A WINNING FORMULA
With stock engines, plus big tyres, names and money, F5000 was a recipe for boom and bombast 50 years ago
Brief but brilliant: remembering F5000
Chris Summers was a burly bloke with a no-nonsense attitude to motorsport. Tiring of expensive and finicky competition engines, this garage owner from near Coventry paid £75 for the Rochester Ramjet-injected V8 from BP’S 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air research car. Bored from 4.4 to 4.7 litres and tuned by Downton Engineering of burgeoning Mini fame, it was slotted – with room to spare, apparently – into a ’58 ex-formula Two Cooper. This 320bhp hybrid, with widened rear track and converted from leaf to coil springs, won Libre races, hillclimbs and sprints from 1962 before its replacement two years later by a Formula One Lotus 24; into which Summers slotted – with less room to spare, one assumes – a 5.4. By which time several intrepid British club racers had followed his lead.
Rangy romantic Dan Gurney, several rungs higher on motorsport’s ladder, had also invested in stock-blocks’ rising stock among single-seaters, having qualified Mickey Thompson’s Buick V8-powered car eighth for the 1962 Indianapolis 500 and played a key role in the Lotus Powered by Ford campaign that almost won with Jim Clark in ’63 using an experimental aluminium version of the Fairlane V8. A capacity concession from ’66 – out to five from 4.2 litres – helped Gurney to win the ’67 Rex Mays 300 at Riverside in a self-built Eagle Indycar fitted with a smallblock Ford pushrod V8 featuring heads Gurney had commissioned from Weslake Engineering. He also finished second at Indy in ’68 and – allowed another 250cc as turbocharged overhead-cam rivals were shrunk – in ’69. By which time a baker’s dozen of similar cars had shattered Oulton Park’s pastoral tranquility.
Go-ahead British promoter John Webb had thrilled to the ‘cheap power’ potential of the Sports Car Club of America’s decision to allow 5-litre stock-blocks into its Continental
Championship from 1968. But he was underwhelmed by its Formula A nomenclature: hence the UK’S chunkier, gruntier Formula 5000. Predictions that it might replace F1 would never come to fruition, but its 500bhp ground-pounding head-turners were for several years the torque of the paddocks on both sides of the Atlantic, either side of the equator.
David Hobbs was on pole that day in Cheshire in April, 1969: “Those cars came out of the box pretty well. I had a TS5, the first Surtees. A Len Terry design, its front suspension had fabricated top rockers instead of wishbones. Unfortunately, these bent during the race. It was dragging on the floor by the end.”
Eventual champion Peter Gethin, run on Bruce Mclaren’s behalf by Church Farm Racing, took the victory ahead of the hobbled
Hobbs and Keith Holland’s Lola T142; all three used 302cu in smallblock Chevys – the winner’s Bartz version soon to have its injection banned in Europe due to cost. That winning M10A was derived from the cigar-shaped M7A F1 of ’68 but was heavier (and stiffer) due to designer Gordon Coppuck using an up-and-over rather than a ‘bathtub’ monocoque. The TS5, a bathtub, was designed originally for Roger Nathan and had arrived at TS Research & Development’s door via the collapse of the replacement deal that John Surtees had brokered with James Garner’s American International Racing. The T142’s was a rugged spaceframe carrying T70 running gear rendered redundant by changes to Group 4 homologation. Cheaper than the (£7055 on-the-button) Mclaren, Lolas bulked the grids but rarely were competitive. When at last the most prolific manufacturer of racing cars caught up, however, it would bestow upon the series its signature look.
Although California’s Eagle Mk5s – second-generation Indycars tweaked by designer Tony Southgate to feature a slimmer monocoque of mild steel rather than the chrome-moly demanded by USAC – won the SCCA titles of 1968 and ’69, courtesy of dentist Lou Sell and ex-white House staffer Tony Adamowicz, British chassis would rule the roost. Barring Sydneysider Frank Matich’s eponymous cars – modular in concept, with a triangulated monocoque that was fabricated using spaceframe principles and later an exhaust-blown twin rear wing – and Garrie Cooper’s Elfins from Adelaide, plus the Begg, built on New Zealand’s South Island by the Manx GP ’bike racer George Begg who invented the sheep-inverter, smaller makes floundered: Cicada, Elk, Grizzly Torque, Harrier, etc.
F5000 was no sinecure. Lotus won just twice – Arizona’s George Follmer in ’70 scoring rare category victories for Ford power – before kicking (all) customer racing cars into touch in ’72. And absented Eagle couldn’t return to winning ways on its 1974 comeback, even when the slimmed but still overweight 755 was driven (to second place at Laguna Seca) by James Hunt.
