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John Surtees
40 autosport.com January 17 2013
Can-am’s
First King
the first clash of Can-am monsters was filled with talent and innovation.
surtees and his small team prevailed in one of his greatest achievements
Bruce McLaren, Jim Hall, Jackie
Stewart, Graham Hill, Dan Gurney,
Chris Amon, Phil Hill, Denny
Hulme, Mark Donohue, Mario
Andretti, Peter Revson, Anthony
Joseph Foyt and Rufus Parnell
Jones – John Surtees beat them
all to win the 1966 Los Angeles
Times Grand Prix at Riverside and
so put his bid for the inaugural
Can-Am title back on track.
Malcolm Malone, his mechanic
on loan from Lola Cars, winched the
red-with-white-arrowhead Lola
T70 Mk2 onto a trailer hooked to
their first-generation Chevy Van
– this was before the big-bucks
days of McLaren’s orange ‘crusher’
and Porsche’s turbocharged
panzerwagens – and turned it and
his mind to Stardust International
Raceway in Las Vegas, scene of the
concluding round. Surtees, racing
himself fit again, was about to
show Ferrari the error of its ways.
A T70 and Surtees was a
formidable combination. Having
overseen the development of Eric
Broadley’s semi-monocoque
design, John trusted it, even
though it had tried to kill him at
Mosport in September 1965 when
victory at Riverside got the title challenge back on-track against a formidable field
a front upright shattered.
“You can be confident with
a car that gives you consistent
feedback and reacts and responds
to you in an honest way,” he says.
“Just forgiving enough – a car that
is too easy is never the quickest
– it was very driveable.”
Before his accident Surtees
had won at Mosport, Brands Hatch
and St Jovite in 1965, making the
Lola-Chevy the weapon to have.
The Mk2 version featured a
small-block V8 – prepped
by LA’s Traco concern in Surtees’s
case – and (mainly) a four-speed
Hewland, but was considerably
lighter due to an increased
percentage of aluminium plus
bonding and riveting instead of
welding. Surtees, who used one to
again win at Brands in August ’66,
was about to embark on the most
lucrative streak of his career.
It helped that benchmark
Jim Clark was wrestling with
uninspired Lotuses – the lumpen
BRM H16-engined Type 43 F1 car
and the whippy Group 7 30 –
but then Surtees, as great racing
drivers must, had always backed
himself to beat anyone, given a