‘Dad would be patting them on the shoulder’ – Bruce McLaren’s daughter salutes Oscar and Lando

Amanda McLaren was four when her legendary father, Bruce, went to the great F1 garage in the sky after a fatal crash. Fifty-five years later, she’s applauded Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.

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Formula One’s European swing is a work of art. A Mona Lisa of a schedule. Oscar Piastri is about to fang it through consecutive races in Italy, Monaco and Spain. Nice gig if one can get it. The world’s most riveting sporting tour has the stunning backdrop of cities so beautiful they must have been painted on.

I’m starting to think Piastri and his McLaren teammate Lando Norris are such genuinely good blokes they’ll go at each other’s throats on the track this year without too much damage to their mateship. We shan’t rehash the most famous in-house feuds over the years, led by the charismatic Ayrton Senna and clinical Alain Prost at McLaren, lowlighted by Senna swerving to take out Prost at 280km/h at the 1988 Portuguese Grand Prix. “If that’s how he wants to win the championship, I’m not interested,” Prost said. “I don’t want any part of it.”

McLaren's Miama Grand Prix winner Oscar Piastri, right, joined by teammate and second-placed finisher Lando Norris on the podium in Florida last week Picture: AFP

F1’s trillion fans are waiting for Piastri versus Norris to turn nasty. There’s been zero opprobrium. Norris is peeved to be overshadowed by Piastri, who leads the drivers’ championship, but they keep shaking hands after the chequered flag and throwing compliments back and forth.

This is to their credit as humans and according to Amanda McLaren, the daughter of the legendary Bruce, the team’s gentlemanly founder would approve of their noble approach.

Amanda visited McLaren’s factory in Surrey on the weekend for the first time since the Papaya team won last year’s constructors title. “I think my dad would be patting them on the shoulder,” Amanda said of Piastri and Norris. “I think he’d love them because of their genuineness. Obviously, he would love what they’re doing, but they are nice people.

“Everybody who talks about my father says he was a lovely man and I think, in that sense, Lando and Oscar would remind people of my dad. I think that my dad would give them a good pat on the shoulder for that reason. They’re both young, but they’re both very mature and everybody loves them.”

Check out a documentary on Stan called ‘McLaren’ to get a wonderful idea of Bruce’s genius, goodness and gentlemanliness. The New Zealand Sports Hall of Farmer went to the great F1 garage in the sky after a tragic accident at the Goodwood Motor Circuit at West Sussex in 1970. Testing a new McLaren, aged 32, he wanted to do “one more lap” to get things right. It was a lap he never got to finish.

The daughter of the F1 legend Bruce McLaren, Amanda, at McLaren HQ

One report said: “As Autosport went to press on Tuesday afternoon, we received the dreadful news Bruce McLaren had been killed in a testing accident at Goodwood. Early reports said that the engine blew at around 180mph (288km/h) when Bruce was flat out along the Lavant Straight and the car veered into the bank and disintegrated. It is impossible to know where to start when remembering Bruce McLaren’s contribution to motor racing …”

Six years earlier, McLaren appeared to have written his own epitaph. When his Cooper teammate Timmy Mayer died aged 26 in a crash at Tasmania, Bruce wrote: “The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime?

“To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.”

Those words became famous for summing up McLaren’s life in equal measure. He was an F1 driver for 12 years, winning four GPs, before birthing one of the most esteemed teams on the grid. The day he died, his right-hand man, Teddy Mayer, brother of Timmy, told the McLaren staff: “Guys, I have the worst possible news. Bruce has just bought the farm.” To buy the farm was a wartime euphemism for being killed. “Let’s all just go home,” Mayer said. “Have some time to yourselves. Take tomorrow off.”

Bruce McLaren in a shot from the film McLaren

McLaren’s never-give-in mantra is built on what happened next. The next day, Bruce’s staff turned up to work. Fast-forward 55 years, through decades of lean times but coming off the team’s first constructors’ championship this century, one of Piastri or Norris are likely to become the first McLaren world champion since Lewis Hamilton in 2008.

Piastri leads Norris by 16 points. Seventy-five points are up for grabs through the oil painting of a swing through the Emilia-Romagna GP on Sunday, the delicious Monaco GP on May 25 and the Spanish GP on June 1. Then it’s wheels up to the 51st American state for Canadian Grand Prix on June 16 before everyone returns to Europe for a dream tour of Austria, England, Belgium, Hungary, Denmark and Italy … by which time we’ll know whether Piastri and Norris are truly gentleman racers or inclined to taking each other out at 280km/h.

“I remember seeing Lando walking through the paddock and a young girl comes up to him with a bracelet. He stops and kneels down, takes the bracelet and puts it on. He didn’t just chuck it in his pocket and walk on.

“I think that’s what makes our drivers special. They both take their time with fans. That’s really special.

“And of course, they’re both absolutely capable of winning races because at the end of the day, getting in that car and getting it across the finishing line first is what we are all about. “For us to have two of them, we are very, very lucky. In Formula One, like any sport, there are peaks and troughs. You ride the wave, then it all crashes down for a little while, and then you ride again.”