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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]. 

Lunch with … Cary Taylor

11 September, 2024

Many years ago — in June 1995 to be more precise — I was being wowed with yet another terrific tale from Geoff Manning who had worked spanners on all types of racing cars. We were chatting at Bruce McLaren Intermediate school on the 25th anniversary of the death of the extraordinary Kiwi for whom the school was named. Geoff, who had been part of Ford’s Le Mans programme in the ’60s, and also Graham Hill’s chief mechanic — clearly realising that he had me in the palm of his hand — offered a piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten: “If you want the really good stories, talk to the mechanics.”
Without doubt the top mechanics, those involved in the highest echelons of motor racing, have stories galore — after all, they had relationships with their drivers so intimate that, to quote Geoff all those years ago, “Mechanics know what really happened.”

ROTARY CHIC

6 September, 2024

Kerry Bowman readily describes himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Citroën fan and a keen Citroën Car Club member. His Auckland home holds some of the chic French cars and many parts. He has also owned a number of examples of the marque as daily drivers, but he now drives a Birotor GS. They are rare, even in France, and this is a car which was not supposed to see the light of day outside France’s borders, yet somehow this one escaped the buyback to be one of the few survivors out in the world.
It’s a special car Kerry first saw while overseas in the ’70s, indulging an interest sparked early on by his father’s keenness for Citroëns back home in Tauranga. He was keen to see one ‘in the flesh’.
“I got interested in this Birotor when I bought a GS in Paris in 1972. I got in contact with Citroën Cars in Slough, and they got me an invitation to the Earls Court Motor Show where they had the first Birotor prototype on display. I said to a guy on the stand, ‘I’d like one of these,’ and he said I wouldn’t be allowed to get one. Citroën were building them for their own market to test them, and they were only left-hand drive.”