LUNCH WITH BOB MCMURRAY
MICHAEL CLARK STRETCH ES HIS LUNCH THROUGH ANOTHER COURSE WITH SOMEONE WHO WAS THERE IN FORMULA 1 AS IT GREW INTO THE COMMERCIAL BEHEMOTH THAT IT IS TODAY
HE AND MICHAEL CLARK SIT DOWN FOR A SECOND HELPING
It wasn’t long before the ambitious Ron Dennis was chasing a very big name for one of Mclaren’s seats. Thirty-year-old Niki Lauda had abruptly retired during practice for the 1979 Canadian Grand Prix (GP), but, if anyone was able to persuade the Austrian back into Formula 1 (F1) for 1982, it was Dennis.
“Ron was totally convinced that Niki still had the goods to make an impression on the championship. He was right — Niki was soon as fast as anyone, and won at Long Beach a few races into his second F1 career … and then won his third title and the first for Ron in 1984,” says Bob. At the first test session, however, the team wasn’t so sure. “At the Silverstone for Niki’s audition, it was the general opinion of many that he had probably lost his edge,” Bob tells us. “His first or second lap out at speed ended with him coming into the pits to say, ‘I think there is a small wheel weight missing from the left rear’. There was. He hadn’t lost anything in his time away, and proved that multiple times in the future.”
Prost, Rosberg, and Senna
Lauda beat his new teammate Alain Prost to the title by half a point — according to Bob, Alain learned a lot from Niki. Lauda retired for good at the end of 1985, but Bob recalls the Austrian as “superb”. In his place came Keke Rosberg, known and loved by New Zealanders after the Finn had made his name over here in the late 1970s with a pair of Formula Pacific titles. At the mention of Rosberg’s name, Bob simply responds, “Keke — he was something else.”
Prost won the first of his four titles in 1985, at a time when the Dennis-run Mclaren team was the yardstick.
“We won seven of eight world championships from 1984 — not even Ferrari can claim that,” Bob recalls.
Central to the period of Mclaren supremacy was the pairing, from 1988, of Prost with the massive talent that was Ayrton Senna.
“The biggest ego battle during my time at Mclaren was between Prost and Senna; it was ridiculous,” Bob says. “They were equally quick on the track, but in different ways — Ayrton was superfast most of the time but had lapses, while Alain would be able to pace himself and always look at the longer game. However, the way their on-course battle degenerated into a personal battle within the team was just plain ugly.” I ask Bob for one word to describe each of them. “Senna: intense. Prost: calculating. However, away from the track, Ayrton was wonderful company — a completely different bloke. At the end of the 1993 season, Ayrton
“I’m very passionate about encouraging young drivers — openwheeler racing has been such a huge part of my life, and hopefully we can be part of finding the next Brendon Hartley or Scott Dixon”
visited New Zealand and we took a long helicopter ride with him. After travelling around by air and then by road, he announced that he wanted to buy a property here. Sadly, he never made that happen. As for Prost, I was in Singapore recently for the Grand Prix and I heard ‘Bob, Bob’ in a distinctive French accent. I turned around to see who it was, but, in a crowd of people, you can’t see Alain, because he’s five-foot-nothing; he’s OK.”
Berger and Häkkinen
We discuss some of Mclaren’s other drivers during this period. “Gerhard Berger was better than a journeyman; in fact, he was bloody good and a big help to the team — and to Ayrton, frankly,” Bob remembers. “We loved Mika Häkkinen, and he won two championships back to back: ’98 and ’99. Nigel Mansell is best forgotten. When you look back, Mclaren invariably had two of the six or seven best drivers.”
But not always; Bob recalls Senna’s 1993 teammate: “Michael Andretti’s short time with Mclaren was simply a waste of a good car. While in the south of France, we were asked by RD [Ron Dennis] to look out for a home for the Andrettis. We looked at dozens of million-dollar villas but Andretti — or the ‘Missus’ — would not have a bar of any of them, as glamorous as they were. I think it was then, pre-season, that we figured that he was not really that serious about Formula 1 driving.”
Others
We talk about top drivers during the period of Bob’s involvement who didn’t drive for Mclaren. In most cases, they’re dismissed as being not as good as at least one of the pilots on Mclaren’s books: “We didn’t need [Nelson] Piquet or [Alan] Jones. I think the driver we didn’t get that we all wished we would was Ronnie [Peterson]; he was special.”
All this time, Bob’s role within the organization was ever so subtly changing: “Although I was in charge of the motorhome and hospitality, and a lot of that area of the marketing department, I was also doing a lot of Mclaren undercover stuff in a ‘secret squirrel’ sort of way for RD. This was about the time that Shaune and I were living on RD and wife Lisa’s property in the south of France. Much of my role became keeping the press away, keeping the garage clear of unwanted visitors, and stonewalling the media quite a lot of the time.”
Shaune casually mentions that it was about this time that Bob was generally referred to as ‘Mr Grumpy’.
“Lots of other stuff crept into my role,” Bob explains. “As I understood the mechanicals of things, I invented a role of having a camera and microphone in the garage with a direct audiovisual link to all our guests in the hospitality areas, so I was in the garage doing a commentary and reporting role. Shoelaces tied together, brake clean up the trouser leg, and other unmentionables while on camera were regular ‘treats’ from the boys! I also had the task of overseeing the development of the first ever, and now ubiquitous, pop-top paddock vehicles, the first of which was the ‘RD’ motorhome and the second was for the Sultan of Brunei. Now, everybody has got one, or two, or three, or more.”