Gethin successfully defended his title in ’70 in a works Mclaren M10B prototype – customer versions were built by Trojan Cars of Croydon – that featured a lowered engine position thanks to a dry sump and was now run by rambunctious Walsall-based Irish privateer Sid Taylor. Meanwhile Hammersmith-born Canadian John Cannon’s sister car claimed the SCCA spoils, despite the presence of a 3-litre F1 Brabham.
The Mclaren theme continued in 1971: New Zealander Graham Mcrae, on carbs and a shoestring, won a Tasman Series that had bolstered its fading 2.5-litre thoroughbreds with F5000s since 1970; and St Louis trucking magnate Carl Hogan’s team, with Hobbs replacing Cannon, fended off newer machinery in North America.
“I’d missed the ’69 title by a point even though I only did eight of 13 races,” says Hobbs. “I did a half-season in ’70, too, and finished third. The TS5 and TS5A were the equals of the Mclaren. The loss of high wings – they hung on to them a little longer in America [through ’70] – did not affect them as much as I thought it might.
“I switched teams because Roger Penske asked me to drive his Ferrari 512M at Daytona, Sebring and Watkins Glen, plus his Indycar at the three 500-mile races; he brokered my deal with Hogan [to keep Goodyear sweet]. John, a Firestone guy, went
ballistic. I just got on with it. The Mclaren was responsive to set-up changes; we won five races.”
Changes, however, were afoot. Lola’s Australian development driver Frank Gardner gradually improved the twitchy monocoque T190, mainly by lengthening its wheelbase. He won three rounds of the 1971 Rothmans European series in this hefty T192 update before changing tack and squeezing a Chevy – as a semistressed member – into a T240 F2 car, its piled-high side radiators creating that muscular, hunkered stance. Three more wins – including a defeat of Emerson Fittipaldi’s Lotus 56B turbine at Hockenheim – secured the title. Though the T300 suffered a bad reputation in accidents – hence the ‘Lola Limp’ – it set a trend Brian Redman was determined to follow.
“I’d made a foolish retirement to South Africa after 1970,” says the Lancastrian. “When I returned four months later, Sid Taylor asked me to drive his F5000 Mclaren M18 [designed by Australian Ralph Bellamy]. It was not particularly good, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. Whereas the new Lola was so light that we knew instantly everything else was outdated. So I asked Derek Bennett of Chevron, ‘Can you build an F5000?’ Yes. ‘Okay. How much, how long?’ Ten weeks. And I paid £3000 – just about the only time I’ve spent money on a racing car.”
Based on the Bolton marque’s F2 contender, and using an engine and gearbox supplied by Taylor, Redman’s B24 won on debut, at Oulton Park in May ’72: “Then Sid said, ‘We’re going to America – $20,000 [thanks to backing from cigarette brand L&M] for first place at Watkins Glen. $20,000!’ We shipped the car from Liverpool on an open trailer and bought a $500 station wagon in New York. I was leading the second heat when the battery went flat.”
The beneficiary of Redman’s misfortune, Mcrae, was nicknamed ‘Cassius’ because of bold pronouncements, impatience and swagger. The Wellington-born driver/engineer certainly had plenty to boast about in ’72: having successfully retained his Tasman crown – the second in a hat-trick – he would win the SCCA title and register the most wins in Europe. He did so in another appropriated Terry design. With the assistance of London broker John Heynes, he had bought out fellow originator Malcolm Bridgeland of Billingshurst’s Malaya Garage, and in July the Leda LT27, Coke-bottle shape inspired by Mclaren’s M19A F1, was renamed Mcrae GM1. Momentum dissipated swiftly, however. Customer cars didn’t fare so well; the squarer GM2 was a relative disappointment – although as a fast but fragile Talon it would in ’75 give Chris Amon his only category win; and by October ’73 Mcrae’s Poole factory had been sold to Penske’s F1 project. But four titles and 26 victories in the big three series – Mcrae also won the ’78 Australian GP at Sandown in the one-off GM3, complete with look-at-me transparent cockpit – made him F5000’s most successful.
“He whacked us in 1972,” says Hobbs. “But he never did it again. Never even looked like it. We went with a Lola [T330] for 1973 and it didn’t seem a huge step up. Blindly, we’d got Swiss Morand engines because Mcrae used them; we suffered nothing but blow-ups. And by then Brian [Redman] had come on board.”
Lola’s US importer Carl Haas selected Redman to spearhead Chaparral boss Jim Hall’s campaign. “I always seem to be remembered as a sports car driver,” says Redman. “But those four seasons in American F5000 were my best. I won the titles from 1974-’76 and should have won in 1973; I missed two races because I was driving for Ferrari in Europe and Jody Scheckter, who won four races to my five, took the title.
