We had the best trucks and we had the best cars and we had the best girls.
1977 Smart Uniforms
The whole traveling Grand Prix team is dressed to impress.
We were all wearing red Adidas trainers: I introduced this, it was one of the things I did; the smart uniform. McLaren was one of the only teams that wore smart uniform for years. The idea came from America, guys like Tyler Alexander had been doing it with their teams for a while. We went to the British Grand Prix and we had white trousers and yellow shirts and people took the piss out of us. All the other teams went: “Eurgh, nancies,” because they wore ragged clothes, dirty overalls and we had these smart outfits, which were made by the Bowler Shirt Uniform company in Los Angeles.
The shirts were horrible because they were rough cotton and by the end of the weekend your neck was red raw. But McLaren’s were the introducers of good-looking cars and good-looking teams. Philip Morris was very keen on this so as time went by we were always the leaders in this innovation of looking good.
One of the ideas was to wear trainers and then, because the trainers got dirty, on Sunday morning he had a new set of trainers delivered for everybody. At 10 o’clock the guys all had to go into the truck and have their new trainers and clean uniforms put on. The cars were kept smart and the truck was kept smart and we had the best trucks and we had the best cars and we had the best girls. We had the best of everything.
