Bruce McLaren: The Man and His Racing Team [Hardcover]

Eoin S. Young (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1995

Bruce McLaren was killed in a testing crash at Goodwood on 2 June 1970, a racing driver on the verge of realizing the ambition to succeed with his own Grand Prix team and his own cars. This book - reissued with additional material to mark the 25th anniversary of McLaren's death - explores the foundation of the team, and its involvement in Formula 1, CanAm and Indianapolis racing. The team later went on to achieve legendary success, providing winning cars for World Champions from Emerson Fittipalsi and James Hunt to Niki Lauda, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. The full story of Bruce McLaren's career is told, combining it with the development of his racing team. The author discusses the design, production and preparation of the racing cars, with details of the races, as well as how the business was managed.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Patrick Stephens (August 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852605111
• ISBN-13: 978-1852605117
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,880,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great insight into why Bruce raced and should be remembered, October 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bruce McLaren: The Man and His Racing Team (Hardcover)

I have owned the book since it's original printing and found it to be a good insight to Bruce McLaren the man and the racer. It is kept handy for two paragraphs in the introduction to the original version. I do not know if they are in the reprint.

They stand on their own without comment.

"In the dark days that followed it was realized that Bruce, the complete man, had virtually penned his own epitaph in the closing paragraph of his book From the Cockpit, written in 1964. He had put down on paper the grief he felt at the death of his teammate Timmy Mayer, killed in a practice crash in Tasmania, but he had also recorded his justification for going racing and those last few sentences in his book are a fitting beginning for this one:

"The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one's ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone."

Many of today's F1 fans don't know where the name for McLaren the team came from and this will give them great insight into the man that founded the team that in many ways still folllows his philosophy.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great biography of a great driver, by one who knew him, April 11, 1998

By 

Dan Wildhirt (Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bruce McLaren: The Man and His Racing Team (Hardcover)

Eoin Young is well-known as an automotive journalist, but not many may realize that he got his start in the early '60s as the public relations manager for Bruce McLaren's fledgling racing team. So he's more than a researcher; he was a close friend of McLaren's when the New Zealander was gaining his reputaion as one of the foremost driver/engineers of his day. Completed in 1970, a few months after McLaren's death in a race car of his own design, the book is an intimate portrait of a remarkably ambitious man whose influence was so profound that the racing team he started more than 30 years ago has survived and thrived without him. But this isn't a book for those seeking insights into the McLaren organization of the last 20 years; this is a reprint of the original manuscript, with only a new foreword and introduction added.