Can-Am 2.0 had the star names, established drivers and emerging talents: drivers such as Jacky Ickx, Keke Rosberg, Alan Jones, Patrick Tambay, Al Holbert Jr, Bobby Rahal and Danny Sullivan. It had the tracks – Laguna Seca, Road America, Riverside and Mosport included – and even Formula 1 support slots on occasion.

In its pomp the relaunched Canadian-American Challenge Cup had both quality and quantity. Yet single-seat Can-Am, as it is often called, had two problems on its 1977 launch, one that lay in the past, the other in the future.  

The first problem was the original Can-Am series that had withered and died barely a couple of years before it was born again with Formula 5000 machinery clothed in all-enveloping bodywork. Second-generation Can-Am machinery never captured the race-going public’s imagination in the same way as the first.

Can-Am’s revival is today somewhere between overlooked and forgotten, the legacy of a series that lingered on into the mid-1980s largely erased by another new championship that followed in its wheel tracks.  

Can-Am was quickly supplanted as North America’s premier road-racing category by the CART Indycar series. As the breakaway from the United States Auto Club’s National Championship added more road courses and subsequently street circuits to its schedule in the years that followed its foundation in 1979, Can-Am’s thunder was stolen. Also lost to the Championship Auto Racing Teams organisation were Can-Am’s best drivers, teams and tracks. 

Many of those who do remember the recreation regard the Sports Car Club of America’s decision to bring Can-Am back by turning the ostensibly successful F5000 single-seater series into a sportscar championship as sacrilege at worst, cynical at best.

F5000’s star driver opts for the latter. Brit Brian Redman, who in 1976 completed a hat-trick of titles driving Lola machinery for a team run by its US importer, Carl Haas, and Chaparral boss Jim Hall, reckons the drivers “saw it for what it was – a marketing gimmick”.  

Haas/Hall Lola-Chevy T333 took six victories in seven starts with Tambay, who waltzed to inaugural single-seat Can-Am crown

Photo by: William Murenbeeld LAT Images via Getty Images

For long-time Long Beach Grand Prix promoter Chris Pook, who also ran the F5000 teams’ association, it was the same. “The SCCA was still in love with Can-Am and thought they could somehow bring it back just by throwing a sportscar body on our cars,” recalls Pook, who combined his roles when F5000 machinery contested the inaugural Long Beach street race in September 1975 as a trial for F1’s arrival the following March. “Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.”  

The story behind the SCCA’s decision to remodel and rebrand F5000 wasn’t straightforward either. The single-seater series that had started life as Formula A had decent grids and top-line drivers, and a link-up between the SCCA and USAC for 1974 added further shine.

The move, which came at a time when USAC was looking to drop turbocharged engines in favour of normally aspirated stock blocks a la F5000, brought in the Vel’s Parnelli Jones team with Mario Andretti as driver. Al Unser Sr would join him in an expanded two-car effort in the second year. Brother Bobby, as well as Johnny Rutherford and Gordon Johncock, made the odd F5000 cameo in the USAC years, too.  

“We were racing in front of empty grandstands. The fans for some reason weren’t interested” Brian Redman

Redman beat Andretti to the title in 1974 and 1975, and then Unser in F5000’s final year, but he’s insistent it was no cakewalk. “The record books make it look as though I dominated, but it was actually tremendous racing,” he reckons.

But from the cockpit of his Chevrolet-powered Lola T332C in 1976 he saw that the series had a problem. “We were racing in front of empty grandstands,” he remembers. “The fans for some reason weren’t interested.” That was obviously a problem for the tracks.  

The late Burdette ‘Berdie’ Martin, then head of the SCCA’s Pro Racing arm and a future FIA vice-president, remembered in an interview with this author a gathering of the race promoters circa the autumn of 1976 at which they raised their dissatisfaction with F5000.

Up-and-comer Rosberg won twice in 1979 with Newman-Freeman, then drove rejigged team’s Lola T530 in final two races of 1980

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

“Despite having, I believe, six Indy 500 winners on the grid [though never at one time] they decided that they didn’t want 5000,” recalled Martin in 2005.

