McLaren’s roll of honour is well known: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Mika Häkkinen, Lewis Hamilton… Champions all, their names woven into the fabric of the team’s history at Woking.
But as McLaren prepares to line up for its 1000th Formula 1 grand prix in Monaco this weekend, it seems a fitting moment to look beyond the legends – to the drivers who passed through far more briefly, and whose connection to the team history has largely been forgotten.
For every driver who spent years in papaya orange or the red-and-white of Marlboro, there were others who appeared for a single season, a handful of races, or just one afternoon.
They weren’t second-rate drivers, far from it. Several of the names that follow won world championships, Le Mans, or both.
What they share is a brief chapter of their careers at the wheel of a McLaren.
Villeneuve made an instant impression
The story of how Gilles Villeneuve arrived at McLaren is almost too good to be true.
In 1977, having dominated North American Formula Atlantic, winning nine of 10 races in 1976 and the Canadian and US championships, Villeneuve caught the attention of McLaren technical chief Alastair Caldwell, who rang him with a vague promise of a drive later that season after being recommended by James Hunt.
Caldwell put the phone down. The next morning, Villeneuve was sitting in the factory reception. He had simply packed a bag, driven to the airport, and flown to England without waiting to be asked twice.
“That was back in the more genteel days of F1 when drivers were allowed to go off and do something stupid like race in Canada!” Caldwell recalled in 2017. “James came back and said there’s this really good kid that we should talk to. He said he was a natural.
“He was a hit with everybody. We decided to give him a drive at Silverstone; being the home race, we could better cope with three cars.”
McLaren entered him as a third driver for the 1977 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, giving him the team’s older M23 while Hunt and Jochen Mass drove the newer M26s.