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Description
Bruce McLaren was born in New Zealand in 1937. He moved to England in 1958 to pursue a career as a racing driver. In 1964 he set up his own company to make sports-racing cars, and began the M series of designs, which ran from M1 to M30. Bruce McLaren was killed in a testing accident in 1970, but the company continued under the control of team manager Teddy Mayer and Bruce’s friend Denny Hulme, who retired from the firm in 1975, and the company ceased to make sports-racers. Under Mayer the company drifted until 1981, when it merged with Ron Dennis’s Project 4 concern. Chassis were from then on designated MP4 (McLaren Project 4), best-known for the McLaren MP4-00 Formula 1 cars. In 2016 Dennis was forced out of McLaren and the F1 cars were designated MCL from then on. McLaren began the slow climb back to the top echelons of Formula 1, where McLaren was the second longest-surviving team in Formula 1, after Ferrari.
In the 1990s McLaren began making supercars for road use with the F1, and later for competition events.
In the 2020s hybrid McLaren supercars began to appear, and by the 2030s all McLaren road cars are likely to have alternative power sources, including electric.
