The McLaren M2B was the
McLaren team's first
Formula One
Formula One (also known as Formula 1 or F1) is the highest class of international racing for open-wheel single-seater formula racing cars sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). The World Drivers' Championship, ...
racing car, used during the
1966 season. It was conceived in 1965 and preceded by the M2A development car. Designed by
Robin Herd
Robert John "Robin" Herd (23 March 1939 – 4 June 2019) was an English engineer, designer and businessman.
Herd studied at St Peter's College, Oxford, having turned down an offer to play cricket for Worcestershire at the age of 18. He initia ...
, the innovative but problematic
Mallite material was used in its construction. The car was powered by
Ford
Ford commonly refers to:
* Ford Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer founded by Henry Ford
* Ford (crossing), a shallow crossing on a river
Ford may also refer to:
Ford Motor Company
* Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company
* Ford F ...
and
Serenissima
aSerenissima ( heMost Serene) may refer to:
Certain countries
* , a name for the Republic of Venice
* , the official Latin name of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
Art, entertainment, and media
* La Serenissima (musical ensemble), a Britis ...
engines but both lacked power and suffered from reliability issues.
Driven by team founder
Bruce McLaren
Bruce Leslie McLaren (30 August 1937 – 2 June 1970) was a New Zealand racing car designer, driver, engineer, and inventor.
His name lives on in the McLaren team which has been one of the most successful in Formula One championship history, ...
, the M2B had a short Grand Prix career, entering six races and starting only four. It scored the team's first point at the and two more points at the .
Background and development
Bruce McLaren Motor Racing
McLaren Racing Limited is a British motor racing team based at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, Surrey, England. McLaren is best known as a Formula One constructor, the second oldest active team, and the second most successful Formul ...
was founded in 1963;
Bruce McLaren
Bruce Leslie McLaren (30 August 1937 – 2 June 1970) was a New Zealand racing car designer, driver, engineer, and inventor.
His name lives on in the McLaren team which has been one of the most successful in Formula One championship history, ...
was a
factory
A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. ...
driver for the
Cooper
Cooper, Cooper's, Coopers and similar may refer to:
* Cooper (profession), a maker of wooden casks and other staved vessels
Arts and entertainment
* Cooper (producers), alias of Dutch producers Klubbheads
* Cooper (video game character), in ...
motor racing team which competed in
Formula One
Formula One (also known as Formula 1 or F1) is the highest class of international racing for open-wheel single-seater formula racing cars sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). The World Drivers' Championship, ...
, the highest level of international
single-seater
An open-wheel single-seater (often known as formula car) is a car with the wheels outside the car's main body, and usually having only one seat. Open-wheel cars contrast with street cars, sports cars, stock cars, and touring cars, which have the ...
competition. For two years the McLaren team had raced in the
Tasman Series
The Tasman Series (formally the Tasman Championship for Drivers)Tasman Championship for Drivers, CAMS Manual of Motor Sport with National Competition Rules 1974, pages 80 to 83 was a motor racing competition held annually from 1964 to 1975 ove ...
, a competition for single-seaters that ran during the Formula One world championship
off-season
In an organized sports league, a typical season is the portion of one year in which regulated games of the sport are in session: for example, in Major League Baseball the season lasts approximately from the last week of March to the last week of Se ...
, and in various
sports car races
Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, ...
.
Bruce McLaren continued to race in Grands Prix (i.e. Formula One championship races) for Cooper, but by 1965 the team's performances were worsening and so he decided to build his own Formula One car to race the following year.
Despite being a skilled engineer himself, McLaren enlisted
Robin Herd
Robert John "Robin" Herd (23 March 1939 – 4 June 2019) was an English engineer, designer and businessman.
Herd studied at St Peter's College, Oxford, having turned down an offer to play cricket for Worcestershire at the age of 18. He initia ...
to design the car.
Herd was an aerospace engineer who had previously worked at the
National Gas Turbine Establishment
The National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE Pyestock) in Farnborough, part of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), was the prime site in the UK for design and development of gas turbine and jet engines. It was created by merging the design te ...
(NGTE) where he had been involved with the
Concorde
The Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde () is a retired Franco-British supersonic airliner jointly developed and manufactured by Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale) and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC).
Studies started in 1954, and France an ...
project.
In September 1965 the M2A development car was completed. Powered by a 4.5 litre
Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile or formally the Oldsmobile Division of General Motors was a brand of American automobiles, produced for most of its existence by General Motors. Originally established as "Olds Motor Vehicle Company" by Ransom E. Olds in 1897, it pro ...