Present at the meeting in suburban Chicago were representatives of Citicorp, which Haas had landed as a sponsor via its First National City Travelers Checks arm and then persuaded to lend its name to the series as well. “It was very embarrassing, because the representatives of Citicorp were there, and all they could hear was, ‘We want Can-Am’,” said Martin. “The tracks were very vocal about it.” 

An illustration – literally so – of the infatuation with old Can-Am on the part of the promoters is provided by the cover of the race programme for the inaugural round of the revived series at Mont-Tremblant in June 1977. It doesn’t feature a photo of the new breed of Can-Am racer, rather the old: there’s a papaya orange McLaren M8B, in all its 1969 high-wing glory, with marque founder Bruce McLaren driving.  

Martin explained how he’d “anticipated the problem” with the circuits a month or so earlier at the Trois-Rivieres Formula Atlantic race the SCCA co-ran, like Can-Am old and new, with the Canadian Auto Sports Clubs organisation: “I had taken our supplementary regulations with a drawing of a 5000 on the front and scribbled some fenders over the wheels. Eric Broadley from Lola was with us. He couldn’t really see the point, but he said it wouldn’t be a problem.” 

There was one problem with using F5000 machinery as the base for the new category, however. The tracks wanted longer races than the 30-gallon tanks of the cars allowed: F5000 races were sprints, the series settling on a format of two heats and a final.

“We’d ended up with 80-mile races in 5000 and the promoters didn’t feel they could do anything with that,” added Martin. “Those races weren’t long enough to be a real feature.” The fix was easy. Fuel stops were introduced in Can-Am using NASCAR-style refuelling bottles, and the races run over a duration sometimes approaching 200 miles.  

Ickx was hired by Haas/Hall for 1979 and continued team’s run of titles. Trois-Rivieres (pictured) was one of the races he didn’t win

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

Citicorp didn’t take much persuading to shift its deal over to new-style Can-Am. “They were sold on the idea of 5000, but when we started talking about Can-Am, they got even more excited,” said Martin.

“They gave us a deadline, some time in December, and we had to work kinda fast. Carl and I went out and beat the bush with the promoters. Citicorp wanted nine races with purses in the region of $75,000 [the equivalent of more than £300,000 today] and they were going to match that with advertising and promotion.” 

The short gestation showed in the motley field assembled for the season-opener at Mont-Tremblant for the traditional summer kick-off of a Can-Am season. Just 18 cars turned up, compared with 37 for F5000’s swansong at Riverside the previous October. Seven were Group 6 sportscars running in a class for cars under two litres, while a couple of old-style Can-Ams were there for the ride.  

The short gestation showed in the motley field assembled for the season-opener at Mont-Tremblant for the traditional summer kick-off of a Can-Am season

Seven of the nine five-litre cars were Lolas of various vintages: they were a mixture of the new-build T333CS – the F5000 T332 turned into a CS with a kit sold by Haas – and specials built on the British constructor’s chassis. One of those, the dramatic-looking Schkee DB1, triumphed from pole position in the hands of Tom Klausler.

Redman was absent from the race. His Haas/Hall T333CS, with a variation of the bodywork offered to clients, had taken off on the Canadian track’s infamous back straight hump during the opening session of the weekend. The injuries he sustained on landing upside down would keep him out of the cockpit for the remainder of 1977. 

His replacement was Tambay. The Frenchman, just a week away from his first grand prix start at Silverstone aboard a Theodore-entered Ensign, took Redman’s seat for round three at Watkins Glen: he won on his debut and then all but one of the remaining races on the way to the championship. The series gained momentum through the season: 20 pukka new-style Can-Ams turned up for the Riverside finale in October.  

Movie star Newman was major player in Can-Am. Sullivan (left) among the drivers to top the podium with his team

Photo by: John Mahler / Toronto Star via Getty Images

Alan Jones made it five titles in a row for the Haas/Hall operation across F5000 and Can-Am in 1978 (Ickx and a returning Tambay driving Lola’s new T530 would extend the run to seven) aboard a T333 with victories in five of the nine races he contested. Elliott Forbes-Robinson was the only other driver to win more than once.

