building from the ground up. “We started in a little workshop in New Malden,” recalled Ganley. “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.”
McLaren, as leader, driver and designer, motivated by inexorable will, battled on. In 1968 he took their first win at Spa, a mighty result for the still fledgling outfit, and more would surely have followed but for his death in 1970. While testing the team’s M8D sports car at Goodwood, McLaren was killed when he spun off the track and struck a concrete marshal post. He was 32. Yet he had already instilled such passion and motivation in his team there was no consideration of not continuing. “He was the greatest leader of men I have ever met in all my life,” Ganley said.
On they went, Emerson Fittipaldi, also in Monaco this weekend, took their first drivers’ championship in 1974 and more followed. James Hunt’s title in 1976 and then under Ron Dennis’s leadership from 1981, McLaren claimed seven constructors’ titles between 1984 and 1998, a level of success that was admired and envied.
The team’s roll call of champions tells its own story. Alongside Fittipaldi, Hunt and Hakkinen, Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Lewis Hamilton and last year Lando Norris have all claimed F1’s greatest prize with McLaren.
Indeed, being a part of something that goes beyond the transactional basis of simply being employed by a team is not lost on Norris who, with 156 McLaren races under his belt, has more than any other driver.
“It’s a team I think a lot of people want to be a part of,” he says. “To be alongside Lewis and Senna and Prost in terms of drivers who have driven for the team, helped to win constructors’, now achieved a world championship, that’s something that makes me smile more than just saying ‘I’ve won a race’. That’s something in the future I’ll look back on and be happy about.”
Norris joined as the team were emerging from their nadir. A fall to the back of the grid between 2015 and 2017 made it appear that the once mighty marque had gone. Battered and bloody, they came back under the leadership of Zak Brown as CEO and Andrea Stella as team principal, to take the constructors’ title in 2024 and the drivers’ and constructors’ double last year. The revival demonstrated a tenacity of which McLaren would have been proud.
His ethos has remained part of the team throughout, across the highs and lows. Mark Temple joined the team straight out of university when he was 23 in 2003. He has been with them ever since. He started in gearbox design but went on to become Hamilton’s performance and then race engineer and is now McLaren’s performance technical engineer. After more than two decades of involvement, Temple believes the team’s longevity and success still owes much to McLaren’s inspiration.
“It’s much, much more than just a job for everyone here,” he says. “That sense of being part of the team and the team is bigger than any one individual. That really helps with that sense of a common purpose. The best test of that is were people still proud to work for McLaren, even when we were finishing ninth in the championship? The answer is yes.
“If your team looks after you, you want to look after the team. I think that’s a big part of it. In that sense in a way it’s like family. There is a kind of a mutual respect and wanting to feel that you’re part of something special and that the team values you and your contribution makes you want to stay part of that team.”
This weekend in Monaco, win or lose, McLaren have every right to celebrate. As always in F1 the focus is on future success but they have earned this moment.
McLaren's greatest five GPs
Show
1968 Belgian GP winner: Bruce McLaren
McLaren wins from sixth on the grid after a race-long scrap with Pedro Rodríguez driving for BRM on the fearsome, old configuration of Spa-Francorchamps on public roads in the Ardennes mountains. On the final lap of the 14km circuit, the pair believed they were fighting for second and third place but had in fact passed Jackie Stewart who had pitted for a late fuel stop and for McLaren to take the flag. It was the team’s first victory as a constructor and McLaren’s only F1 win in one of his own cars.
1988 Japan GP winner: Ayrton Senna
Having enjoyed the most dominant season in F1 history with the extraordinary MP4/4 taking victory in all but one race, McLaren’s Senna (pictured) and Alain Prost would decide the championship at the finale in Suzuka. Senna started on pole, stalled on the grid and dropped to 14th. An almighty comeback ensued before he caught and passed Prost to claim the win and the first of his three titles with McLaren.
2005 Japan GP winner: Kimi Räikkönen
Rain late in qualifying had stymied Räikkönen, relegating him to 17th on the grid in Japan. He moved inexorably through the field as the team too sensed that he might pull off something extraordinary. Having caught Giancarlo Fisichella on the penultimate lap, the Iceman was not to be denied and swept round the outside of turn one for the lead and a famous victory.
2008 British GP winner: Lewis Hamilton
In treacherous wet conditions at Silverstone, Hamilton gave definitive notice of the touch which would assure his ascent to the top of the sport. With the rain intermittently flooding the old airfield, Hamilton was in complete control, finding grip and pace where others floundered. By the flag he was a minute ahead of his nearest challenger in what had been a masterclass.
Miami 2024 winner: Lando Norris
A race of immense significance for McLaren marking their return to the top table of F1. Won by Lando Norris, his debut victory was on merit after flawless driving to hold off Max Verstappen having made the most of good fortune with the safety car. In Miami McLaren had the quickest car, the team returning to the glories of old. They sealed the constructors’ championship that season and the drivers’ and constructors’ double the following year. Giles Richards
Photograph: Bernard Cahier/Hulton Archive
