Giving way to Porsche

This 1971 season turned out to be the twilight of McLaren’s Can-Am domination, for 1972 shaped up a showdown of an altogether more intense nature due to Porsche’s arrival. The German company’s tool was a turbo-charged derivative of its flat 12 917 endurance sports race, the 917/10, which would be run with works support by Roger Penske, the initial single entry driven by Mark Donohue. Unlike previous Can-Am pretenders, this car had substantially more power than the 770bhp or so which McLaren could by now tease out of its self-developed Chevy V8s.

McLaren’s response to this threat was to have Gordon Coppuck design a new car as the M8 series had reached the limit of development. His new M20 was a neater package designed primarily to concentrate more of the car’s mass within the wheelbase. As a result, some of the 79 gallon fuel capacity was housed in a tank behind the driver, while two flank-mounted water radiators – as pioneered on the F1 Lotus 72 – replaced the conventional front-end layout. Driver comfort was a useful bonus: Teddy Mayer remembers the front radiator generating such a blast of hot air that Bruce and Denny occasionally suffered scalded lips. A bellhousing between engine and gearbox lengthened the wheelbase by 2in, effectively placing the engine further forward in the wheelbase.

Although they suffered too much understeer, the new M20s, still driven by Hulme and Revson (who had been invited back when ulcer-troubled Jackie Stewart opted out of a Can-Am deal with McLaren), were not far off the pole position place of Donohue’s Porsche at Mosport’s opening round. Thanks to the Porsche losing time with induction system problems, Denny was able to give the M20 a maiden victory – but the writing was on the wall. ‘The Bear’ scored only one more win in the remaining eight races as Porsche punched home its advantage, George Follmer in a second Penske entry taking the title with five victories. Its glorious five-year reign over, Gulf Team McLaren was to pull out of Can-Am for good…

"Porsche was the one and only reason why we finished," remembers Teddy Mayer. "To compete with them we needed a much larger budget and a more concentrated design effort. We would have had to scrap most of what we’d developed over five years and start all over again. I decided that it wasn’t viable financially, and at the same time our sponsor, Gulf, decided that Indy racing would give them more coverage – so that was fine by us".

"We were given some money by Chevy to build a turbo of our own. We built an engine, saw over 1000bhp on the dyno, and tested it once in a car. But we knew right away that we didn’t have the resources to develop it, so that was that."

The Trojan Connection

Besides the works cars, privateer efforts boosted McLaren’s Can-Am presence to more than half the field at most races. Unable to contemplate squeezing ‘mass-production’ cars into its busy racing programme, McLaren sub-contracted manufacture to Peter Agg’s Trojan operation from November 1964. Agg, having rescued Frank Nichols’ Elva Cars from liquidation, could offer the facilities and production expertise McLaren needed, and a long-term association was born with the first ‘McLaren-Elva’ cars.

Out of over 220 Trojan-built customer McLarens, around 60 were Can-Am cars. The way the arrangement worked was that Trojan would take McLaren’s drawings for the previous season’s cars, have patterns and moulds made, sell the cars, run a spares operation, and pay McLaren a royalty on each car made.

While a few ‘production’ models shared works designations, the gaps in the factory’s M8 suffix sequence were filled by Trojan. So it was that the 1970 M8C and 1971 M8E were Trojan’s customer variants of the M8B and M8D respectively. Going back, Trojan productionised the 1967 works M6A as the M6B for sale the following season, while the customer version of the original works M8A was described, perversely, as the M12. Into 1972, when McLaren produced the M20, Trojan’s final run of production Can-Am cars carried the previous season’s works M8F designation.

Trojan’s car satisfied demand for McLaren’s super-successful recipe, but having cars one year out of date always put the privateers at a disadvantage. On only two occasions, both in 1968, were the factory drivers ever beaten by customer McLarens.