“I felt bad about Chevron; I’d started its project, plus they were just 30 minutes down the road. But it didn’t have the money for development. To drive for Jim was a big opportunity and the Lolas of that period, except the T400 [of ’75] – something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on – were extremely good: perfectly balanced and, though heavier, faster than F1s on some tracks. There wasn’t a lot of downforce and they would slide at high speed. Not that you would
“Can-am was dead, so the SCCA forced us to fit bodywork to our openwheelers – and called it Can-am. Marketing!”
deliberately drift because of those wide tyres.”
For Redman, who hadn’t driven a singleseater before he was 30, F5000 was bedrock, for which he turned down midfield F1 team Shadow. For 23-year-old Scheckter, it was a stepping stone: “I was wild and young, so F5000 was fantastic. Massive fun. I got a big write-up in Sports Illustrated because I was this kid winning and crashing. I drove that Trojan [T101, an in-house design] sideways most of the time. You could throw it around because the tyres were so hard. But then I wrote it off at Watkins Glen.
“Bob Lazier loaned us his Lola and we put our engine in it. With my hips wedged by planks, I put it on pole by almost 2 secs. It was an occasion you don’t get often: walking down the pitlane with everybody looking at you like you must be quite good. We got our own Lola after that but it never showed the same superiority. And it cost me. I didn’t want to take all the prize money for the whole season – $80k or so – across the border and in the end the team refused to pay me. Sid [Taylor] said, ‘We spent it on the Lola.’”
Redman: “The game changed in ’74 when Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing came in with a massive effort for Mario Andretti and [later] Al Unser Snr; they even took my chief mechanic Jim Chapman. Those races with Mario [in T332s] were some of my best; we never touched wheels in two years. We had the better reliability and my sports car experience perhaps made me a bit more careful with the gearbox.
“F5000 was big back then – in the United States, in Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – but it never took off internationally. I don’t really know why.”
So-so reliability and too many makeweight appearances in non-championship F1 races didn’t help – although Gethin, in a Chevron B24 wearing the handsome livery of Belgian Count Rudy van der Straten, snatched victory in the 1973 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch. Team VDS would also win that year’s European title, courtesy of Belgian Teddy Pilette, and the ’74 Tasman with Gethin. Switching to Lola T400s for ’75, Pilette won a second European title and Gethin’s victory in the Brands Hatch finale – equalling Redman’s tally of 24 – neatly bookended standalone F5000 in Europe.
For the UK’S SHELLSPORT Group 8 International Championship of 1976 catered for F1, F2 and Formula Atlantic cars, too, and although David Purley’s F2-based F5000 Chevron B30, modified by Mike Pilbeam, dominated, its six wins were achieved using an ‘Energy Crisis’ 3.4-litre V6 that Cosworth had developed for Ford’s Group 2 saloons. The last true twitch of F5000 in the Northern Hemisphere was Holland’s victory in a Lola-chevy at the penultimate round. The Holden-repco and lighter but less powerful Leyland of Australia P76 V8s, developed by the legendary Phil Irving, were successful Down Under, and Dodge’s more powerful but heavier V8 won at Road America in 1976 in Jackie Oliver’s Shadow DN6B. But Chevrolet’s smallblock was F5000’s beating heart – and about to undergo a transplant.
“American promoters got better crowds for Can-am than for F5000 but Can-am was dead by ’74,” says Redman. “So the SCCA forced us to fit bodywork to our open-wheelers – and called it Can-am. A marketing exercise.”
It could have been very different. USAC got involved in ’74 with a view to F5000 perhaps replacing its costly turbocharged Champ Cars. But these co-promoters didn’t see eye to eye.
“It was a monumental blunder by the SCCA to halt F5000,” says Hobbs. “Every American driver who mattered, bar AJ Foyt, was there. Organisers were fixated by Can-am; without its really big engines, however, it was not a big draw. Then two years later along comes CART and the crowds are huge. F5000 was pretty much the perfect formula: power, performance, looks, spectacle and relatively cheap.”
An increasingly insular Tasman had gone under, too: Australia and New Zealand split in 1976, the latter switching to 1.6-litre Formula Pacific the following year. The big cars rumbled on in Australia via a Rothmans-backed international series (until ’79) and national Gold Star series (until ’81). But Hunt’s victory in the 1978 Rose City 10,000 at Victoria’s Winton circuit in an Elfin had, sadly, been indicative of a World Champion’s darkening towards F1 rather than a brightening future for F5000.