1,000 Greatest Drivers: Bruce McLaren

A much better founder than his team deserves.

I’m submitting this later than I wanted to and it looks like it’s going to be posted right after midnight on August 31, but I promise I will still post my regularly-scheduled August 31 post on Raymond Sommer sometime tomorrow (er, later today). I decided I wanted to calculate all the single-season driver ratings using my model for all the years McLaren raced in F1 (1958-1970) so I could figure out which years if any McLaren led my model before completing this, and it took me several hours and as a result, I didn’t begin writing until there were only a couple hours left in the day. Nonetheless, I tried to get it in before midnight.

You could make the case that Troy Ruttman was actually the youngest F1 winner before Alonso and McLaren did not officially break Ruttman’s record. However, while the Indy 500 counted as a World Championship race in 1952, it did not count as a Formula 1 race since the IndyCars that year used a different type of car. I just said youngest F1 winner so I could neatly exclude Ruttman from the discussion and cut a few words, but if you want to argue Ruttman was “really” the youngest F1 winner, I won’t argue with you. He’s definitely making the list too.

I’m not really a fan of what the McLaren team became after his death as I found the later team principals Ron Dennis and Zak Brown to be rather loathsome people for all their success. I really haven’t liked how their IndyCar team has essentially turned into little more than a firing squad, but that has nothing to do with McLaren himself because obviously he had no way of knowing what would eventually happen with his team after he was gone. In other words, even though I can’t stand the current iteration of the team, I’m not gonna deny the deserving plaudits to its founder.