History Can-Am: Raw Power

Darn fine machines, F5000, 305 c.i. injected Lola 332, Hewland box...small and mean...and nothing sounds better on the straight as a good old Detroit V-8...........Al Unser, Mario, Redman, Lunger and Posey were rulers back in the earlly to mid 70's.....many of the cars were ruined with the incarnation of the lousy "Can Am" of 1977 which were fullbodied 5000 chassis'....no where near as cool as 5000 and no where near a real Can Am series...

 

Heres a McLaren coupe that was at Laguna Seca in 1982. It was a real street driven, street legal McLaren...I know, I saw him tooling around in Monterey all weekend. He had some "mufflers" on it, but you knew it was coming long before you saw it......man. It seems like yesterday. It was that cool.

 

Can any one tell me how to post short video clips i have saved on my computer of the can am cars

 

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Great thread. I love the Can-Am. It was a great series, but in hindsight, you could see it could only ever have a limited life span. It basically had no rules, other than that you had to have 2 seats. It was really more about the cars themselves than the racing, which was often quite predictable and quite strung out, especially in 69 when McLaren were at their peak, winning all 11 races in their M8B. That year they finished 1-2 eight times, and even managed a 1-2-3 at one round when Dan Gurney drove the teams spare car after his customer McLaren failed.

John Surtees won it the first year in 66 in a Lola T70, when the fields were packed with large numbers of customer T70s and McLaren M1B etc. Then McLaren began their domination in 67, and that continued until the end of the 71 season, after which Mark Donohue with Penske and Porsche arrived. They won it in 72, and McLaren realised than that they couldn't compete, and withdrew.

Donohue was an amazing human being. He was an incredible race driver, and an amazing engineer and race car developer. Yet he was also completely paranoid that his skills as a driver weren't that good, and that he may be passed over for another driver, which pushed him to develop his cars to always win.

He told the German engineers at Porsche, after several weeks of intensive testing of the 917/10 which was hugely problematic, "It will never have enough power until I can spin the rear wheels at the end of the straightaway in high gear". By that stage, the engine was producing 800hp, and delivering it very nicely thanks to Donohues drive to make it perfect.

Porsche won the 72 Can-Am, and typically, Donohue was worried about his rivals being able to beat him in 73 with their own 917/10s, so he and Porsche developed the incredible 917/30.

After he'd won the 73 season, the SCCA decided to try and level the playing field by introducing a fuel efficiency rule, whereby the cars would have to be able to complete a race on a certain amount of fuel. That would mean the top teams would have to detune their cars. Porsche weren't interested, so pulled out, leaving only Shadow as the last remaining factory team.

After Shadow dominated the 74 season, the SCCA pulled the plug. The series was now suffering from small fields, poor spectator support, and dull racing. A few years later they tried to revive the Ca-Am name by making their F5000 teams put full bodies on their F5000 cars, but it was never what the original was.

 

In " Chevrolet racing?" Van Valkenburg says Donahue was the ultimate test driver. No matter what was changed on the car by the time Mark was making the second lap he was going as fast as the car would ever go. His times rarely changed after the first lap.

 

After the Porsche domination the CanAm series morphed into rebodied Formula A or Formula 5000 cars with a 5 litre displacement rule (and I think a stock block rule ) still great racing! This Walter Wolf car was actually specifically built as a second generation CanAm car and not a rebody.

 

Bruce McLaren built some road versions of his CanAm cars for the street, the M6BGT,...this one was locally built (Toronto) using a body from the original supplier in England (Specialized Mouldings), a Weber equipped SBC, a Pantera ZF transaxle, a custom built monocoque chassis and some leftover Lola, March and McLaren suspension parts.

 

Since this thread has wandered a bit, i'll add to it. I crewed on a canam car (my mind is foggy, a McClaren M8C?, is that right?) and to be sure is was a wicked piece of business, injected BBC and all. I've also crewed on an asphalt super modified. Supers are kinda rare, do not pass on an oppertunity to see one of those things in action at like Osewgo NY. Here's a pic of one, it too is BBC injected.

 

I've never seen one, but sure hope I could see a race before I'm too old. Too bad these aren't raced nationwide, eh? WOO you say? WOO what? WOO cares! Supers would be tits. Gary

 

Unlimited ? You bet ! Mount up a 40mm cannon and have Road Warrior Can Am.

