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Material sought for film on Bruce McLaren’s life

15 December, 2015

Acclaimed director Roger Donaldson (The Bank Job, The Recruit, Cocktail), is making a feature documentary on the life of Bruce McLaren, a New Zealander who was well-known internationally as a race car driver, designer, and inventor in the 1950s and ’60s.

Donaldson is hunting for rare audio-visual material (photographs, home movies, audio recordings, etc.) of McLaren, who founded the highly successful Formula One McLaren Motor Racing Team.

Donaldson, a motor racing fan, directed The World’s Fastest Indian, starring Anthony Hopkins, about another New Zealand speed pioneer, Burt Munro.

“Legendary Kiwi race car driver and engineer Bruce McLaren was tragically killed testing one of his cars in 1970,” Donaldson says. “We are very keen to find archival footage that documents this extraordinary New Zealander’s life. So, if you have or know the whereabouts of any potentially interesting film, please be in touch with us. Photographs, home movies, souvenirs; if it is about Bruce, we would love to see it.”

The film’s producers feel there may be more treasures yet to be located, possibly in England, where he lived, and Europe and USA, where he raced.

The film is produced by Matthew Metcalfe (Beyond the Edge, The Dead Lands), through his company General Film Corporation, and Fraser Brown (Orphans & Kingdoms). It has investment from the New Zealand Film Commission, Images & Sound, and The Giltrap Group.

The producers ask that anyone with material featuring Bruce McLaren, or associated people in his life during the 1950s and ’60s, contact researcher Pheobe Shum at [email protected]. 

Design accord

28 March, 2025

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

21 March, 2025

History has a way of surrounding us, hidden in plain sight. I was one of a group who had been working for years in an editorial office in Augustus Terrace in the Auckland city fringe suburb of Parnell who had no idea that motoring history had been made right around the corner. Our premises actually backed onto a century-old brick building in adjacent Fox Street that had seen the wonder of the age, brand-new Model T Fords, rolling out the front door seven decades earlier.
Today, the building is an award-winning two-level office building, comprehensively refurbished in 2012. Happily, 6 Fox Street honours its one time claim to motoring fame. Next door are eight upmarket loft apartments, also on the site where the Fords were completed. Elsewhere, at 89 Courtenay Place, Wellington, and Sophia Street, Timaru, semi-knocked-down Model Ts were also being put together, completing a motor vehicle that would later become known as the Car of the Century.