McLaren’s roll of honour is well known: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Mika Häkkinen, Lewis Hamilton… Champions all, their names woven into the fabric of the team’s history at Woking.
But as McLaren prepares to line up for its 1000th Formula 1 grand prix in Monaco this weekend, it seems a fitting moment to look beyond the legends – to the drivers who passed through far more briefly, and whose connection to the team history has largely been forgotten.
McLaren’s roll of honour is well known: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Mika Häkkinen, Lewis Hamilton… Champions all, their names woven into the fabric of the team’s history at Woking.
But as McLaren prepares to line up for its 1000th Formula 1 grand prix in Monaco this weekend, it seems a fitting moment to look beyond the legends – to the drivers who passed through far more briefly, and whose connection to the team history has largely been forgotten.
For every driver who spent years in papaya orange or the red-and-white of Marlboro, there were others who appeared for a single season, a handful of races, or just one afternoon.
They weren’t second-rate drivers, far from it. Several of the names that follow won world championships, Le Mans, or both.
What they share is a brief chapter of their careers at the wheel of a McLaren.
For every driver who spent years in papaya orange or the red-and-white of Marlboro, there were others who appeared for a single season, a handful of races, or just one afternoon.
They weren’t second-rate drivers, far from it. Several of the names that follow won world championships, Le Mans, or both.
What they share is a brief chapter of their careers at the wheel of a McLaren.
The story of how Gilles Villeneuve arrived at McLaren is almost too good to be true.
In 1977, having dominated North American Formula Atlantic, winning nine of 10 races in 1976 and the Canadian and US championships, Villeneuve caught the attention of McLaren technical chief Alastair Caldwell, who rang him with a vague promise of a drive later that season after being recommended by James Hunt.
Caldwell put the phone down. The next morning, Villeneuve was sitting in the factory reception. He had simply packed a bag, driven to the airport, and flown to England without waiting to be asked twice.
“That was back in the more genteel days of F1 when drivers were allowed to go off and do something stupid like race in Canada!” Caldwell recalled in 2017. “James came back and said there’s this really good kid that we should talk to. He said he was a natural.
“He was a hit with everybody. We decided to give him a drive at Silverstone; being the home race, we could better cope with three cars.”
McLaren entered him as a third driver for the 1977 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, giving him the team’s older M23 while Hunt and Jochen Mass drove the newer M26s.
Villeneuve qualified ninth, splitting his two more experienced team-mates, and was running competitively when a faulty temperature gauge left him stranded in the pits for two laps.
Rejoining 21st, he charged back to finish 11th and set the fifth-fastest lap of the race.
Despite being hailed as a future world champion, McLaren didn’t keep him.
Teddy Mayer had already signed Patrick Tambay for 1978 and decided Villeneuve was surplus.
In August, Enzo Ferrari met the young Canadian and was immediately reminded of Tazio Nuvolari. McLaren’s loss became one of the most consequential gains in Ferrari’s history.
Jacky Ickx
Ickx at the wheel of the Yardley M23
Grand Prix Photo
By 1973, Jacky Ickx’s relationship with Ferrari was crumbling.
The 312B3 was uncompetitive, the team was skipping races, and Ickx — twice a runner-up in the championship and winner of eight grands prix — found the situation intolerable and decided to walk out mid-season.
McLaren offered him a one-off drive in a third works Yardley M23 at the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, a circuit Ickx knew better than almost anyone alive, having won there in both 1969 and 1972.
The Belgian driver delivered immediately, finishing third behind the Tyrrells of Jackie Stewart and François Cevert in what was Stewart’s final victory before his retirement.
“I was fast in practice, but they decided to give me a hard compound for the race,” Ickx said in the Beyond the Grid podcast in 2019.
“That was not the case for Tyrrell with Jackie and Francois at the time, and they always regretted to have forced me to run on hard tyres rather than the medium or soft ones.”
As it turned out, it was Ickx’s only cameo for McLaren, as he wouldn’t drive again for the team.
The following year he signed with Team Lotus, beginning a frustrating period in machinery that never matched his abilities.
His single McLaren appearance remains a small but telling footnote of a great driver finding a refuge for one afternoon at a track where he was, and always would be, at home.
John Surtees
Surtees drove a privateer McLaren-Ford in 1970
John Surtees is another name not usually linked to McLaren, but the Briton had four races in 1970 as he worked on his own car.
