The story of McLaren really began when 41-year-old New Jersey driver Walt Hansgen crashed his new Briggs Cunningham Cooper on lap 15 of the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, in October 1961. At the exit of The Loop Belgium’s Olivier Gendebien spun in his rented UDT Laystall Racing Team Lotus and came back on to the track, into the path of Hansgen. The Cooper flew over the Lotus and lost its left front wheel and then flew over a guardrail and ended up in a field, luckily sitting on its remaining wheels. Cunningham packed up the wreck and went back to his workshops in New York, where the crashed car remained throughout the winter. Early in 1962, the 25-year-old Roger Penske paid a visit to Cunningham’s place in Woodside, a New York suburb. He saw the wreck of Hansgen’s Cooper and despite the damage, which included the suspension having been ripped off and the chassis twisted badly, he saw potential. He had grown up repairing wrecked racing cars, competing with them and then selling them and decided that he could do the same with the Cooper. Penske took the car back to Philadelphia with him and took it to Leroy Gane’s Updraft Enterprises, which was housed in an old blacksmith’s shop in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, not far from the celebrated ladies college. Gane and Jim Soley, who worked at the nearby Molin Body Works in Wayne, rebuilt the chassis, replacing tubes that could not be bent back into shape. Penske arrived one day with an idea. He had been reading the SCCA rule book and had seen a number of drivers build sports cars that were central-seaters, although the rules said they must have two seats. The rules did not say that there had to space for someone to sit in the second seat and Pete Lovely had won the 1955 SCCA National Championship with a Cooper Streamliner record car fitted with a Porsche engine and nicknamed the Pooper. Penske figured that if one was going to build such a central-seater sports car, it was logical to start with a Formula 1 chassis. He asked Gane to build such a car and he called in local fabricator Harry Tidmarsh, a former US Marine, and he worked in the Molin workshop in Wayne with Bob Webb, a celebrated fabricator from Indianapolis, to create a shrink-wrap aluminum body, while Gane, assisted by Austrian Karl Kainhofer assembled the car and fitted a rare experimental 2.75-litre version of the Coventry Climax FPF engine which had been used by Jack Brabham at Indianapolis in 1959. The finished car was baptised the Zerex Duralite Special, after Penske’s sponsor, a Dupont brand of anti-freeze. The canny Penske has checked with the SCCA that the car would be legal, if not exactly designed to the spirit of the regulations and arrived at the LA Times Grand Prix at Riverside in October 1962. He put on pole and won the race after Dan Gurney’s Lotus 19 broke down, completing the 200 mile race with an average speed of 154 mph. A week later he won the Pacific GP at Laguna Seca. He then took the car to Puerto Rico and won again at the Autopista Caguas. The SCCA outlawed the car for 1963 and so Penske had to modify the car into a true two-seater. He sold the car to Texan oilman John Mecom, but continue to race it in 1963, winning SCCA races at Marlboro Motor Raceway and at Cumberland in Maryland. In June he raced at Pensacola in Florida, sharing the car with Hap Sharp, but the engine was damaged when Sharp missed a gear change. That summer Penske took the car to England and won the Guards Trophy at Brands Hatch. At the end of the year, Mecom sold the car to Bruce McLaren, having first removed the engine.
Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Limited was incorporated by Bruce McLaren and Teddy Mayer in September 1963 and they rented a shed, with an earth floor, in Wellington Crescent, in the London suburb of New Malden. Tyler Alexander (a pal of Mayer’s) and Walter Willmott (a pal of McLaren’s) began work to rebuild the Zerez Special, modifying the space frame and fitting an Oldsmobile V8. It was was raced as a Cooper-Oldsmobile to avoid problems with the Cooper Car Company, but McLaren was soon working on the McLaren M1A, which was largely based on the Zerex.
joeblogsf1 
These facts remind me of the old BBC series presented by James Burke- “Connections”
The fascination is in how the story gets from the start to the conclusion. In a very good way,
He won a race at Riverside at an average speed of 154mph?
