McLaren celebrates its Kiwi roots

Thursday, 19 December 2019

McLaren says the Elva 'has been born out of a vision to create the purest driving experience.' That means it doesn't have a roof or windscreen.

While we New Zealanders know that the McLaren Group (made up of McLaren Automotive, McLaren Racing and McLaren Applied Technologies) has very Kiwi roots, the rest of the world sometimes forgets.

While the rose-tinted nostalgics among us like to claim the current McLaren logo is derived from Bruce McLaren's original 'Speedy Kiwi' logo, the company itself denies that, saying that it represents 'the vortices created by our rear wings'.

Closer to the truth, however, is the strong likelihood that it is simply an evolved version of the Marlboro chevron logo that first appeared in 1997. But we don't talk about cigarettes in motor racing these days, so vortices it is.

Amanda McLaren, daughter of Bruce, with the McLaren Elva and Kiwi interns Elizabeth Grant and Harvey Merton.

But logo-denial aside, McLaren itself doesn't forget its antipodean origins, and a part of that sees it regularly taking in engineering students from New Zealand for internships. And the two latest interns have just started.

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Bruce McLaren's daughter, Amanda, says her father would be proud of the internship named after him.

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The Elva is McLaren's first road-going open-top sports car - just 399 will be made.

University of Auckland students Elizabeth Grant and Harvey Merton are both following in the footsteps of Bruce McLaren who arrived in England in 1958 on a scholarship before going on to establish his racing team five years later.

McLaren always harboured the desire to build road-going supercars and was in the process of developing his first - the M6GT - when he was tragically killed testing the M8D Can-Am car at Goodwood in 1970. McLaren Cars was established in 1985 and released a single model - the legendary McLaren F1 - before being replaced by McLaren Automotive in 2010.

And that is where Elizabeth and Harvey, who both have a passion for high performance engineering and cars, will spend the next two months based at the iconic McLaren Technology and Production Centres in Woking, Surrey, England where they will have stints with designers, development engineers, the powertrain team as well as areas such as aftersales to gain a 'rounded understanding of the 2,700 strong team.'

'It's wonderful to welcome Elizabeth and Harvey to McLaren as the latest bright young engineers to benefit from the international internship named in honour of my father and to know his legacy lives on today both in the cars and the ethos of the company,' said Amanda McLaren, Bruce's daughter who is also a brand ambassador for McLaren Automotive.

'My father would be very proud of what McLaren has become today and I'm sure he would be equally proud of the internship which celebrates the strong links between Britain and New Zealand that he epitomised.

'I'm grateful to both McLaren Automotive and the University of Auckland for their continued support for nurturing young engineering talent and can't wait to hear what Elizabeth and Harvey make of it all.'

And it would be a pretty good time to be at McLaren, with the company currently on a serious roll, in a product sense.

Hot on the heels of its more luxurious GT model, the company has revealed its stripped out lightweight Elva roadster which celebrates the renowned Bruce McLaren-designed M1A and McLaren-Elvas of the 1960s.

The original McLaren-Elvas were produced as customer versions of the innovative and brutally fast Group 7 McLaren race cars, with construction outsourced to British race car maker Elva.

The companys says that the original McLaren-Elva sportscars 'embodied many of the pioneering design and engineering principles that are still integral to the McLaren road cars the company hand-builds today.'

The new version will be produced as a limited run of just 399 units and is a part of McLaren's top-tier Ultimate Series, which currently includes the Senna, Senna GT and Speedtail, with previous models being utter legends - the original F1 and the more recent P1.