V8 engine
A V8 engine is an eight-cylinder piston engine in which two banks of four cylinders share a common crankshaft and are arranged in a V configuration.
The first V8 engine was produced by the French Antoinette company in 1904, developed and u ...
, it was used to test Herd's design ideas and
Firestone's tyres. With McLaren still employed by Cooper, the McLaren team initially denied that they were building a Formula One competitor, claiming that the M2A was purely a tyre
test bed.
At the factory in
Colnbrook
Colnbrook is a village in the Slough district in Berkshire, England. It lies within the historic boundaries of Buckinghamshire, and straddles two distributaries of the Colne, the Colne Brook and Wraysbury River. These two streams have their co ...
, construction started on at least two M2B chassis, whilst a third was possibly started but not completed. By December 1965 the M2A had completed over of testing and two race engines were ready to be installed in the M2B, Bruce McLaren testing the car at
Goodwood Circuit.
[ Also that month, the design team was joined by Herd's former NGTE colleague ]Gordon Coppuck
Gordon Coppuck (born 8 December 1936 in Fleet, Hampshire) is a British racing car designer who was chief designer for McLaren and later worked for March and co-founded Spirit.
Born in December 1936, he attended Queen Mary's School for Boys b ...
; Coppuck later became chief designer at McLaren. In February 1966 further testing was carried out in California, United States in anticipation of the start of the world championship season in May.[
]
Design
The M2B was a mid-engined
In automotive engineering, a mid-engine layout describes the placement of an automobile engine in front of the rear-wheel axles, but behind the front axle.
History
The mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive format can be considered the original layout of ...
rear-wheel drive
Rear-wheel drive (RWD) is a form of engine and transmission layout used in motor vehicles, in which the engine drives the rear wheels only. Until the late 20th century, rear-wheel drive was the most common configuration for cars.
Most rear-wheel ...
monocoque
Monocoque ( ), also called structural skin, is a structural system in which loads are supported by an object's external skin, in a manner similar to an egg shell. The word ''monocoque'' is a French term for "single shell".
First used for boats, ...
design, monocoques having been popularised by Lotus's 25 of 1962. Influenced by his aerospace experience, Herd built the chassis with Mallite, a material that had originally been designed for internal panelling in aircraft. Mallite is a composite of balsa
''Ochroma pyramidale'', commonly known as the balsa tree, is a large, fast-growing tree native to the Americas. It is the sole member of the genus ''Ochroma''. The tree is famous for its wide usage in woodworking, with the name ''balsa'' being ...
wood bonded between two sheets of aluminium alloy
An aluminium alloy (or aluminum alloy; see spelling differences) is an alloy in which aluminium (Al) is the predominant metal. The typical alloying elements are copper, magnesium, manganese, silicon, tin, nickel and zinc. There are two principa ...
that is much stiffer than ordinary aluminium alloy, a useful characteristic for a racing car. However, the material proved to be difficult to bend into the curved shapes needed and so, whilst the M2A prototype was made entirely of Mallite except for the steel bulkheads, on the M2B it was utilised only for the inner and upper skins, the remainder being aluminium alloy. Mallite was also complicated to repair after crash damage.[ Its use did mean though that the chassis was the stiffest then built for an open-cockpit car, with torsional rigidity of nearly per degree.] Glass-reinforced plastic bodywork covered the nose, cockpit and engine. Fuel was stored in rubber bag tanks situated within the moncoque.
Herd's knowledge of aerodynamics and Bruce McLaren's experience with Ford
Ford commonly refers to:
* Ford Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer founded by Henry Ford
* Ford (crossing), a shallow crossing on a river
Ford may also refer to:
Ford Motor Company
* Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company
* Ford F ...
's sports car racing programme combined to spur the team into experimenting with aerodynamic bodywork. The M2A was fitted with a rear wing that produced downforce
Downforce is a downwards lift force created by the aerodynamic features of a vehicle. If the vehicle is a car, the purpose of downforce is to allow the car to travel faster by increasing the vertical force on the tires, thus creating more grip ...
– downwards pressure on the car and tyres which allows faster cornering – and reduced lap times by three seconds at a test at Zandvoort
Zandvoort () is a municipality in the province of North Holland, Netherlands. It is one of the major beach resorts of the Netherlands; it has a long sandy beach. It is bordered by coastal dunes of Zuid-Kennemerland National Park and the Amsterdam ...
circuit in November 1965, two and a half years before the Brabham and Ferrari teams eventually debuted wings in a Grand Prix. The team intended to use the wing on the M2B, but the engine problems that occurred prevented this.[
The suspension was a conventional wishbone-based arrangement with inboard ]coilover
A coilover is an automobile suspension device. The name coilover is an abbreviation of "coil-over shock absorber".