Changing channels
Bob’s last season in F1 was 2002.
“Shaune had stopped working for Mclaren by then and was back living in New Zealand, where her mum had been based for some years. Without Shaune, I wasn’t enjoying it as much and didn’t want to get to the stage of not enjoying it,” he says. “Not long after getting back, I had a call from David Turner [DT]. DT worked for TVNZ, and, when he’d been in England a few years earlier, he had rolled up to Mclaren and I had been … given the job of showing yet another Kiwi around the place. We spent two or three hours together and got on very well. When he heard that I was back in New Zealand, he contacted me and asked if I could drop into TVNZ for a chat about Formula 1. That led to me fronting the introduction to each Grand Prix — so, accidentally, I ended up with a media presence. At the first GP I went to after leaving Mclaren — Melbourne 2003 — I went into the press room and received quite a lot of flak from the assembled media corps; friendly but pointed! My first TV interview was with RD — uncomfortable it was, especially when I asked him why the Mclaren of that year (MP4/18) was just a polished version of the 2002 car. He got quite irate, so much so that he decided that we’d do a second take and he would be more reasonable with his answer. It was quite the intro into the ‘other side’ of RD.”
Racing in New Zealand
“The Toyota Racing Series kicked off shortly afterwards and I was approached by Toyota to get involved — and I still am,” Bob tells us.
He is a Toyota Racing ambassador, and this is his 15th season of involvement. Among his various tasks are interviews with the mostly teenage drivers who have F1 on their horizon.
When the promising but short-lived A1GP Series started, it was logical that Bob have an involvement.
“Colin [Giltrap] rang and asked me to take on the CEO role for New Zealand’s A1GP team,” he says. “We had some success, but, ultimately, the series failed. I am mostly disappointed for Colin because of the huge personal effort he put into it.
“At some point, I got a call from Radio Sport, and, for some years now, D’arcy Waldegrave and I have chatted to guests about all aspects of motor racing. Then, The New Zealand Herald contacted me about doing a weekly column for the Saturday edition — although I don’t write very well.”
Developing talent
This last statement from Bob reminds me of an email he sent me, probably not long after he came to live here permanently in 2003. I can’t recall the specific content, other than that it was perceptive and funny in about equal amounts. I forwarded it to Eoin Young, who must have been on the phone within seconds of reading it.
“Why doesn’t someone give him a regular column? He writes very well” — this from Eoin, who wasn’t what you’d call generous with his praise of other scribes. Bob was convinced I was making this up when I told him late last year, but I assured him that it was true and he was clearly flattered.
Acting as a tour guide has become an occasional gig for Bob — “I took a group to Indy in 2015 and then there’s been Singapore for the past few years.”
However, much of his time over the past decade or so has been spent in connection with the Elite Academy and the Kiwi Driver Fund.
“I’m very passionate about encouraging young drivers — open-wheeler racing has been such a huge part of my life, and hopefully we can be part of finding the next Brendon Hartley or Scott Dixon,” he says.
Half a century ago, when they were hanging about with the Mclaren ‘family’ in their unofficial team pub, Bob and Shaune could not have imagined how their lives would pan out. The way Mclaren kept returning to the couple’s destiny isn’t lost on Bob.
“First, we were merely socializing with them,” he remembers, “never imagining we’d be working there — and then I ended up working for Ron Dennis in Formula 2 before being lured to Mclaren after we’d made the decision to settle in New Zealand at the end of 1976. Then RD bought Mclaren,” he recalls. “When we arrived in the UK in 1977 to start driving the Marlboro motorhome, they discovered that I didn’t have a truck and trailer license, only enough for a rigid. I quickly had to take a test around the streets of South London. Fortunately, I passed, and was then immediately spirited to Monaco for the Grand Prix. The next GP was in Belgium, then came Anderstorp in Sweden — a heck of a journey for the first articulated-truck trip of my life.”
After becoming friends with Bob sometime early in 2003, it became obvious to me that the Kiwi tall-poppy syndrome was alive and well. I started getting asked, “What did Bob actually do at Mclaren?” and “Why is he on TV talking about Formula 1 — didn’t he just make the tea?”
All one needs to do is spend a few moments chatting to Bob, or listening to him on Radio Sport, to realize that he holds logically reasoned views on many areas of motor racing, views that he articulates with an unmistakable passion.
I said to him once, “Well, Bob, as they say, you might have just made the tea, but you were there — and what a time to have been there.”
“In any case,” Bob adds, “I was never actually allowed in the kitchen by Shaune, so I had to find other stuff to do and, well, there were Formula 1 cars out there! You know, that era we were in started off out of club racing, and it grew to something huge — and we saw it all happen. Formula 1 was growing exponentially, and Mclaren was king. Look at the things that everyone takes for granted these days — the Paddock Club, pop-top vehicles, garage overheads and set-ups, tyre warmers, six- and seven-speed gearboxes, and so much more — it all came from Mclaren.”
Bob concludes our lunch with, “Some day I will get a proper job — maybe I should write a book.”
Dear Editor, I loved the article about Tim Bailey in the latest issue [Motorman, No. 337]. I used to do photo work for him, and enclosed is an example of one of the shots that we actually sold to Ferrari.
The black stallion was in New Zealand for a reshoot of … [ The Black Stallion], the movie with Mickey Rooney[, as a series]. Pic was taken at Puketutu Island stables. The Fi was in NZ for a promotional tour. It was owned by a chap in Australia, and I actually got to drive it!
Cheers, Rob