Six hundred is a number that requires some accumulation. McLaren had been accumulating since 1966, when the team Bruce McLaren founded made its first world championship appearance, and by the time the cars lined up at the Nürburgring on 7 May 2006, the total had reached a figure that put the scale of the operation into some perspective. Not every one of those starts had been glorious. Quite a few had been. The number held all of them equally.
What 600 starts contains
The arithmetic from start number one to start number 600 runs through a great deal of Formula 1 history.
Bruce McLaren himself, who died before he could see what his team would become.
Emerson Fittipaldi’s championship in 1974.
James Hunt’s in 1976.
The Marlboro years, the Lauda years, the years when the team was simply one of several competitive outfits rather than the dominant force it would later become.
Then the 1980s, which elevated McLaren into a different category entirely.
Niki Lauda’s 1984 title.
Alain Prost’s three championships with the team.
The Senna era, which produced two more titles and some of the sport’s most discussed moments on and off the track.
By the time those years were done, McLaren had accumulated enough history to fill several books, and several books had duly been written.
Where McLaren stood in 2006
The 600th start arrived during a period of transition.
McLaren had not won a constructors’ championship since 1998, and the team that had been so dominant through the late 1980s and early 1990s was operating in a more competitive landscape with more evenly matched resources.
Kimi Räikkönen had pushed hard for the 2003 title and remained a frontrunner.
The MP4-21 they were running in 2006 would prove disappointing across the season, though Fernando Alonso’s eventual move to the team for 2007 suggested where ambitions were pointed.
The Nürburgring was not one of the landmark days.
It was a round number on a complicated calendar, which is sometimes how milestones arrive.
The number kept moving
McLaren’s 600th start was, in the context of what followed, not a particularly round number at all.
The team continued racing, continued winning occasionally, continued existing as one of the sport’s permanent institutions through further ownership changes, technical overhauls and the kind of organisational turbulence that tends to visit ambitious operations sooner or later.
What the Nürburgring milestone captured, more than anything, was simple persistence.
Six hundred starts means showing up six hundred times, building six hundred cars capable of making a grid, and believing on each occasion that the next result would justify the previous effort.
For a team that began in a New Zealand racing driver’s garage and grew into one of the most recognisable names in the sport, 600 was a reasonable place to pause for a moment before carrying on.
