A Museum Home

In conjunction with Denny, Goodyear and MOTAT (the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, NZ ) it was agreed that the M8 should come to the home of its drivers and builders and arrangements were made for its trip downunder to New Zealand. In March 1978, Denny again sat in the M8A and the car was officially presented to MOTAT by the Goodyear Tyre & Rubber Co.

The McLaren created much interest and formed the basis of many special displays. In time and in line with MOTAT policy it was decided that some work should be done on the M8 and an effort made to work on the engine and get the car going. The car was sent out to have some work done on and as so often happens in the world of voluntary museum work, it disappeared.

It apparently passed from hand to hand as each engineer or mechanic looked at the complexities under the bodywork and understandably realised that it was a mammoth task to repair.

The Rescue

Things McLaren move in mysterious ways and in the early 1980s, a farm was purchased in South Auckland and the new owner decided to clean up all the old machinery and cars lying under the big Macrocarpa trees. He duly brought in the bulldozer and dug the hole to bury everything. A last minute thought saw him make a phone call to a car club member to see if they were interested in the old sports car before he buried it. The car club members realised immediately what the car was and the rescue was made. The McLaren was duly trailered to the Northern Sports Car Club premises, cleaned up and put on display. After that near disaster, Northern Sports wouldn’t let the car out of its sight and didn’t trust anyone to look after it any more. And the rein started the seventeen year battle of ownership. Without entering into all the details of the ownership claims, it is enough to say that they all had some validity.

M8A - The Body Beautiful

Whilst we inherited the M8A as a “complete” looking car with bodywork, the actual old body work on the car was from an M8D - a very different model that had seen two years of development, alteration, widening, wings, etc, etc. And no way could any of this bodywork be used for our M8A!

So it was back to the drawing board and hours and hours of research and a challenge that had plagued us from the very beginning - where in the world would we find any parts of the original body to at least give us a starting point?

We are delighted to tell all our members and readers that the buck is virtually finished after nearly five months painstaking work and it is composed of about 18 different sections. The reason for so many sections will be explained later. What a great sight it has been to actually see a full body take shape on top of the tub!! It looks magnificent and it is so exciting to know that we are nearly there.
 

Duncan Fox, our McLaren expert, takes up the story from here:

We had a 1968 chassis with 1970s bodywork, made out to look like a 1971. I studied all the existing bodywork so that I could basically reverse engineer a modified piece of 1970 customer body work back to an M8A. From moulds of the old Trojan customer cars that Group 7 have bought and own in England, I started with an M8C front and an M8E rear and we made a panel out of each of them and then started modification.

Looking at the front of the new buck - the front upper section is M8C, the next section piece is off an M8D and then the other section is from the M8F. It is just a matter of identifying the componentry and using it with unmolested pieces of various bodies and putting them all together.

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