Racing improves the breed

Half a century on it is quite extraordinary to look back at the five months of the life of Graham McRae following the worst crash of his career at Hockenheim in September 1971. His special F5000 McLaren — an M10B like no other that he’d adapted during the course of 1970 in England and then brought back here to win the first of his three Tasman Cups — was destroyed. I once asked Graham if the McLaren would have been good enough to win the ‘72 Tasman in the face of the latest offerings from Lola and his arch-rival from Sydney — Frank Matich. He thought it would have been but wasn’t exactly emphatic — to the outside world he was ‘Cassius’, the boastful super-confident engineer-driver, but the reality was quite different; he knew better than anyone the effort required and Matich’s desperation to beat him.

Had McLaren been prepared to sell him one of their M19 F1 cars, Graham’s own seminal GM1 may have never happened. He’d arrived in England in March 1971 to drive McLaren’s replacement for the all-conquering M10B, the M18, but it was quickly determined that his Tasman winning mount was better off back in Europe than sitting