Having left Honda at the end of 1968 and spent an unhappy year at BRM in 1969, Surtees had committed to building and racing his own car, but with the Surtees TS7 not yet ready for the opening rounds of the 1970 season, he needed a temporary home.
McLaren provided it, running him in a McLaren M7C for the first three races of the year in South Africa, Spain, and Monaco, and again in the Dutch GP after skipping Belgium.
Results were modest — he did not finish any of the first three and was sixth in his fourth outing — but the arrangement served its purpose.
By the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, the TS7 was ready, and Surtees drove it in place of the McLaren, never returning to Woking again.
He went on to win the non-championship Oulton Park Gold Cup in the new car that same season.
Nelson Piquet
Piquet’s McLaren outing proved a pivoting point
Grand Prix Photo
Technically, Nelson Piquet never drove for McLaren, but he did drive a McLaren at the start of his career.
Long before he became a three-time world champion, he was a young Brazilian making his way in European Formula 3 and attracting attention in the paddock.
In 1978, after a one-off appearance for Ensign at the German Grand Prix, he was picked up by the small British outfit BS Fabrications, which ran a customer McLaren M23, by then an older, privately-operated chassis rather than a works car.
Piquet drove the M23 in three races: Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy. He retired in the first two but finished ninth in Italy, enough to persuade Bernie Ecclestone to hand him a Brabham for the final race of the season.
That cameo proved the pivot of his career. Within three years, he was world champion.
It is a quietly wonderful irony that the McLaren M23, one of the most successful Formula 1 cars of the 1970s, served as the vehicle through which Piquet found his path to Brabham and, ultimately, to the summit of the sport.
His name doesn’t feature in any serious account of McLaren’s history, although it probably should, if only as a footnote.
Derek Bell
Bell didn’t enjoy McLaren’s 4WD car
Grand Prix Photo
Derek Bell’s Formula 1 career was intermittent and, by the standards of what followed in sports car racing, almost beside the point, though it did include one genuinely curious McLaren chapter.
After making his grand prix debut for Ferrari at Monza in 1968, Bell found himself without a competitive drive for 1969. McLaren offered him a single outing: the 1969 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, at the wheel of the experimental four-wheel-drive McLaren M9A.
“I got a call from McLaren – it wasn’t Bruce himself but one of the guys – and they said, ‘How about driving in the British GP in our four-wheel-drive (4WD) car?’,” Bell recalled in 2016.
“They said Bruce had tested it earlier in the week at Goodwood and it was running OK, and he thought it was going to be alright.”
The M9A was one of several four-wheel-drive Formula 1 experiments of that era — Lotus, Matra and Cosworth all built similar machines — and like all of them it proved a failure, its handling unable to translate the theoretical traction advantage into lap time.
“I started near the back and half a dozen laps into the race the suspension collapsed. I remember after the race he [Bruce McLaren] looked at me and said, ‘What do you think? It’s not going to work, is it?’ And I said, ‘No,’ so it never saw the light of day again.”
Indeed, the car never raced again. It was the M9A’s one and only grand prix appearance, making Bell the sole Formula 1 driver ever to race it in anger.
He went on to collect five Le Mans victories, two World Sportscar Championships and three Daytona 24 Hours wins, becoming one of endurance racing’s true immortals.
Mike Hailwood
Hailwood at the 1974 British GP
Mike Hailwood arrived at McLaren for the 1974 season having spent three years with the underfunded Surtees team, for which he had produced results well above the machinery’s potential.
He was also carrying a George Medal, awarded for the extraordinary act of bravery he had shown at the 1973 South African Grand Prix, when he dragged an unconscious Clay Regazzoni from a burning BRM — his own overalls catching fire in the process, extinguished by a marshal before he went back into the flames a second time.
At McLaren, partnering Denny Hulme and Emerson Fittipaldi, Hailwood finally had competitive machinery. He used it well, finishing third in South Africa and fourth in Argentina and at Zandvoort.
He was driving as well as he had at any point in his Formula 1 career.
Then came the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in August: Hailwood lost control of his McLaren at the Pflanzgarten jump and crashed heavily, shattering his ankle. The injury ended his car racing career.
He returned to motorcycle racing in 1978 and won the Isle of Man TT to scenes of mass celebration. He was killed in a road accident in 1981. His single season at McLaren was the closest he came to racing at the front.
Jody Scheckter
Scheckter had a troubled stint at the wheel of the McLaren
Grand Prix Photo
Jody Scheckter arrived at McLaren as a raw but fast 22-year-old South African who had torn through British Formula Ford and Formula 3.