Description
Coilovers are found on many vehicles, from RC cars to normal passenger cars, race cars and 4x4 vehicles. They are s ...
springs and dampers at the front and outboard coilover springs and dampers at the rear.[ Braking was provided by Girling discs within diameter ]magnesium alloy
Magnesium alloys are mixtures of magnesium (the lightest structural metal) with other metals (called an alloy), often aluminium, zinc, manganese, silicon, copper, rare earths and zirconium. Magnesium alloys have a hexagonal lattice structure, w ...
wheels.[ The ]wheelbase
In both road and rail vehicles, the wheelbase is the horizontal distance between the centers of the front and rear wheels. For road vehicles with more than two axles (e.g. some trucks), the wheelbase is the distance between the steering (front ...
measured exactly , and front and rear track was and , respectively.
For 1966 the Formula One engine capacity limit was increased to 3.0 litres from the 1.5 litres of the previous five seasons. McLaren considered and discounted British Racing Motors
British Racing Motors (BRM) was a British Formula One motor racing team. Founded in 1945 and based in the market town of Bourne in Lincolnshire, it participated from 1951 to 1977, competing in 197 grands prix and winning seventeen. BRM wo ...
(BRM), Maserati, Coventry Climax
Coventry Climax was a British forklift truck, fire pump, racing, and other specialty engine manufacturer.
History
Pre WW1
The company was started in 1903 as Lee Stroyer, but two years later, following the departure of Stroyer, it was reloca ...
and Oldsmobile engines before opting for a Ford V8 engine. This engine was originally designed for the Indianapolis 500
The Indianapolis 500, formally known as the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race, and commonly called the Indy 500, is an annual automobile race held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) in Speedway, Indiana, United States, an enclave suburb of Indi ...
, the premier single-seater oval track
Oval track racing is a form of closed-circuit motorsport that is contested on an oval-shaped race track. An oval track differs from a road course in that the layout resembles an oval with turns in only one direction, and the direction of traff ...
race in the United States, and had to be reduced in capacity from 4.2 litres to the 3.0 litre limit. This choice was partly motivated by the belief that it might bring financial support from Ford, although this never materialised. Ex BMW and Daimler-Benz
The Mercedes-Benz Group AG (previously named Daimler-Benz, DaimlerChrysler and Daimler) is a German multinational automotive corporation headquartered in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is one of the world's leading car manufactur ...
engineer Klaus von Rucker was initially appointed to carry out the conversion of the engine in England. However, progress was slow so the project was transferred to Traco Engineering in California, United States, where extensive modifications were made to the internals under the oversight of McLaren's Gary Knutson. In its 4.2 litre form the Ford engine produced 470 bhp and McLaren expected the reduced capacity version to produce about 335 bhp. In fact, it produced 300 bhp in a narrow power band
The power band of an internal combustion engine or electric motor is the range of operating speeds under which the engine or motor is able to output the most power, that is, the maximum energy per unit of time. This usually means that maximum a ...
and was further handicapped by its large size and weight; combined with the gearbox it weighed nearly as much as rival team Brabham's entire car. In order to allow time to further develop the Ford, McLaren also used a Serenissima
aSerenissima ( heMost Serene) may refer to:
Certain countries
* , a name for the Republic of Venice
* , the official Latin name of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
Art, entertainment, and media
* La Serenissima (musical ensemble), a Britis ...
M166 3.0 litre V8 engine for some of the races. This engine produced about 260 bhp and required modifications to be made to the monocoque but was at least relatively light and compact.[ Four- and five-speed ZF ]transaxle
A transaxle is a single mechanical device which combines the functions of an automobile's transmission, axle, and differential into one integrated assembly. It can be produced in both manual and automatic versions.
Engine and drive at the s ...
gearbox
Propulsion transmission is the mode of transmitting and controlling propulsion power of a machine. The term ''transmission'' properly refers to the whole drivetrain, including clutch, gearbox, prop shaft (for rear-wheel drive vehicles), differe ...
es and a Borg & Beck
'Borg & Beck'' is a British car parts company owned by First Line Ltd.
It was started as a tool company in Moline, Illinois, in the United States, bCharles Borgand Marshall Beck. In 1909 theinventedthe first practical sliding clutch. It merged ...
clutch were employed.[
The M2B was originally intended to be raced in a green and silver colour scheme designed by Michael Turner. However, short on money, the McLaren team made a financial deal with the makers of the film '']Grand Prix
Grand Prix ( , meaning ''Grand Prize''; plural Grands Prix), is a name sometimes used for competitions or sport events, alluding to the winner receiving a prize, trophy or honour
Grand Prix or grand prix may refer to:
Arts and entertainment ...
