There's Can-Am thunder at Mosport again

 

I remember it as if it were yesterday. The images and the sounds are seared in my brain.

It began with the sound – a veritable thunder-clap that struck a couple kilometres away when the field took the green flag, and it resounded through the hills, increasing in intensity for the less than a minute it took them to approach.

Dominant above the general roar as they came closer was the blat of two big Chevy rat-engines on full song as they swept through corner four.

And then they appeared – two bright orange bolides, almost side-by-side, diving down into the valley of Corner Five like low-flying fighter planes in tight formation, already well ahead of the pursuing pack.

In an instant their exhaust note changed to a bark as 16 throttle blades snapped shut simultaneously. Their high-mounted wings shook sideways atop the toothpick struts that supported them, and the cars hunkered down even farther, darting this way and that, as they scrambled for traction under hard braking up into 5a — Moss Corner.

It was McLaren and Hulme – the Kiwis – the Bruce and Denny show. The 1969 Mosport Can-Am race was on!

The 1960s were a golden age of racing and the Can-Am cars were at its forefront. Defined loosely by FIA Group 7 regulations, and almost unlimited in terms of specification, they were all about raw power – the most exciting racers since the pre-war Grand Prix cars of Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz.

Those were the days!

The days that drew more than 100,000 fans to Mosport for a race weekend.

The days that saw such iconic drivers as Chris Amon, Mario Andretti, Jack Brabham, Mark Donohue, George Follmer, A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, Denny Hulme, Bruce McLaren, Jim Hall, Graham Hill, Brian Redman, Peter Revson, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees and many more dueling wheel-to-wheel in what were then the most powerful road racers on the planet.

The days when the cars of even the top teams were towed in on open trailers behind pickup trucks and a couple of naïve engineering-student race fans could not only rub shoulders with the drivers and crews but chat with them at length about the technical nuances of their cars.

You can't repeat that history, but fortunately you can revisit it. So that's what I am doing this weekend when the Can-Am cars are featured at Mosport's annual VARAC (Vintage Automobile Racing Association of Canada) vintage racing festival.

And I will be accompanied by that same Detroit-based engineering classmate and friend with whom I attended so many Can-Am and F1 races back in the day.

The original Can-Am series was born in 1966 and ran through 1974, jointly organized by the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and the Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs (CASC).

It was an evolution of the U.S. Road Racing Championship (USRRC), which featured many of the same cars and drivers and ran on many of the same tracks (including Mosport). The two series continued to co-exist for a couple more years.

But two things made the Can-Am both different and unique: it was internationally sanctioned and thus attracted the top drivers from Europe and around the world, and it paid big bucks.

Indeed, the Can-Am was the first major road-racing series in North America to attract a corporate sponsor – Johnson Wax – which continued that sponsorship for six years. According to reports from the time, the Can-Am race purses were exceeded on this continent only by the Indianapolis 500 and possibly the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen.

Equally important as the drivers to the series' success were the cars themselves: a field far more diverse in their approach to a common formula than anything we see today.

While the series included occasional forays by manufacturers such as Ferrari, until its latter days, when Porsche arrived, it was dominated by smaller, dedicated race-car builders: BRM, Chaparral, Lola, March, McLaren and Shadow, along with a number of one-offs.

Ford played around at the edges of the series, without ever taking it seriously, but GM was hugely, if surreptitiously, involved both in terms of engineering collaboration with Jim Hall's Chaparral team and in the supply of specially-developed race engines to multiple teams.

Even Nissan and Toyota built Can-Am-spec cars of their own designs, which they raced in a Japanese Group 7 series but never brought to the Can-Am itself.

Although Lola had the car to beat in the beginning, McLaren ultimately became the dominant marque, with the cars that carried Bruce's name winning 37 of 43 races during the first five seasons and continuing victorious well after his death in a testing crash in 1970.

Race-car engineering was on a steep learning curve in those days, and that was particularly true of aerodynamic development – long before computational fluid dynamics simulations and wind-tunnel testing became its driving forces.

With few rules restrictions to limit the imagination, the Can-Am was a hotbed of try-it-and-see-if-it-works experimentation, some of which – like free-standing wings – proved highly successful. Others ideas, such as tiny little wheels and tires and "sucker" technology that vacuumed a car down onto the track, either didn't work or were regulated out of existence.

What really attracted the fans wasn't the technology – although seeing the high-winged Chaparrals for the first time was a mind-blowing experience, to use the vernacular of the time. What they came to see was the sheer spectacle: the speed, the colour and, above all, the relentless cacophony of sound.

Never were the race cars more spectacular than during the 1972-74 period, when Porsche joined the series in collaboration with Roger Penske, fielding a succession of turbocharged, 12-cylinder 917/10 and 917/30 racers of unprecedented complexity.

They proved to be both fast and reliable – so much so that they effectively drove away, as well as driving away from, the competition, leaving lap records in their wake.

Some blame the Porsche domination for killing the series, which ended part way through the 1974 season. But other factors, not the least being the loss of Johnson sponsorship, the widespread effects of the OPEC oil crisis, and the general mood of the period, which was by no means pro racing, were probably equal if not greater factors.

The Can-Am name was revived by the SCCA in 1977 for a new series using closed-wheel versions of cars from the then recently-canceled Formula A/5000 series.

It produced some good racing and attracted and nourished some good drivers – including a teen-aged Paul Tracy who won a Can-Am race at Mosport in one of Canadian driver Horst Kroll's Frisbees in 1986. Outdone in terms of both speed and spectacle, not to mention commercial support, by the rival IMSA GTP series, that proved to be the last year for the revived Can-Am series' existence.

There will be cars from both the original and revived series racing at Mosport this weekend, as well as those in a host of other classes. And there will be a special tribute to the many cars of different types built by Lola, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

We'll give all the others at least a passing glance. But we'll be spending most of our time with the Can-Am cars from the '60s and early '70s, and in the process revisiting our youth.

There will be racing all day today and

tomorrow. More information about Mosport and the VARAC Vintage Racing Festival can be found at mosport.com.

 

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