McLaren gave him a trial outing at the 1972 United States Grand Prix, then contracted him for occasional appearances in a third car in 1973.
What followed was equal parts thrilling and catastrophic.
“Lotus came and wanted me to drive for them,” Scheckter said. “I told McLaren and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you a drive in the last grand prix, at Watkins Glen.’ I don’t think they’d thought about it, but when other teams start making offers, they knew they had to do something!”
At the French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard, Scheckter qualified second, led 42 laps in the new McLaren M23, and looked set to win on debut before colliding with Fittipaldi while lapping a backmarker, prompting the reigning world champion to call him “a madman and a menace.”
Two weeks later at Silverstone, Scheckter spun on the opening lap and triggered a multi-car pile-up that stopped the race. The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association called for his immediate ban. McLaren quietly rested him for four races instead.
When he returned, there was another incident — a collision with François Cevert at Canada — but the pace was undeniable.
Ken Tyrrell signed him for 1974. Within six years, Scheckter was a world champion with Ferrari.
McLaren had spotted the diamond; it took a little longer for the rough edges to go.
Dan Gurney
Gurney was at the end of his career when he drove a McLaren
Grand Prix Photo
The death of Bruce McLaren in a testing accident at Goodwood in June 1970 left the team he had built in a state of shock and with an immediate vacancy alongside Denny Hulme.
The call went to Dan Gurney, one of the most respected drivers of his generation — a four-time grand prix winner, the only man to win Formula 1, NASCAR, and Le Mans in cars to which he contributed to their design in one way or another, and a figure of such intelligence and substance that his presence in any team brought something beyond raw speed.
Gurney drove for McLaren in three races of the 1970 season – South Africa, Spain, and Monaco – but could not find the results. He retired in two and finished sixth in Spain, then left the team mid-season.
Peter Gethin took over his car.
Gurney, in his early forties, had really come to the end of his grand prix career by this point; his final Formula 1 start came at the 1970 British Grand Prix for his own Eagle team, and he never raced in a world championship event again.
He arrived in circumstances no one would have chosen and, for McLaren, his presence in those months of grief was something more than a racing arrangement.
Philippe Alliot
Alliot had a single outing with the weak McLaren-Peugeot
Grand Prix Photo
Philippe Alliot’s appearance in a McLaren came about not through any conventional talent pathway but through the particular politics of the 1994 season.
Peugeot, which was supplying McLaren with engines that year, insisted the team take on Alliot as a test and reserve driver, apparently against the better judgment of Ron Dennis, who had preferred to retain Martin Brundle.
Alliot spent most of the season testing, kept at arm’s length from race duties.
Then Mika Häkkinen triggered a first-corner accident at the German Grand Prix and received a one-race ban.
Alliot was called up for Hungary. He qualified 14th and retired after 21 laps with a water leak in the unloved McLaren-Peugeot MP4/9, which was a difficult car in a difficult season.
It was his only race for the team. He moved directly to a one-off Larrousse outing at Belgium the following week, which also ended in retirement, and then drove in Formula 1 no more.
Alliot made his one McLaren start at 39 years old, as a late-career footnote in a long journey through RAM, Ligier and Larrousse.
He holds the somewhat melancholy distinction of leaving Formula 1 as the second driver with the most race starts never to achieve a podium, pole position, or fastest lap, only behind Pierluigi Martini.
Jan Magnussen
Magnussen had a rough spell at Woking
Grand Prix Photo
Jan Magnussen, father of Kevin, arrived at McLaren with some extraordinary credentials.
In 1994, he had won 14 of 18 races in British Formula 3, breaking the record of 12 set by Ayrton Senna, and had been signed by Mercedes-Benz as a junior driver.
His McLaren moment came in 1995, when Mika Häkkinen fell ill before the Pacific Grand Prix at Aida. Magnussen stepped in, qualified, and acquitted himself well in difficult circumstances.
It was his Formula 1 debut, and he drove the McLaren-Mercedes MP4/10B competently, if without the drama that had lit up the previous year’s F3 season, and finished the race down the order in a car that was proving frustrating even for Häkkinen.
McLaren did not retain him, though.
He joined the Stewart team for 1997, but the expected breakthrough never materialised, and he was replaced mid-season in 1998 after a run of retirements.
His one McLaren appearance remains, in hindsight, a glimpse of what might have been.
