The Zerex Beginning of Sports Car racing domination
They told Walt Hansgen he shouldn’t have bought it. They told Roger Penske he couldn’t straighten it. When we heard what he was doing with it, we reckoned it wouldn’t work. When it did, we said it was illegal, so he changed it. It was always a winner. When the sleek little special was superseded, he sold it. Bruce bought it and the McLaren era in sports car racing started there.
Perhaps it was the Cooper parentage that helped Bruce to decide and the fact that it came with a 3.5-litre aluminium Oldsmobile V8 engine; the recipe was complete. Bruce said at the time, “The record is there to say that this extraordinary set of suspension arms, steering column and odd few feet of chassis (for that’s all there was left of the original) has won more sports car races and more money than any car in the last decade.”
Briggs Cunningham had no idea what he started in 1961 when he placed an order for a Cooper F1 car identical to the works cars that Jack and Bruce were driving that season. It was duly completed and shipped with the works cars to Watkins Glen for the U.S. GP. Painted in smart white and blue Cunningham racing colours, it was entered for Walt to drive but the car didn’t survive its first race. The car went end over end at speed and ended up in a sorry state. Roger Penske realised the potential and bought the wreck for a song. There were some who thought Penske was stupid, but he knew better. He was buying the basis of a new Formula One car which he could convert to the last word in sports car racing, smaller and sleeker than the lumbering big American sports cars.
Think about Roger Penske’s total command of U.S. motor racing today and reflect on Bruce writing fifty years ago: “Roger Penske was a name that was a fast growing in American road-racing circles. He was, and still is, a young man rightly confident of his abilities in many directions, besides those he certainly has behind a steering wheel. Although no engineer, Roger knows his way around racing cars and, more important, he knows how to find and pay the right man for the job.
In a short space of time Penske was running the car in Formula Libre races in its original single-seat form with a Coventry Climax F1 engine.
Sports car racing, particularly the two big races at Riverside and Laguna Seca in California in October, were offering exotic prize money for the day and good racing.
Roger hired a top body-builder from Indianapolis for three months and arrived at Riverside Raceway with what was the smallest, lightest best-looking vehicle for a long time. It had to go – it was simply the F1 chassis with the Coventry Climax F1 engine extended to 2.7-litres – a proven combination with a very light all-enveloping body clipped on. It was more than 200 lbs lighter than the factory Cooper Monaco!
At Riverside Roger won something like $10,000 plus the latest Pontiac pace car; he won again at Laguna Seca the following weekend and carried off the laurels yet again at Puerto Rico, collecting a small fortune in prize monies and advertising contracts. Roger was not one to leave the business side unexploited and the car was quickly christened the Zerex Special.
Then the rule-makers stepped in, prompted by drivers who had been outpaced and Penske had to re-make the chassis so that it had two seats instead of a sleek central one. He had the two top rails of the chassis removed from just behind the front suspension to the rear of the cockpit bay, replacing them with new tubes that curved down and out, then back in and up, giving room for two seats where there had previously only one in the centre, F1 fashion.
The tube bends would have delighted a master plumber but the chassis probably had one of the lowest-ever torsional rigidity figures! But it still won races and Roger walked off with the 1963 Guards Trophy at Brands Hatch. Roger had sold the car to John Mecom so now he was winning all the way round, taking the prize money but not having to pay the bills. And they had plans for a Chevyengined Cooper. The Zerex was left under a cover in Mecom’s workshops.
We started working around ideas for a prototype while we were in New Zealand and Australia but Bruce was the only one convinced that the 4-cylinder 2.7-litre Coventry Climax was the way to go. When the Zerex came on the market as raced by Roger with Climax power but with the spare aluminium Oldsmobile included, it appeared that Bruce might be able to save face.
“We came to an agreement with Mecom and just two days before the April Oulton Park meeting, the car arrived in England with Tyler who had handled the purchase. We had problems initially, but by the time we had competed at Aintree and Silverstone, we had played with the springing and castor angle and felt that it was going as well as we could expect.
“The day after Silverstone we ran a tape measure once more over the Oldsmobile engine and took a hacksaw to the chassis, cutting out the entire section from just behind the front suspension to just in front of the rear. I left a couple of sketches and a wire model with Wal and Tyler and flew down to Monaco for the GP. A week or so later I returned to find they had made a very smart-looking job of the chassis and the Oldsmobile was fitting in quite snugly.
“Due to space and suspension geometry considerations, we found ourselves committed to use the Type 21 Colotti gearbox from my Tasman Cooper, already a tired unit, but, cutting a lengthy story short, we rushed to Mosport Park in Canada – and won first time out!”
Bruce couldn’t have known then but he had just begun a run of success in North American sports car racing that would become legendary. “After Mosport we had time to do a little development, both on the chassis and the engine before the Guards Trophy. We very much wanted to build a nice new car, as neat, clean and efficient in its design as some of the modern GP cars. To do this, of course, meant a lot of experimenting, and a lot of data collecting regarding spring rates, roll centres, cooling requirements, tyre sizes and a million other things that we wanted to be sure of before we started building our own car. In effect we had ourselves a perfect prototype.
“I still wasn’t convinced about using an American engine – at least not until I saw the Oldsmobile stripped for crack testing and rebuilding. It was perfect. I’ve never seen a racing engine that looked so good. Traco Engineering in California had done a great job for us.
“And that’s my sports car saga to date. In one short season we bought a well-used sports car special, rebuilt it, raced it, and have incorporated the lessons learned into a brand new sports car – a McLaren. I hope we manage to build in a little of the development that a lot of cars lack…”
They did.