His two successes came aboard a car known as the Spyder NF-10 powered by the almost ubiquitous Chevy V8. It was another Lola-based special, though the most significant thing about the car can be understood from the prefix of the type number.

‘N’ stood for Newman, as in Paul Newman. The movie star and amateur racer was coached by Forbes-Robinson and came in as a partner at Bill Freeman Racing. He subsequently decided to go it alone and for 1981 would field the new 817 with which March entered the series. Formula 2 hotshot Teo Fabi was part of the deal.

The Italian won four times over the course of a season that should be regarded as the high-water mark in the story of second-generation Can-Am. Fabi didn’t win the title, however. He lost out in a three-way shootout on the F1 undercard at Caesars Palace.

The other contenders were Geoff Brabham in Count Rudi van der Straten’s VDS-001 – a reworked version of the T530 in which he’d started the season – and Al Holbert Jr (a winner in the series as early as 1978 driving for Hogan Racing) at the wheel of the CAC-2 contender he’d developed with funding from industrial giant CRC Chemicals.

Fabi finished ahead of both of them on the Las Vegas parking lot but was pipped to the crown by Brabham because he was beaten to the win by Danny Sullivan driving a Frissbee, another take on the T332/333 design, for Garvin Brown Racing. 

Frissbee machinery claimed crown in Can-Am’s final meaningful years, Unser Jr triumphing in 1982, Villeneuve Sr (pictured) in ’83

Photo by: Uncredited

A further evolution of the Trevor Harris-designed Frissbee concept took Al Unser Jr to the title in 1982 as the series started to wane. Little Al raced in Can-Am with the Galles team at the behest of his father, Al Sr, between winning the US Formula Super Vee title and moving full-time into the CART ranks with Galles in 1983.

Galles Racing wasn’t the only Can-Am team to step up to CART. Haas had pulled out of the series for 1982 ahead of a move to the CART Indycar grid for 1983. He would do it, of course, in partnership with Newman. Jim Trueman won the two-litre Can-Am class in 1981 and took his Truesports straight into CART, while VDS jumped ship for 1983. Just as important in Can-Am’s decline were the defections of some of its premier tracks. Laguna and Mid-Ohio, for example, switched codes for 1983. 

Winning machinery over a campaign of just six races in 1983 included an F1 car with fenders and Porsche’s Group C 956, though Jacques Villeneuve Sr took series honours with the Frissbee design. A year later the SCCA leased the series to Dallas real estate magnate Don Walker, one of the prime movers in the city’s one-off grand prix in 1984.

“Can-Am had the big sponsors, raced at all the big tracks and had all the big names, but no one turned it into something” Danny Sullivan

The series limped through two seasons before the SCCA retook control and promptly announced that the 1986 campaign would be the last. Not quite, as it turned out. It lingered on under new management for another year to little effect. The failures of Can-Am are laid firmly at the door of the SCCA. An organiser founded on its involvement in the amateur ranks lacked the commercial nous of CART.

“Can-Am had the big sponsors, raced at all the big tracks and had all the big names, but no one turned it into something,” reflects Sullivan. “The SCCA didn’t do anything about getting a decent TV package and CART did.” It helped, he concedes, that CART had the Indianapolis 500.  

Yet for all the criticism and its neglect in the history books, single-seat Can-Am was a highly competitive and professional championship in its admittedly short heyday.

“Everyone says that it wasn’t the same as the old Can-Am, but the cars were fast and the racing was excellent,” offers Forbes-Robinson. “If you sat up on the podium, you know you’d beaten some good guys. You were racing against Ickx, Jones and Brabham, and that’s without mentioning Sullivan and Rahal.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the October 2026 issue and subscribe today.

March took on arch-rival Lola in Can-Am from 1981: new 817 won on debut with Fabi at Mosport but missed out on title

Photo by: John Mahler / Toronto Star via Getty Images