Bruce McLaren’s legacy is pretty well-cemented by now. The late New Zealand-born race driver and designer has his name now on an iconic road and race car (the F1) and his name has continued to adorn Formula 1 cars long past his untimely death in 1970. At that time, he had yet to win an F1 title—though his company that continued has since won eight constructor’s and 12 driver’s titles—but his McLaren M8 was absolutely the pinnacle of Can-Am racing in the late 1960’s.
The Can-Am Series was largely an open-formula sports car racing series and McLaren didn’t hold back. Although the M8 (and earlier M6) went through several iterations, the central tenet remained the same: Source a monstrous V8 and then build a lightweight and competent chassis around it. McLaren won the ‘67 Can-Am title in his own M6A with his driver Denny Hulme taking the championship with the M8A in ‘68. McLaren reclaimed it in ‘69 with the M8B with two more McLaren titles in the works in the next two years with the M8D (driven by Peter Revson) and the M8F (with Hulme again). Those later iterations both featured more displacement than the M8B’s 7.0-liter Chevy V8 with 7.6 and 8.0 liters, respectively.
Anyway, what’s all this about anyway? Well, the M8F with its massive engine is the oft-remembered one, but Australian Duncan MacKellar races his M8E in vintage races Down Under. The M8E was simply a customer version of the M8B and while it “only” has the 7.0-liter V8, this beginning of this video from a 2015 race at Sydney Motorsports Park shows what that really means. When the green flag drops, so too does MacKellar’s right foot and the the orange McLaren wedge just saunters right past the two Porsches on the front row. From there, it’s all glorious American V8 roar and armfuls of steering input to keep the beast from tossing MacKellar straight into a wall.
