LONDON : McLaren will celebrate its 1,000th Formula One race at the Monaco Grand Prix, marking a remarkable journey from a small New Zealand-founded outfit in 1966 to one of the sport’s most successful teams.
The milestone has prompted reflections from champions, engineers and team leaders who helped shape McLaren’s history.
Former world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, who secured McLaren’s first drivers’ title in 1974, recalled the intense pressure of the championship-deciding finale against Clay Regazzoni.
“He was next to me and I was thinking: who’s going to be champion? Me or Clay?” Fittipaldi told Reuters. “I only slept three hours before the grand prix. That was the maximum pressure a driver can get.”
Fittipaldi never met founder Bruce McLaren, who died in 1970, but remembered joining a team of only 38 employees.
“It was a very small team but full of enthusiasm and starving to win the world championship,” he said.
McLaren’s most recent champion, Lando Norris, delivered the team’s 13th drivers’ title last year, ending the four-year championship reign of Max Verstappen.
“My love has always been with McLaren,” Norris said. “It’s always been the team that I’ve supported since I was a kid. It’s what’s more close to my heart.”
Former chief designer Neil Oatley, who joined McLaren in 1984 and helped create title-winning cars across multiple eras, highlighted the 1993 car driven by Ayrton Senna as one of his favourites.
“It was a little bit of an engineers’ playground,” Oatley said, recalling an era before tighter technical regulations restricted innovation.
Current team principal Andrea Stella said McLaren’s continued success rests on preserving the values established throughout its history.
“What defines the team today is our investment in talent and preserving our values,” Stella said. “It was very important last year, when we had the possibility to fight for the championship with both drivers, that we race with fairness, equality and respect.”
Since its debut at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1966, McLaren has become one of Formula One’s most decorated teams, winning multiple drivers’ and constructors’ championships while producing generations of champions and engineering innovations.
