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Bruce McLaren, March 18th 1968

This article was written by Bruce in 1968 for AUTOSPORT magazine. He covers his Race of Champions win at Brands Hatch and Denny's 3rd place finish, then getting ready for the Spanish F1, Can-Am and Indy races.

Do you realise that the Race of Champions was the first single-seater race I’ve won at Brands Hatch since 1958 – that’s ten years! That was my first race at Brands and I remember Ken Tyrell and I were both in Formula Two Coopers. I suppose I really beat him again last weekend as well, because Jackie Stewart’s Matra was down in sixth place after a pitstop, but I mustn’t rub it in because we’re not kidding ourselves this early in the season. We’re well aware that Clark, Rindt and Gurney weren’t there, not to mention Black Jack or Surtees with a good Honda. Our win obviously gave us encouragement, but we’ve got to find 1 ½ seconds a lap yet, particularly on that type of track.

During our testing on the short circuit at Brands the car handled quite well, but most of the time we were running on about half fuel load. I had a light fuel load in the first practice session to try to go quick immediately, but on the full circuit for the first time the car felt distinctly twitchy. I thought there was something wrong and Denny was convinced there was. It wasn’t until I talked with Chris Amon and Jackie Stewart at lunchtime and heard them complaining bitterly about their cars leaping all over the road, and being in continual slides with too much wheelspin that I realised that we all had the same problem.

It wasn’t so much a problem with the car as a characteristic we were getting with too much power on this track. With just the slightest bit of oil down it was possible with the Ford engine to get wheelspin all around the circuit. Even in fourth gear the wheels were spinning, and we were only in fifth for a little while. If it’s wet or oily, the extreme power of the Ford, which tends to come on all at once at around 6500 rpm, is quite an embarrassment.

I noticed last year in the Canadian Grand Prix with the BRM V12 engine that its ultra smooth torque curve was definitely a help under difficult conditions and around slow corners. It was obvious that both Spence and Rodriguez were enjoying this characteristic of the engine at Brands Hatch.

I think the power of the Ford V8 really took Denny by surprise after the long Tasman Series in his Formula 2 car. He’d had virtually no time at all to get accustomed to his car, having done only a couple of laps at Goodwood after rushing back from Los Angeles where he had been testing the Indy turbine car. His first proper drive in the McLaren was really during the weekend of the race itself. The Repco V8 apparently has a nice gentle torque curve, and I don’t think the Brabham is quite as tail-heavy as our car. I had been testing our car for a month and I’d got used to this business of feeling that the car might fly off the road when the wheelspin started, and also, when it was bounding up and down on the bumps, having built it I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to break. Denny had neither of those advantages.

Stewart and Spence had been testing their cars almost continually for the last month, and Pedro had been racing a BRM in the Tasman Series, but I’ve got no doubts at all that when we get the cars a little more sorted out and Denny gets used to the car, I’m going to be following him….

To keep full throttle over the brow climbing out of South Bank was pretty thrilling because the car almost left the ground there. It was accelerating at such a rate that it was nearly lifting me out of the cockpit and the weight transfer, particularly with our car with a lot on the rear, nearly had the front wheels off the ground. We were going over at about 150 mph and reaching 160 mph in the dip.

It was such a change to be leading a Formula 1 race that I was toying with the idea of standing on it and keeping going as fast as I could, but I wanted to be absolutely sure of winning and not spinning or over revving by trying too hard, so I started being fairly cautious. This is something you should never really do in the middle of a race because you slow down and lose concentration. However, having slowed down a bit I started thinking too much about how we could put the power on the rear better, and how we could stop the rear end bouncing up and down and I simply lost concentration. Once you’ve done that it takes a while to get up to pace again. It wasn’t until I saw the signal that Rodriguez was following me that I thought I’d better start trying again, because Spence had been there all the time and I didn’t know where Pedro had come from. I found out that when I got trying again I could open up the gap and keep it at about 20 seconds.

I was quite happy when Mike dropped out because I had opened out a lead of 7 secs fairly quickly over his BRM, but when the oil started to appear he began picking up ½ a second a lap and got within 2 secs. I had started driving where there wasn’t any oil because I couldn’t get any traction, and I could tell that Mike was too, because for a while the oil was on the outside of the corners going in, and I was shooting up the inside, keeping it tight and using a lower gear so I could stay there and accelerate out, but when Mike started doing that too the whole track was covered in oil and that’s when he really started catching me. An oil line had rubbed through on his BRM. I had a couple of laps when the tyres were shiny all over from the oil and that was just like driving on ice. Nasty. I don’t think it was the fault of the Goodyears because Pedro was on Goodyears as well and he was going like hell. It was just that the power of the Ford became even more tricky under those conditions – it has so much poke for so little weight, and it comes in hot and strong. Having driven around the inside of the track it was quite a decision to reckon when to go for the outside, charging over and hoping it was dry.

I was delighted to win the race and delighted to finish two cars. Mine looked as though we’d only just warmed it up. There wasn’t a drop of oil in it, although Denny’s engine had spewed a little out of the breather. It was quite a race for the Kiwis (or the Cherokiwis as cowboy Graham Hill called us on his Christmas card) because Denny finished third close behind Pedro, and Chris Amon was fourth in the Ferrari on Denny’s heels.

Back at Colnbrook we’ve all been working hard since I’ve been back from the Tasman Series. It’s been test-and-change, test-and-change, and it will continue that way until the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama on the new date of May 12, and then we’ll have to start all over again with the sports car. We have already been doing some testing with the sports car, trying some modifications on Denny’s CanAm car which Graeme Lawrence (the newest Kiwi in the nest) has been driving to get some test figures, and we’ll be getting down to some solid work in April, hacking the car about using it as a prototype for the 1968 CanAm car.

I’m setting off now for my first look at the Indy brickyard and my first drive in the turbine cars that Denny and I will drive in the 500 at the end of May. Come to think of it, the calendar is going to get pretty crowded around that time – I just hope we manage to qualify on the first weekend at Indy.