Born To Drive -- Bruce Mccaw Has A Lifelong, Full-Blown Interest In Very Fast Cars

The 2 1/2-year-old's words, something like "Dad, I'm going to put the car in the garage," whistled past the boy's father without much notice.

C-R-A-S-H was the next thing the father heard. His small son had climbed into the family sedan and pushed the starter button. The little guy already understood that pushing and pushing that button on the 1948 Buick dashboard would move the sedan even though the ignition key was still in his father's pocket.

The car jerkily moved forward all right, but the garage door was closed. It came down across the top of the car with a very startled small driver inside.

This story of Bruce's first drive still circulates at times through the McCaw family.

It could have been a clue to what has become a full-blown, very personal interest in cars, fast cars.

Bruce McCaw is a car and racing enthusiast to the core.

McCaw, 49, an investor, is one of four brothers in the family that helped make cellular phones part of everyday life. This week, he lowered his customary curtain of personal privacy to tell of his long and strong attachment to the kind of cars showing up at this weekend's vintage sports car races at Seattle International Raceway.

Charity benefit

The annual Fourth of July weekend event benefits Children's Hospital & Medical Center. Almost $200,000 has been turned over to the hospital's fund for uncompensated care in the past three years. The goal is to raise $100,000 this weekend.

The field of 185 cars includes 15 from the old Canadian-American Challenge (CanAm) series, which never made it to Seattle International Raceway. McCaw will drive a 1964 McLaren Mark 2 he purchased from series regular Lothar Motschenbacher.

Two of the other monster cars with V8 engines will be driven by Indy car drivers Maricio Gugelmin of Brazil and American Danny Sullivan. They are contracted drivers for the PacWest team in which McCaw is the principal. In other races, McCaw will drive a 1969 Mirage Mark 2 and a rare 1953 Allard J2 LeMans.

McCaw's memories of cars reaches back to sitting in his father's lap, driving a variety of family cars. "By the time I was 12 or 13 I was a pretty decent driver and I could really hustle a car down the road," he said. Matter-of-factly, he added: "By the time I was 15 I knew I could outdrive any of the cops around because in those days the police didn't know much about driving."

McCaw still has copies of much thumbed books by Denis Jenkinson and Paul Frere that made an impression on "my studying the theory of driving a car fast." The authors were successful European racers. "I read a lot of books on fast driving, and I read both of those before I was old enough to have a driver's license," he said.

He got that license on the morning of his 16th birthday in 1962, the minute the testing station opened, after scoring 100 on the written portion and 98 on the driving test. McCaw explained why he missed a perfect driving score: "I had my hands too close together. The more I thought about it, I had them at the 10 and 2 o'clock positions and that is the prescribed position for racing."

First car

Even before McCaw had his license, he and two friends pooled their teenage incomes to buy the cheapest car they could find, a $50, 1941 Chrysler four-door sedan. It had a somewhat operable crude automatic transmission and a tired engine.

"If you wound it (the engine) up you could get moving quickly and we used to spin it around in turns and stuff like that," he recalled. "We actually took it out and put a wooden roll bar in it. We got some big round wooden beams and bolted them together so we could see what a car rolled like." Most of that action took place on dirt parking lots.

"We were probably a little crazy but nobody ever had a serious problem. I look back today at the things we did and it is amazing how fast we drove. But there weren't as many cars on the road and the police didn't seem to get as agitated. I got stopped all the time but I never got a ticket."

Later, but still before he had a license, McCaw bought a Crosley station wagon as a toy, and with his license in hand he bought a 4-year-old 1959 Mercedes Benz 220SE from a traveling salesman. With the car, he entered several sports car rallies. He also drag-raced a variety of borrowed cars, including his mother's Cadillac.

The 12-hour Norwester Rally in 1963 was only his second rally but McCaw and a friend won the "unequipped class," meaning they had only a stopwatch and the car's odometer to work their time and distance calculations. The victory banquet was in the Space Needle.

"We weren't old enough to get in the banquet because they were serving liquor and we were only 17," McCaw laughed "They finally said, well you can stand in this area - it really was like a hallway - but we couldn't be in for the cocktail hour."

Some local young drivers of that era fudged about their date of birth to get their chance on the track. McCaw found a different approach around the 21-year-old minimum age rule. A friend was involved in building and racing what was known as Formula 4 single-seaters.

"Warren (Gibbons) would enter the race (a combination regional and national event of the Sports Car Club of America) and he would let me run the regional. He would slow down behind his station wagon and I would put on his helmet and go out and race. I ran three or four races that way."

After his 18th birthday, McCaw got serious about his racing and with a friend bought a former national championship sports car, an Austin-Healey Sprite, the model called the "Bugeye" because of its almost bizarre front body. "I didn't have enough money to buy a race car so I convinced my friend that this was a good investment for him because he could learn how to race.

"We paid about $800 or $900 for the car down in Portland and we would drive every other race but he didn't have the enthusiasm for it," McCaw remembers.

Wanted power

After several seasons of production car racing with the Bugeye, McCaw was bored by its lack of power. "And it was not a particularly graceful handling car," he said. A friend convinced McCaw that sports car club's C-sports racing class would be more fun, so he bought a used Elva Mark 7 in 1968. He still owns it.

Doing most of his own mechanical work, McCaw raced it until 1971. "I was usually in the top three in races in the Northwest."

With a mixture of frowns and grimaces, he recalled running in a national championship race in Atlanta in which he wound up behind Seattle's Dale Forsgren.

"I was quicker in the turns than Dale but I couldn't get away from him because of what I thought was a slipping clutch," McCaw said. "Actually I got stuck behind Dale because he was a pretty crafty driver and I would get on the straightaways and the clutch would start to slip."

Later McCaw discovered the clutch plate was not slipping after all. The clutch pedal was sticking, not allowing the clutch plate to fully engage. "If I had known then, I could have pulled the pedal back with my toe" and gone racing.

McCaw's investment business schedule overwhelmed his racing interests in 1971. "That's really when the professional side began creeping into amateur racing," he said. At about the same time, the Northwest Region of Sports Car Club of America and another sanctioning organization, the International Conference of Northwest Sports Car Clubs, increased the intensity of their competing struggles.

McCaw held competition licenses from both and did not take sides, but was bothered by the struggle, which injured the sport. He dropped out but his interest did not evaporate.

In the late 1970s he put the Elva back together. "I got the bug and got more and more old stuff, you know, buying this assortment of parts in a basket that someone (else) thought one day would resemble a car again," he said.

If McCaw, a bachelor, had children, he would try to get them into racing, he said: "Racing is a great outlet for kids. Other than abbreviating the tire life, I didn't hurt the car.

"I think it really is too bad the kids don't have more access to go-karts and race tracks. It is a great outlet and I think road racing really teaches a level of discipline that makes people better drivers.

"As fast as I drove on the street I was pretty sensible about it. I was really conscious about what was going on and I always had a plan."

The performance of the Allard that McCaw will drive this weekend relates to another vehicle he drove just once, the Slo-mo-shun V unlimited hydroplane that he helped restore. "They both have huge steering wheels and neither of them wants to stop."