According to Bruce's own account in "From the Cockpit" (Frederick Muller 1964, pp. 27-28), his first competition was a hillclimb at Muriwai Beach shortly after his 15th birthday. That was the necessary age to have the driving test for a road licence, which in turn was required to start as a novice in competitions. As the story goes, the place choosen by father and son McLaren for his debut was the first run of a hillclimb at a new venue at Muriwai - in fact, the drive up to the family's summer house newly laid out with road metall. Later this venue was to be known as "Muriwai hillclimb" or "Quarry Road". In the Auckland Car Club run event (Les McLaren being its chairman!) Bruce was driving his Austin Ulster, and made FTD in the 750cc class, followed by Phil Kerr, driving his Austin Nippy. This story has been repeated in a number of printed publications, for example Eoin Young's "McLaren Memories" (Haynes Publishing 2005, p. 29), and also on the sites both of the McLaren Team and the McLaren Trust.
My question: when exactly did this event take place? Surely it must have been after August 30, 1952, Bruce's 15th birthday. However, neither in printed stuff nor in the net I have found any record of a hillclimb at Muriwai in the following weeks. Hardly a top event, that's perhaps no real surprise ...
Or was there no Muriwai hillclimb at the time at all? In fact, in "McLaren Memories" Eoin Young has Bruce's lifelong friend Phil Kerr as a witness for the Muriwai hillclimb and cites him: "We [Bruce and Phil] first met in 1952 at a car club hill climb.[...] It was Bruce's first event and it was my first event as well. We were the youngest guys there and we got talking. We got on very well that day [...]." (p. 29)
In his autobiography "To Finish First" (Motor Racing Publications 2008), however, Phil Kerr tells a different story: "During this time I found out about the Auckland Car Club and hastily became a member. [...] For many years it had promoted rallies and various forms of motor racing [...] One weekend in September '52, I headed out to rural Clevedon, southeast of Auckland, for my first event, a gymkhana. These were very much the 'in thing' at the time, a series of driving tests and slalom runs laid out on a large, flat farmer's paddock. [...] We were divided up into classes of similar vehicles. That's how I found myself grouped with another teenager a couple of years younger than myself. I was 17; Bruce McLaren had just turned 15. [...] He told me his driver's licence was less than a month old, but explained that he already had 18 months' experience around the backyard of his parents' house in Remuera, and occasional dawn outing around his neighbourhood. [...] Bruce and I found ourselves seriously competitive. The likes of George Smith might have been local legends, but their V8s were hardly the stuff for hurling around markers on slippery grass. On the other hand, Bruce's Ulster and my Nippy were ideal, and by the end of the day, machinery triumphed over talent and I won the gymkhana with Bruce second. 'Young driver beats George Smith' read the headline in the local daily, The New Zealand Herald. [...]" (pp. 17-18)
Anybody who can put the record straight? When exactly did the Clevedon gymkhana take place?
Edited by O Volante, 07 May 2016 - 15:26.
