Mille Miglia Peter Miller

This wonderful book is back in Print!


http://www.themille-miglia.co.uk

If you go to the web-site and click on Miller's name, you will get to a side where there is a sequence of four pictures that definitely has nothing to do with Mille Miglia. But who, what, where, when? Could it be Phil Hill's Cooper at Zeltweg '64?

Tom

Tom

There´s only one rule that normally works in this curious new world of computers and the net : always click !

Yes, you are right in your guess, and the answer comes when you click on any of the four pictures...



Felix

I've mentioned that to Simon. The WWW can be a humbling experience!

That Cooper was rebuilt with a 2.5-litre Climax engine and was campaigned for many years in New Zealand. Former speedway rider Bruce Abernethy carried out the rebuid with sponsorship from Rothmans and from that time on the car was always referred to as the Rothmans Cooper. After Abernethy, the car was driven by various people. Paul Fahey won his first single-seat race in the car and Dennis Marwood finished fourth in the 1966 New Zealand Grand Prix. It won a number of national championship events but by 1970 it was being beaten by Formula Fords and was quietly retired. It was on display at the Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology as a memorial to Bruce McLaren. The last I saw the car it was at a classic car meeting where someone was asking for information and assistance so that restoration of the car could commence.

While I can't invalidate this story, I don't believe it's true. The Tasman Coopers built by McLaren were quite different to the F1 cars, and I'm sure the Marwood car was a McLaren Tasman Cooper. There were three cars built, to my knowledge, one each for McLaren and Mayer in 64 and a replacement for McLaren in 65, P. Hill taking over the McLaren 1964 car. The Mayer car wasn't, to my knowledge, ever rebuilt.
The McLaren (64)/Hill (65) car went to Patterson for John McDonald to drive. I would imagine, but I'm not sure, that the McLaren car (Bruce never again campaigned in the Tasman, too busy with F1 development, V8 Indy Ford engines, etc) is the car of which you speak.

Ray

I think you misread my post as I did not refer to the car as “the McLaren car”.
The car that was pictured in the Miller site was Phil Hill’s Cooper that crashed and burned at Zeltweg in 1964.
I can assure you that is the car driven by Abernethy, Marwood and others. McLaren had nothing to do with the car after it was rebuilt. It definitely was not one of the cars that Bruce brought to New Zealand.
For confirmation I quote from Nye’s Cooper Cars book, page 276 – “Other Cooper aspects of the (Tasman) series included New Zealand speedway rider Bruce Abernethy rebuilding the cremated remains of Phil’s Zeltweg-wrecked T66, winning sponsorship from Rothmans tobacco and fitting a 2.5 FPF…..”

So where did the McLaren 1965 Tasman car get to?