History Can-Am: Raw Power

True story (Scout's honor) I was at the Glenn back in the mid-70's for a FIA 6 hour race (Saturday's feature) and Penske had rolled in with two of these for Mark in Sunday's CANAM race. The primary car got wrecked on the back straight (the bad tire?) in the first few laps on the track but the Penske boys pulled out the spare. Mark immediately broke the out right lap record for the long course by something like 3 seconds in the spare. When he pulled in the pits after that run, he just sat in the car (assume his knees shaking). He was a pale white when he took off his helmet and it took him quite awhile to de plane. I have those pix someplace as I was only a pit stall down from him when he pulled in. Amazing drive. Jackie Stewart was there, too, and he and Mark had a chat. Jackie was entered with Jody Sheckter in a Ford Capri in the FIA race (broke motor in practice, DNS). The team I was hanging out with shared a garage stall with that Capri for the race (we crashed out, sad to say).

Penske and that car ruint the Can AM. I think they lapped the field twice that Sunday (all but the second place car anyway). No one else came close. Even rich guys get pissed off and quit when they can't win, eh?

Still, very cool class. I vote for a "super" cup car, or super TransAM car, or super door slammer PSC, or super Indy car, or super-whatever class. The sanctioning body only only gets to regulate the weight, overall dimensions, engine size and fuel allowd for the race duration. EVERYTHING else is free! One car per team allowed to run the feature on Sundays!

Gary

 

Oh the days at Riverside. Can't seem to get the sound of the big blocks out of my head. Loved to stand on the bridge and listen to them shift into high gear. WOW is all I can say.

 

That washer & dryer acted like a vacuum, to suck the car to the ground for better traction. Never really worked out. The car was a Chaparral 2J ground effect car, or "super sucker."

 

Thank You for that link,I've been searching for any pics of this car,for years. I worked for Ric Moore, years ago, as did other members of my famliy. I was there as his son Greg, started driving a go-kart around the car dealership parking lot, leading to Cart and unfortunately tragedy.

 

Another thing the Chaparall 2J Sucker Car was famous for was sucking up gravel and debris off the track and hurling it out the back towards the car behind it.

JG

 

Yeah, if I one of the drivers trying to compete with that in a non-downforce car, I would have made a big stink out of that too.

That doesnt mean it was really a problem, though...

 

Thank you all above for your stories and knowledge of these cars and history. It brought back a memory of a trip to the Glen with my dad when these guys ran... Thanks..

 

Oh how I would love to go for a drive in a late sixties Chaparral or McClaren.

Hanging out on Mulholland Drive in the seventies after the series was canceled might have been fun as well.

How many here still have their L&M Lola or Black Shadow A/FX cars?

 

No slot cars here, but I have the logo from my Shadow T shirt!

 

The 917/30 ruled ass. They weren't kiddin around with that car. I love the concept. Put the most power in the lightest thing with the widest tires. Awesome.

 

Pretty cool that this has stayed open. These cars were some of the baddest ass things ever built.

Even if it was done again it wouldn't be the same.

 

I can feel my guts vibrating now...earthshaking

 

Like already posted, Porsche was out to win. When they were developing the 917 to win Le mans they had several air cooled flat 12s, one had shared crank pins like a V8 and one with separate throws like an opposed 911. they also tried coupling 2 six cranks together. They had a 16 cyl. they ran on the dyno but didn't need it to win. After Canam the Porsche 935 turbo race car was unbeatable, it also had a spindly aluminum frame and roll cage.


Ago

 

Would have been interesting if there had been an answer to the 917/30 leviathan. With further development there may have been a turbo BB V8 contender, and a player like McLaren or Jim Hall (if he wasn't so pissed over the 2J) potentially could have developed a chassis to keep it on the road. The combination of Porsche, Roger Penske and Mark Donohue was surely a gorilla in the room, and by that time the wind had gone out of everyone's sails. The 917 program was costly for Porsche, but overall was an unmitigated success. They had actually built 25 of the original 917's to meet the homologation standard, something rarely done for a prototype of that complexity...