'' – a drama that included actual race footage – which involved the car being painted white with a green stripe (edged in silver) in order to represent the film's fictional Japanese "Yamura" team.
Racing history
The Ford-powered M2B made its debut driven by McLaren at the world championship season-opening . There he qualified 10th on the grid and ran as high as sixth but retired after nine laps due to an oil leak. After Monaco McLaren decided "it looks as though we're going to have to make some fairly drastic moves in the engine room", and so for the next race in Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
the Serenissima engine was used. The replacement unit did not provide an immediate solution though, terminally damaging its bearings in practice. With no spare, McLaren was unable to start the race. The team missed the next race in France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
, but at the at Brands Hatch
Brands Hatch is a motor racing circuit in West Kingsdown, Kent, England, United Kingdom. Originally used as a grasstrack motorcycle circuit on farmland, it hosted 12 runnings of the British Grand Prix between 1964 and 1986 and currently host ...
the M2B finished sixth to score McLaren's first championship point. Another non-start resulted when the Serenissima failed again before the , and the entries for the German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
and Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
Grands Prix were withdrawn in anticipation of the improved Ford engine being readied. Thus equipped at the , McLaren drove to fifth place and two more points.[ At final event in ]Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
, the rear bodywork was cut away to help prevent overheating but the engine failed during the race.[ McLaren had intended for ]Chris Amon
Christopher Arthur Amon (20 July 1943 – 3 August 2016) was a New Zealand motor racing driver. He was active in Formula One racing in the 1960s and 1970s, and is widely regarded as one of the best F1 drivers never to win a championship Grand ...
, who was already racing sports cars for the team, to race a second car but the engine problems prevented this.[
]
World Championship results table
Legacy
Despite the M2B's lack of success Herd said of the team, "Everyone was ten times more determined to do better the following year." On the design of the car he reflected that, "our emphasis tended to be more on the elegance of the chassis structure rather than on the design of a really quick racing car" and that, "we ... tended to go towards technical ingenuity and bullshit rather than racewinning engineering". Team member and later manager of the organisation Teddy Mayer
Edward Everett Mayer (September 8, 1935 – January 30, 2009) was an American motor racing entrepreneur who was successful in several categories of racing, including Formula One and IndyCars.
Life and career
Mayer was born in Scranton, Pen ...
said, "Our main problems were with the choice of the Ford engine." Bruce McLaren's personal secretary and author Eoin Young concurs. The winners of the 1966 Drivers' and Constructors' championships, Jack Brabham
Sir John Arthur Brabham (2 April 1926 – 19 May 2014) was an Australian racing driver who was Formula One World Champion in , , and . He was a founder of the Brabham racing team and race car constructor that bore his name.
Brabham was a R ...
and his eponymous team, used a Repco
Repco is an Australian automotive engineering/retailer company. Its name is an abbreviation of Replacement Parts Company and was for many years known for reconditioning engines and for specialized manufacturing, for which they gained a high r ...
-modified and badged Oldsmobile engine. It produced approximately 290 bhp – less than the Ford – but its light weight and reliability rendered it effective. Despite having used the Oldsmobile in sports racing cars, the McLaren team discounted it. Afterwards, Mayer said, "We considered it, but the kind of modifications which Repco did were well beyond our resources, and I doubt very much if we could have done any more with it than we did with the Indy Ford."
McLaren's later cars abandoned Mallite in favour of conventional aluminium construction; the Ford and Serenissima engine also saw no further action. For 1967 BRM engines powered the M4B and M5A but it was not until the Cosworth DFV
The DFV is an internal combustion engine that was originally produced by Cosworth for Formula One motor racing. The name is an abbreviation of ''Double Four Valve'', the engine being a V8 development of the earlier four-cylinder FVA, which had fo ...
became available in 1968 that McLaren scored their first Formula One wins with the M7A.[ Herd stayed on designing all of these cars until he left for Cosworth in 1967.] McLaren have since become one of the most successful teams in Formula One.
The M2A was sold on to be used by various private racers in the United Kingdom before being destroyed by fire in 1969. Sources suggest that three M2B chassis were similarly sold on; one is awaiting restoration in the United States and another is currently on display at the Donington Grand Prix Exhibition.
References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
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External links
{{Good article
McLaren M02B
1966 Formula One season cars