Can-Am Series Successes

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31499, 13 October 1967, Page 10

Can-Am Series Successes

(By BRUCE MCLAREN) A FTER our showing in last year’s inaugural CanAm sports car series we came home with our tails between our legs. We had tried hard, but we hadn’t won a race. It had been a bit like our formula one year no results worth mentioning, but a lot of lessons learned. With the 1967 Can-Am series offering a total of half a million dollars in prize money, we had to go back and try again. Goodyear wanted to help us, so we were able to lay plans last December. We felt the opposition would be stiff, particularly from Jim Hall and his Chaparrals.

The fact that our BRM V-12 formula one engine did not show up in February as promised gave the sports car programme a big boost For a completely new car it wasn’t really very new. With the exception of the drive-shafts everything else was a deve-

lopment of something we had done before. DESIGN Our design philosophy? Simplicity, light weight, and a rider that I stressed fairly hard—strength. The only area left loose in the original design was the extreme rear of the tail. During testing we played with wings and a few other ideas, but finally ended up with a fairly conventional duck-tail. The testing was extensive. We ran without the body for a month, my intention being to make it handle as well as a good single-seater, and then with the body fitted to use aerodynamics to make it even better.

I spun the car (unintentionally, I might add) at fairly high speed once. A racing driver gets fairiy used to this sort of thing but at the time Robin Herd, our designer, was kneeling on the passenger’s seat facing backwards taking the measurements of rear suspension movement He hasn’t been quite the same since! GOING WELL

But now we’re going so well, I can hardly believe it! Three wins in the Can-Am series thanks to Mr Hulme (he hasn’t won the world championship yet, so we

aren’t calling him Sir—just yet, anyway), 1-2 finishes at Bridgehampton and Mosport, and fastest two qualifying times in each of three races. It doesn’t really seem all that hard either, although I did make the mistake of saying that aloud in front of one of the team. “Hard . . .?” he queried with a rather incredulous look on his face, “I didn’t see you in the garage at fow o’clock this morning!" Before Bridgehampton the mechanics had three nights in a row to 3 a.m. and then an all-nighter before Mosport. Now it seems just too easy to forget the little meeting we called at the Coinbrook factory in early July. All holidays were cancelled, Saturday was to be a full working day. and 5 p.m. was to be considered the middle of the afternoon. It speaks volumes for these people who work their way into motor racing that there wasn’t a murmur. At Elkhart Lake for the first race of the series Denny knocked 10 seconds off the lap record. “You've got to demoralise 'em right away,” he said, and then I finished up with pole position a tenth faster than Denny’s time! We were both two seconds faster than Dan Gurney who was next on the grid. The Chaparral wasn’t fast at all, and the Holman and Moody Ford was withdrawn before

the race. Denny charged off into the lead from the rolling start, with my car tucked in behind him. I did precisely three laps. I’d lost oil from an oil cooler leak. I didn’t know whether to cry, shoot myself, hurl rocks at the Lolas, or what. . .

Eventually I settled for walking back to the pits, sitting there getting more and more nervous inventing trivial problems that might cost Denny his lead, and biting my nails down the wrist. But this time Lady Luck was with us and I’m pleased to say she has followed us around since.

FUEL LEAK At Bridgehampton cylinder head studs snapped in the first practice day because of bad heat treatment. At Mosport it was a leak in one of the fuel bags in my car. An hour before the race the mechanics went to lower the car off its jack stands, and the leak appeared. The car had been sitting with full tanks since early morning. Fifty gallons is an awful lot of petrol. Getting it out of the tanks involved filling every vehicle we had around and some we didn’t. When we got to the stage of pumping it out faster than we could empty the cans into cars and trucks, we simply tipped it over the fence. By the time we had fitted a new rubber fuel bag, filled the tanks and got the engine running, the race had started. Just 40 seconds earlier to be precise!! This was just the exact gap that could be made up without going completely crazy.

I made it to second place with just 10 laps left. Denny was well out in front, but two laps from the flag he had an incident at the hairpin and ploughed off the road folding the left front comer in on to the wheel. The fibreglass cut the tyre, it went flat, but Denny limped on with smoke pouring from the demolished front end to win. A journalist asked me after the race, “Who writes your scripts Frankenheimer?” Anyway we’re just halfway through the series and with $60,000 in prize money so far, I reckon we’ve put a smile back on the faces of our accountant and bank manager.