England to America. Door catches are required for two new racing cars about to be shipped to the CanAm.

I worked like a lunatic because my wife and children were not here yet. I was able to really put the hours in. I’d work seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, week after week after week building racing cars. We built some CanAm cars, which were cars that could only race in America in an event called the Canadian-American Challenge Cup: CanAm. They were huge sports cars with huge engines. I can still remember the day we went to the airport to ship them across the Atlantic. I was building the door catches, which was the marvelous thing about my job in those days because I had designed the door catches, built them, and fitted them to the cars. I was inside the first car fixing the handles, loaded on the back of a lorry as it drove to the airport.

When we got to the airport to weigh them for airfreight them I had to get out. They took me back to the factory and I climbed into the second car and off we went, back tot he airport. It was fantastic. We designed an awful lot of the cars ourselves: the details of the cars were not drawn by the factory, it was done by the workers, the mechanics.

• 1943 Alastair's early years
• 1955 Licence to drive
• 1957 Alastair's High School years
• 1959 Evading the police
• 1960 Becoming a mechanic
• 1966 The Tasman series
• 1966 Leaving New Zealand
• 1967 Joining McLaren
• 1967 CanAm Door Catches
• 1967 Monza
• 1968 South Africa
• 1968 CanAm
• 1969 Driving the Formula 1 Cars
• 1973 Fittipaldi joins McLaren
• 1973 McLaren Team manager
• 1974 Montezemolo
• 1975 Hunt replaces Fittipaldi
• 1975 Hunt gets paid little
• 1976 Inventing the Air-Starter
• 1976 Six-speed Gear Boxes
• 1976 Misbehaving in Canada
• 1976 Japan
• 1977 Adidas Uniforms
• 1977 Changing Tyres
• 1977 Leaving McLaren
• 1979 Nelson Piquet
• 1980 Skirts on Formula 1 Cars
• 1981 Leaving Formula 1
• 1982 Making Lists
• 1982 Signing on
• 1982 Creating Space Station
• 1991 Highland Fling
• 1991 Classic Marathon
• 1992 Getting the Austin A35
• 1992 El Salvador
• 1993 Carerra Panamerica
• 1993 Centre of attention
• 1993 Nicest car in rally
• 1993 LeJog
• 2000 London to Sydney
• 2000 Porsche Racing
• 2000 Porsche Crashing
• 2001 Ferrari
• 2001 Inca Trail
• 2004 Berlin - Moscow - Berlin
• 2005 World Cup Rally
• 2007 Norway
• 2008 Liège-Brescia-Liège
• 2008 An Icelandic Odyssey
• 2008 North & West Africa
• 2009 West Coast America
• 2009 London to Casablanca
• 2010 New Zealand Festival of motor racing
• 2010 New Zealand Big Sky Adventure

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Years: 1966 to 1974
Event: Candian-American Challenge Cup
Details:SCCA/CASC sports car racing series
Key figures: Bruce McLaren more... , Denny Hulme more...

McLaren dominated the CanAm series for the majority of the nine years that it ran for. Before he died in 1970, Bruce McLaren led the team with Denny Hulme as the second driver in the M6 and M8. Alastair was a notable part of the multi-national McLaren team in the period which became known as the 'Bruce and Denny show'.