Legends of Can-Am, Part 1

Big Bangers; that’s what the Brits called Can-Am cars, and they were right. Everything about the Canadian-American Challenge Cup series was big—big speed, big breakthroughs, big bucks. Big names, too.

At last year’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, our own Pete Lyons was asked to co-moderate with Dan Davis, a round-table discussion with many of the living legends of the Can-Am championship. Fourteen of those names came together at Amelia Island to tell stories about the grand old series, in which essentially unlimited sports racing cars ran wild across North America from 1966 through 1974. By kind permission of Concours founder Bill Warner, here is the first of our two-part digest of what these heroes of yesteryear had to say about an era of racing so exciting that we’re still talking about it.