Bruce McLaren's Only McLaren Win — and More Belgian GP Facts You Didn't Know

Bruce McLaren’s only win in a McLaren

Belgium is near and dear to the McLaren team’s heart for many reasons, but above all it is because this is the first (and only) race that the team’s founder ever won for them. 

The team was established back in 1963 by Bruce McLaren, a young driver and racing engineer from Auckland, New Zealand. The McLaren team initially competed in the Tasman series, held across Australia and New Zealand during the F1 offseason, until the team was ready to enter its first F1 race in 1966. It took three seasons with McLaren himself–who had started his own F1 driving career eight years earlier with Cooper–at the wheel for the team to get their first podium (a P2 in Spain). Shortly after, at the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix, came their first win.

“We were pretty realistic, but we were competitive, for sure. Not front row, but right up there,” recalled Alastair Caldwell, who worked for the team first as a mechanic then as a manager between 1967 and 1978. 

“Bruce, with three or four laps to go, he was fifth, and then suddenly he was fourth, and then he was third, second,” Alastair said. “And he crossed the line first. [It was] a brilliant result, first McLaren win of a Grand Prix.”

McLaren went on to finish second overall in the Constructors’ Championship that year, with Bruce stepping up to the podium two more times, but never on the top step. To this day, it remains his only win with his own team, but it was one that kicked off the story for a team that today is the reigning Constructors’ Champion.

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When Lewis Hamilton slammed the decision to race here as “a bad choice”

Spa-Francorchamps is known for its microclimate and frenetic weather, but the deluge that hit the track in 2021 will go down in history as one of the most extreme conditions that F1 has ever seen. The rain was coming down so hard that the race, originally scheduled for 3:00 PM local time, did not get under way until over three hours later, at 6:17 PM. When it finally did start, it was under a safety car, and even then, the drivers only went around the track three times before the race was red-flagged for safety and did not resume again.

With at least two laps completed, the race could officially be classified. The complex rules about lap classifications following a red flag, however, meant that only the first of the three laps counted towards the final race distance. With that, the 2021 Belgian GP clocked in at a final race distance of just under 4.3 mi (6.9 km), making it the shortest race in F1 history by miles (literally). And given the distance covered, drivers were awarded only half the typical amount of points.

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The way this race played out was less than ideal, with many on the grid voicing their displeasure that it was carried out at all given the safety concerns associated with such heavy rain. Seven-time World Champion, Lewis Hamilton quickly told Sky Sports F1 that he thought “the sport made a bad choice.”

"I mean, money talks," he also said. "It was literally the two laps to start the race, it's all a money scenario.

"So everyone gets their money and I think the fans should get theirs back too because unfortunately, they didn't get to see what they came and paid for.

"It's a shame we can't do the race tomorrow and I love this track as well, so sad that we couldn't do this. But today wasn't a race."

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F1's longest circuit used to be twice its current size

Spa is famously the longest circuit on the F1 calendar. At 4.352 mi (7.004km) it actually runs four meters over the maximum length that an F1 track should be, but an exception was made given its historic status (a similar exception was made for the Circuit de Monaco falls a couple hundred meters short of the minimum track length of 3.5km).

But the original Spa-Francorchamps Circuit was actually much longer than this. In fact, it was more than twice as long as the track used today, measuring 8.740 miles (14.066 km), and stretching through the local roads of the Belgian countryside.

“There were cows, farm houses, telegraph poles,” recalled former race car driver Jackie Oliver, who competed in F1 for Lotus and McLaren, among other teams. 

“The big difficulty with races on a circuit so long [is] sometimes it used to be raining on one part of the circuit and it would be dry in another,” Oliver explained in a McLaren YouTube video paying homage to the track. “So you would be doing full speed in some of these corners, go over-brow of a hill and on the other side of the hill the track was wet… If you made a mistake you’d either collect a tree or end up on wet grass at 180 miles an hour.”

Indeed, the danger that the track posed resulted in drivers boycotting the Belgian Grand Prix in 1969, and the race being held at Circuit Zolder for several years instead. In 1979 the track was shortened to the length that it is today and the portions that wound through towns and urban areas were cut, though remnants of that era still remain in sections of the track such as the Bus Stop chicane, which used to be a literal bus stop. 

Want more surprising facts about this year’s F1 drivers and race tracks? Sign up for our newsletter for a bonus fact about the Belgian Grand Prix, and be sure to check out our other Speed Reads:

• 3 Things You Didn’t Know About the British Grand Prix 
• 3 Things You Didn’t Know About Charles Leclerc