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Bruce McLaren won the first Tasman Cup/Series in 1964 aboard the first ‘real McLaren’, a 2.5-litre Cooper T70 Climax FPF. Two of these machines were designed and built by McLaren and his friend/confidant/mechanic and fellow Kiwi, Wally Willmott, at Coopers in late 1963. The nascent Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Team cars were raced by the […]

The Richard Attwood/David Hobbs Lola Mk6 GT at Le Mans in 1963. Q22 after dramas with the French scrutineers, and just outside the top-12 at the end of the first hour. The GT’s first pitstop was to rectify a slipping dynamo belt, later there was a two-hour stop to sort Colotti T37 transaxle dramas. Then […]

Bruce McLaren setting up a selfie before the Lady Wigram Trophy, Tasman Series, 23 January 1965… Sorting his goggles in any event, Cooper T79 Climax. The cars in the background are the #9 Bill Thomasen Brabham BT4 Climax and Red Dawson’s Cooper T53 Climax Lowline. What stood out on an initial scan of this bunch […]

Dave Walker in the radical Lotus 56B Pratt & Whitney, 4WD gas turbine powered F1 car during practice for the 1971 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort… It is just over 50 years since the gritty Aussie raced this radical Lotus – developed and raced at the ’68 Indy 500 then adapted by Chapman and his […]

Bruce McLaren, Cooper T70 Climax, Australian Grand Prix, Sandown Park 1964… Its an unusual angle, Bruce is thinking about brakes as he passes the end of the pit counter and heads towards the tight ‘Peters’ left-hander before the blast up the back straight- unusual in that the shot is taken from outside the circuit, between […]

Frank Matich, Brabham BT7A Climax leads Jim Clark’s works Lotus 32B Climax into Pub Corner at Longford in March 1965. A take-your-breath-away shot, composition and execution by Reg Dalwood is something special… I suspect this is lap 2 with the leading trio of McLaren, Brabham and Hill further up the road. Behind Jim are Bib […]

Jim Clark takes in a few rays and a touring car race from his grandstand atop a Ford Zodiac, Levin, New Zealand Tasman, January 1965. In the distance are the Tararua Ranges, alongside the Team Lotus mechanics are fettling Jim’s Lotus 32B Climax. The champions relaxed nature and the scene itself epitomises all that was […]

Tim Mayer sizes up the cockpit of  his new Tasman Cooper T70, full of optimism having just tested the car at Goodwood, October 1963… Tim Mayer is one of motor racing’s many ‘might-have-beens’, cut down in his prime in a Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd Tasman Cooper T70 Climax at Longford, Tasmania on 28 February […]

  To keep a sponsor happy that is! Here it’s Perth racer Gordon Stephenson presenting the prizes to the winners of a department store lawnmower racing competition… WTF you may well say? Boans was an iconic department store in Western Australia for almost a century. Remember when every State or City had such emporiums of […]

Levin, NZ January 1964 (Smedley) Geoff Smedley fettles his twin-plug 2.5 Coventry Climax FPF engine fitted to John Youls’ Cooper T55 … In the late Formula Libre period in Australasia – just before the Tasman Cup commenced on 1 January 1964 – the engine of choice was very much the Coventry Climax FPF. In fact the Tasman […]