I think Joe has taken some results on t’internet (247kph) and converted to mph. I’m amazed that 154mph at Riverside did scream out “wrong” at the usually fastidious Joe – the race was 2hr 5secs for 200 miles, so just under 100mph average. BTW I also looked at the car – gorgeous…. As ever – I love these articles at this time of year
This story has a connection with the Weslake story below. In 1966, my family took a holiday at Rye. Access to the caravan park went past the Weslake works (with AAR truck parked alongside). Also in Rye, were Elva, who built the customer M1As.
Difficult to straighten a Cooper space frame of that era since it was principally constructed from bent tubes. I forget the name of the designer but in a magazine article at the time he defied the journo to straighten a bent tube as proof of his theory ! As anyone with even basic engineering training knows it just ain’t so.
Do you know how long, in its various guises the basic bent tube chassis survived ? Colin Chapman principally, but amongst others, had already shown the benefit of a properly designed space frame, both lighter and more rigid, before he moved on to unitary construction.
Sobering, now, to remember that many F1 cars were designed with chalk lines on the workshop floor and in the lesser formulae even some quite successful marques were still using this boat building technique right through the ’80s.
The designer was Owen Maddox. The legend is that he got fed up with Charlie Cooper objecting to his proposed designs so he did one with just curved tubes to wind him up but Charlie took one look and declared that it was ideal. Owen was well aware of the benefits of straight triangulated tubing and he was the first to build for Cooper a true modern composite F1 chassis in aluminium honeycomb in 1965 but it was never raced.
The Cooper designer during their most successful period was bearded jazzman Owen Maddock. Apparently the original curved-tube F1 chassis was sketched out as a joke, but Charlie Cooper seized on it and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I suspect that claims about chalk lines on the the floor are one of the mind games that successful manufacturers played with one another. A racing car is a 3D object and the clever packaging achieved by Cooper was the result of much thought. Rob Walker’s Cooper-BRM design (and its lack of success) demonstrated how hard it was to improve the Cooper-Climax.
The bent tube chassis has been revived in recent years with the Ariel Atom and imitators. It benefits, of course, from the huge advances in welding and material science — and in tube bending.
Agreed about the Atom but still not as rigid as it could be. I can assure you I saw such a space frame being constructed for a quite successful Formula Ford at the end of the 80s.
Interestingly, Roger Penske was also in the 1961 US Grand Prix where he finished 9th in one of the 7 Coopers in the race, some 4 laps behing the winner Innes Ireland.
The cutting away of part of the original frame, and substituting curved tubes to create space for a passenger seat, resulted in a chassis with “the lowest torsional rigidity figures ever.” MCLAREN, Eoin Young, 1971. I wonder if the then “willowy” frame then started doing odd things, like lifting wheels in some corners.
Strangely the lifting of the inner front wheel was generally indicative of a reasonably rigid chassis, a restricted front rebound and a soft rearend normally with a solid axle.
Roger Penske, a DNA contributor to McLaren racing!
Roger has been around so long, most don’t remember him for the accomplished racer he was.
Being a New Jerseyean, maybe that’s why I’ve always liked McLaren? Great stuff as usual Joe.
Very interesting read. Only correction
I can make is that the car was raced on arrival in the U. K. With a Climax engine at Olton Park and Silverstone beforebeing stripped and modified to take the Buick/Oldsmobile.
Thanks for letting me know.
If that’s the real Wally Willmott there’s a wealth of knowledge there. Always found him great to listen to.
Joe, do you think Penske will get involved with Formula One after the new Concorde and / or when the new regs come in to effect?
No
I can assure you that is the real Wally Willmott and ‘wealth of knowledge’ is spot on. Two weekends ago at Teretonga he set a personal best in his ‘special’ – not bad a 76 year old!
I can confirm it!