The influence of money in road racing began to have a notable effect in the early 60’s.

Racing was becoming a booming business and drivers and teams could actually make a reasonable living driving in series throughout the world.

This began to percolate down to the constructors and teams.

Some races were lucrative enough – paying travel, starting, lap and prize money – to make it profitable not only to travel long distances to participate but also to build specialized vehicles specifically for regional race series.

What had long been accepted practice at singularly important and very lucrative races like the Indianapolis 500 began to be prevalent in Australia and New Zealand and particularly in the United States.

For the 1964 Tasman series Bruce McLaren asked his team at Cooper Cars to build and prepare two special cars specifically to compete in the rich series of races that were home to him.

Cooper felt it was too much work, so Bruce and the Mayer brothers, Timmy the driver and ...