 

That's not an F5000... As a matter of fact it's Brian Blain's 1969 Lola T163. I used to maintain and crew chief that car for Brian at vintage events. I've been to racetracks all over the country, and I race supermodifieds... There was NOTHING to compare to standing on the pit wall at Road America as 36 vintage Can-Am cars went by to take the green. It literally took our breath away.

As a side note, we changed engines in that car the night before the feature race at the 40th reunion. Drew quite a crowd of "real" Can-Am mechanics, as it was the first time a team had swapped engines since the actual series ran in the 60s and 70s.

 

What a great thread! I was fortunate enough to see the 917 dominate at Road Atlanta in '73 (on a weekend off duty from Ft Bragg) and also see guys like Lothar Motsenbacher (sp?) chasing him (laps down) in their McLarens. Rinzler's 917s were there, too. CanAm, TransAm, and F5000 were the heyday of roadracing in the US. "The SCCA couldn't run a professional racing series to save it's life. They created the Can-Am and screwed it up. They created the Trans-Am and F5000 series and screwed them up too. " Kurt O. As a full-time participant in the TransAm from '85 thru '93, this is about as simply and truthfully as it can be said. vic

 

Imagine the balls it took to drive one of those porsche's after lookin' at all the chickenshit welds you were surrounded with.

 

I read an article with one of the drivers of the early F1 turbo cars, the Renault i guess but can't remember the name of the french driver. He said it had so much power that all he could do was to quickly aim at the next corner, then floor it and wish for it to go straight... Love it too.

 

At the end of the F1 turbo era in the late eighties they did a test of an F1 turbo car and it could turn the tires in 7th gear.





Ago

 

can't get enough...

 

Just My Opinion, But Supers are what ( Should be ) The top class of American open wheel race cars.

Huge HP - American made tube chassis - American Mills

Can You Imagine 33 of these monsters at the Brick Yard....!

Oh Yah...!

 

You don't see them at Indy because the super rich guys haven't infested the super modifieds yet. They are still the best show around, wouldn't that be something?

 

Indy is too fast for supers as we know them. You'd need something more along the lines of the F5000 cars shown earlier. The supermods are the true children of the Can-Am though... That's where the huge tires, injected big blocks, and wing techology came from. The injector on my supermod engine was originally built for Can Am racing...

I'm building a brand new supermod right now, and going back to some of the aero principles Jim Hall orginally came up with for the Can Am.

 

And today the IRL cars are all exactly alike, with the same engine, power levels, transmissions, and are soooooooooo boring one wonders how they keep on going at all. Its no longer a race, its a parade.

 

There would be a great way to make that interesting again.

Bring the Front Engine Roadsters back...

Of course they wouldn't look like the the ones that got fased out when the Mid Engined Cars took over, they'd look something like this:



I think it would be a hell of a lot more interesting to watch, give a real link to Indy History, and create some distance between it and F1.

If there was some incentive in the rules, the Teams would spend the Time and Money to build them...

 

Ex west racer, hope you bring it to Ct. when you get it done. Why not post some pics, hopefully they will be considered on topic.

 

Here. Post #11. Sorry, don't want to jam up the thread.
http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=368192&highlight=swept+headers

The Can-Am series was also the arena where the pre-preg carbon fiber monocoque was introduced to America (Jim Hall again). The car was the Chaparral 2H, a 4 wheeled space shuttle if there ever was one. It didn't work...

 

2H is Hall's "ugly duckling" but is unappreciated for its very forward thinking. Surtees wouldn't drive it. They ran a McLaren M12 between development on the 2H. Hall was out of driving competitively for good since the horrific crash at Las Vegas, and the clash with Surtees did not bode well for the car or Chaparral's season...and then there was the 2J...

 

my college instructor , Sherm Decker , beat the rich boys in a battered Cooper Ford [aka KING COBRA } at cumberland , maryland 1965 ussrc early can am race

 

like the jim shampine rear engine super mod at oswego ?

 

From what I've read, Surtees fucked that car up...

It was designed to work with very precise Aerodynamics.

The Rear mounted Radiators were supposed to get their air from the laminair flow over the body, for example.

But Surtees didnt like the lack of visibillity and had a hole cut in the roof so he could drive it with his head outside of the bodywork instead of being in the closed coupe version.

Cutting a hole in the skin messed up the boundry layer, and they had to try and restore it by putting vortex generators all over the thing...

As cool as it is right now, I cant help but wonder what it could have been capable off if Hall could have done his own test driving, and Developed it.
( he was recovering from a racing crash, at the time...)