On 2 June 1970, Bruce McLaren died at Goodwood while testing a McLaren Can-Am car. He was 32.
The accident was cruelly direct. A failure at speed sent the car off on the Lavant Straight, ending the life of a driver, engineer, constructor and team founder whose work had already reached beyond the usual limits of a racing career.
McLaren had won Grands Prix, won Le Mans with Chris Amon, built a serious force in Can-Am and taken his own name into Formula 1. In 1968 at Spa, he won a World Championship Grand Prix in a car carrying that name, a neat statistic with a much heavier meaning after Goodwood.
The team survived because people around it chose survival. Teddy Mayer helped steer McLaren forward, and the badge became one of the great names in Formula 1. The founder was gone. The garage kept opening.
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