Life Magazine, August 7, 1970, Volume 69, Number 6

'Don't take that extra risk'

While LIFE's essay on automobile racing was being prepared, Correspondent Dorothy Bacan interviewed New Zealand's Bruce McLaren, one of the world's most successful driver-designers. On June 2 he died in a crash while testing one of his new cars. This was McLaren's commentary on racing.

The challenge for a driver is always to see if you can go that little bit faster and still come out of the corner with everything pointing in the right direction, and perhaps to outthink or outwit the driver alongside you, or just plain outdrive him as you go into the corner. Another challenge is to be sober enough not to take - or to have the courage not to take - that extra risk at the wrong time, just for the glory. The fear is what will happen if you do.

When you do get into trouble, or see trouble ahead, you do two things. You immediately realize you are frightened but you dismiss it. Then, if your car is going to go off the track, you try to pick the softest place to aim for - between the trees rather than at them. And you start concentrating on controlling the car, not neccessarily by just putting on the brakes, because the first thing that happens if you put the brakes on hard is that you lock your wheels and can't steer the car. You also have to turn, and this is more important. It is part of the racing driver's stock-in-trade.

A racing driver's reactions are absolutly automatic. You don't say, "Oh, there's a car across the road!" In fact very often, if a car spins in front of you, the avoiding action is completly automatic and your concentration is barely broken. You can often get halfway down the straight before you realize you have taken avoiding action. This happens so soften that you get fairly good at guessing which way a car is going to go as it gets out of control. Of course the bad guessers are in trouble.

My car went out of control last year in a Can-Am race at Riverside, when a rear suspension part broke and the car swapped ends. The back was going where the front ought to be going. The car charged up a hill, ran along a brick wall for a while and then ended up bang in the middle of the track. There was a lot of dust so I couldn't see what was happening, but the first thing that came to mind was that it would be very inappropriate to jump out immediately because other cars were going to come by. It was simply a question of balancing the slight risk of the car bursting into fire and sitting there waiting until the dust settled. That was the most frightening part of the accident, because now I was in the hands of other drivers. They were arriving at the spot where I was at 150 mph and they could have crashed right into me. This is when you rely on just two things: the flag marshals with their yellow caution flags, and the drivers having enough sense to slow down when they see the yellow flag. Fortunatley the marshals had the situation under control, and I was able to jump out and get away from the car as quickly as possible.

What is the special mystique of race driving? For me it is hard to say because I am the man in the forest. I can't see the woods for the trees. I am in it. Only occasionally now can I watch a race or see a new racing car and feel the same way as I did at 15 or 16 when I saw my first motor races in New Zealand. Some youngsters want to drive a train or a fire engine. But with some it's racing cars. With me it was certainly racing cars.

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