 

we had five of these racing at my local track ( Teretonga) here in Invercargill , New Zealand a couple of years ago.... Man they were fantastic, for 40 year old technology they still lapped faster than the new stuff.

 

...

 

I used to hang out on Mulholland in the '70s a lot. Hang out, race, get chased by the cops, you know, typical teenage activities.

Kurt O.

 

To simulate a 917 today you could take your shifter cart and put a twin turboed hayabusa engine in it and take it for a spin.

 

Hartley Engines is making a V8 out of hayabusa blocks...400HP out of a 2.8 liter...the thing is tiny

 

Which was one of its weak points. The fans were fragile and the snowmobile motor driving them gave problems also. I knew a guy who was an SCCA corner worker and was working Turn 6 at Riverside for the Can-Am in 1970. Corner workers are pretty savvy people. They know the cars, the drivers and the track. They can usually tell when someone is carrying too much speed or is off-line and going to lose it. He told me that at the beginning of practice when the 2J came up the hill on its first hot lap, that the entire corner crew bailed out. The 2J was carrying so much speed that everyone was sure it was going to crash right where they were standing. But the 2J, with "Quick Vic" Elford driving, just turned in and took the turn no problem, faster than any other car they had ever seen. He said it took most of the session before they got used to the speed the 2J could carry through the turns. The 2J qualified on pole a full 2 seconds faster than the next car and blew and engine on the second lap of the race.

In all the years Jim Hall and the Chaparralls ran the Can-Am, they won exactly one race. But they were usually fast and always pushing the envelope.

Kurt O.

 

...Formula 5000 are just as cool.

 

These cars were truly too tuff to tame, after a while I think the scca was just scared to death of what could happen if one of these missiles ever got airborne like the Mercedes fiasco at Le Mans in '55. You have to remember these things were capable of going nearly twice as fast as the 300SLRs that dominated in the 50's, and still having to corner and handle, to say nothing about staying attached to the ground. Aerodynamics were so important to these cars that if something failed, there was no telling where they would end up going, could have been ugly! Still they were my favorite road race cars of all time, had to be an unbelievable rush to lap a road course in a fuckin' rocket like that. waldo

 

I love a quote I read from Denny Hulme, something to the effect "When I saw that thing (the 2J) suck down on it's skirts when they started the fan motor on the grid, I knew we were in trouble"...

The 2J generated enough downforce (when it was working well) to run upside down.

 

Most modern downforce cars can do that now at speed, without skirts!

The 917-30 made around 1100 HP from 5.4 liters. In the '80s BMW built a 4-cylinder turbo charged 1.5 liter F1 engine that put out 1100-1200 HP in race trim and a reported 1400-1500 HP in qualifying trim (i.e. 3 laps and BOOOM!) And the really amazing thing (at least to me) about the BMW engine is that it used a production car block! They actually found that an engine with about 60K on it was really strong and they would use those blocks for the race engines.

I love this stuff!


Kurt O

 

Modern racers have mastered gobs of downforce, but at speed! I just marvel at the idea of a car that generates that kind of force even on the grid. As much as I understand killing off the 2J, (and the Brabham Alfas a few years later) you have to hand it to them for trying. Those Bimmers were in the Brabhams I think, right? They were impressive and beautiful cars. The turbo f1 era produced some frightfully powerful machines.

 

Did someone say Formula 5000, famous Pike turn Long Beach 1975

 

Shadow Formula 5000 car

 

This thread is a trip down memory lane for me. The Can-Am series sorta started as USSRC. From there it went kinda insane. To say that the cars were ridiculously overpowered...well, that would be a gross understatement. The noise, the spectacle, the raw speed (quickness and top speed) was incredible. I am very lucky to have lived throught the early days of USRRC...had a Cooper Monaco Chev....into the later years and finally, the dreaded death knell for Can-Am.
Some get to heaven before they leave the earth.

 

Man, I think that was the Jackie Oliver car. He'd go allllll the way through Turn 9 at Riverside with the back end kicked out...damn near like drifting...big ass Dodge engine I believe...pretty, too

 

That's like 938 mph right? I grew up near mid ohio and these were the most fun to watch because the injected big blocks sounded so wicked on the back stretch.