Matt Bishop: When grief-fuelled McLaren honoured its founder the best way — with F1 victory

So McLaren has done it again, having also done it last year. On the evening of Sunday, October 5, in Singapore – despite two messy, grouchy drives – Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri delivered to their team what its doughty staffers had been working so hard to achieve: first place in the 2025 Formula 1 constructors’ world championship. Yet, in the afterglow of McLaren’s latest triumph, my mind wandered not to the now but to the then; not to the more of the same but to the what came before; not to 2025 or even to 2024 but to 1974, the year of McLaren’s very first F1 constructors’ world championship; to an F1 season marked by resilience and, above all, redemption.

The small McLaren team that lifted the big silver pot at Watkins Glen on that warm October afternoon in 1974 was not merely a racing outfit made good. It was a wounded but unbowed band of racers who had, just four years earlier, lost their inspiration, their guiding light, their North Star. Bruce McLaren, that rarest of F1 breeds — a fine driver, a resourceful engineer, a tireless worker, and a magnetically effective motivator of men — had been killed in June 1970 while testing one of his own Can-Am creations, a McLaren M8D, at Goodwood. He was just 32. The news hit the McLaren boys — and the sport — like a freight train. Not only had the team that he had so lovingly assembled lost their leader, but F1 was also suddenly without one of its most beloved souls – gentle, funny, unfailingly decent, yet fiercely and relentlessly competitive.

It could all so easily have crumbled then and there. But it did not, and that is where the tale of 1974 truly begins. Because, in the wake of Bruce’s death, the team rallied with the kind of dauntless resolve that could be born only of indefatigable regard for its founder. Teddy Mayer, Bruce’s close friend and business partner, took the reins. Teddy was shrewd and driven, less mechanically minded than Bruce but strategically more astute. Alongside him, the quiet but clever Gordon Coppuck began sketching a new generation of McLarens. In the garages and on the pitwalls, the bullish Alastair Caldwell and the phlegmatic Tyler Alexander kept the wheels turning — literally. What they (re)built together — cheerfully yet doggedly — was a team of enormous heart and understated quality. And in 1974 it all finally came good.

The year before, McLaren had introduced an F1 evolution of its 1972 Indy 500-winning M16, the M23, a car elegant in form and effective in function, a grand prix winner in its first season, 1973, in the hands of Peter Revson and Denny Hulme but not yet a world championship contender, for rarely was it quite as quick as the Tyrrells in which Jackie Stewart and François Cevert finished first and fourth in the 1973 F1 drivers’ world championship or the Lotuses in which Emerson Fittipaldi and Ronnie Peterson finished second and third. But in 1974 Mayer, Coppuck, Caldwell, Alexander, and a tiny band of kindred spirits, all of them still somehow working for Bruce — or at least inspired by his memory — gradually improved the M23, nut by nut, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, all-nighter by all-nighter, and, on track, tenth by tenth.

It was still not the fastest car on the 1974 F1 grids – that was either the powerful Ferrari 312B3 or the nimble Brabham BT44 – but the M23 was beautifully balanced, aerodynamically tidy, and, crucially, readily adaptable. As a result it was a car with which, for the first time, McLaren could fight for F1 world championships. But, with respect to Revson, who was good but not great, and Hulme, to whom we will return later and who had been F1 world champion for Brabham seven years before but was now about to turn 38, McLaren needed a driver who was incontrovertibly F1 world champion material.

Enter Emerson Fittipaldi. Just 27 but already an F1 world champion with Lotus in 1972, the young Brazilian hotshot whom no-one yet called Emmo was a marquee signing for McLaren. He and Peterson had won a combined total of seven grands prix for Lotus in 1973, but by the early autumn of that year Fittipaldi’s relationship with Colin Chapman had begun to fray around the edges. Emerson now wanted a team that was unsullied by internal discord and whose designers, engineers, and mechanics could match his tenacious ambition, and McLaren and its new title sponsor Marlboro wanted a superstar. It was, as they say, a perfect fit. Fittipaldi brought with him not only glossy black locks and extravagant sideburns but also recent world championship-winning experience, a powerful work ethic, and an unerring ability to caress a car rather than hustle it, as a result of which adroit yet prudent driving style he was well known for making very few errors.

He wasted no time, either. He won at home in Brazil – only the second grand prix of the 1974 F1 season – and he added further victories in Belgium and Canada, as well as a quartet of hard-fought podium finishes. Steely, unflappable, and blessed with a tactician’s mind, he racked up points with machine-like consistency, his F1 drivers’ world championship challenge gaining momentum like a thundercloud steadily rolling in from the Pampas.

But as far as McLaren’s F1 constructors’ world championship challenge was concerned, Emerson did not have to shoulder it alone – and here we must doff our proverbial caps to one of the toughest and truest racers the sport has ever known: the aforementioned Denny Hulme. Already an F1 world champion when he joined McLaren in 1968, he became Bruce’s closest confidant, for, like Bruce, he was a stout-hearted Kiwi, and he was soon also a steadfast colleague and a devoted friend. The death of his fellow countryman hit Denny harder than anyone, but he stayed on, grimly determined to help the team that he still called Bruce McLaren Motor Racing achieve what his old mucker had always hoped it would.

In 1974, now balding, and no longer at the absolute peak of his powers, Hulme nonetheless delivered what the team needed: a win in the first grand prix of the season, in Argentina; regular points finishes; unselfish support for Fittipaldi; rugged gumption; and metaphorical ballast. That win in Buenos Aires — his last in F1 — had the doubly sweet tang of personal vindication and a message to all the other teams: we mean business. McLaren would not and could not have won the 1974 F1 constructors’ world championship without him.

And then there was Mike Hailwood, a man who lived like a rock star: talented, bold, gregarious, and not without the occasional reckless chord. By 1974 he was already a legend on two wheels, having won nine motorcycle world championships. But he was now also a capable and charismatic racer of cars, a man who brought both speed and spirit to the McLaren camp. Although he never quite found the consistency to challenge the cream of the F1 crop, he nonetheless contributed valuable points to McLaren’s 1974 campaign in Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and the Netherlands. And, more than that, he brought levity. In a season of hard graft and high stakes, his locker-room humour and devil-may-care charm kept morale high.