There is no prouder name in New Zealand motor racing history than McLaren, and no person better qualified to tell the life story of Bruce McLaren than internationally-respected motor racing columnist and raconteur Eion Young.
Having met Bruce McLaren in the late 1950s, and introduced him to his future wife Pat, Young eventually left his home town of Timaru for Europe to take up a role as McLaren's personal secretary. He was there through the highs and lows of McLaren's great Formula One and CanAm years, right up to that fateful day in June 1970, when McLaren lost his life in a testing accident at the Goodwood circuit in the south of England.
My timing in picking up this latest story of McLaren's life could hardly have been better: a few weeks earlier my interest in this great driver was reignited by the discovery of another recent and photographically rich Bruce McLaren book, by Karl Ludvigsen, in the Dunedin Public Library.
Young starts with the crash that ended McLaren's life, but quickly moves back to his childhood days, growing up in a car-mad Auckland family, incapacitated for two years by Perthes' disease, and giving up his university engineering studies to be a race driver.
McLaren's first international achievements were as a driver. He contested 101 world championship Grands Prix, winning four, and scoring no fewer than 23 other podium results. Upon taking his first win, in 1959, at 22 years of age, he became the youngest winner of an F1 Grand Prix.
That record stood until 2003, when it was bettered by current F1 world championship leader Fernando Alonso.
McLaren's proudest F1 win, though, was his last, his only Grand Prix victory in a car bearing his own name. With fellow Kiwi and friend Denny Hulme as team-mate, he also enjoyed huge success racing his big V8 McLaren sports cars on the lucrative North American CanAm series.
His enduring legacy, of course, is the F1 team that still carries his name. It's a team that sets high standards of engineering and competitive excellence that McLaren himself would surely have appreciated, and which scored its latest success when Juan Pablo Montoya beat Alonso to victory at the recent British Grand Prix.
While Young has told much of the Bruce McLaren story in several earlier books, this latest work draws heavily on the columns Young and McLaren penned together during his racing career. A worthwhile new dimension is added by fresh perspectives from some of those who also knew the Kiwi racer well: fellow F1 racer driver and sometimes employee Chris Amon, and an even older racing rival, race mechanic and long-time McLaren team stalwart Phil Kerr come to the fore in this respect.
Having finished McLaren Memories, Young is now working on his next book project, The Denny Hulme Diaries.
Along with his 2003 work Forza Amon!, it will complete his unique look at New Zealand's three great F1 drivers.
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