Blood, Sweat, and Turnips
This is the autobiography of the Canadian Can-Am driver John Cordts. Cordts participated in one Formula One World Championship Grand Prix, the 1969 Canadian Grand Prix on 20 September 1969. He qualified 19th, but retired his Brabham after 10 laps with an oil leak, while lying 16th. In addition to his Formula One appearance, Cordts had been successful in Canadian and U.S. sports car racing, particularly with various McLarens run by Dave Billes's Performance Engineering. He competed in many events, ranging from Harewood Acres (where he still holds the track record when it closed in 1970), Mosport, Mont-Tremblant, and Westwood in Canada to various tracks in the US and even Japan. He later became a regular participant in the CanAm series, in which he raced until 1974, mainly in McLarens and Lolas. His best Can-Am finish was second at Road America in 1974. He was also known for his participation in the SCCA Trans-Am Series, where he had, at one point, piloted a BF Goodrich-sponsored Pontiac Firebird, known as the "Tirebird" and also several FIA events with the Greenwood Corvette team. John was also inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame in 2003. Cordt has since retired to a private life in Western Canada where he is well known for his beautiful wood carvings and in 2008 wrote Blood, Sweat and Turnips.
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Can-Am Racing Cars: Secrets of the Sensational Sixties Sports-Racers
It was a golden era. Horsepower was unlimited; designers, builders, and drivers just needed to harness the horses of massive engines and deliver their thrust to the track. It was an age of 8-liter aluminum Chevys, turbocharged Oldsmobiles, flat-12 Porsches, and the best and brightest designers from McLaren, BRM, Lola, March, Shadow, AAR, Caldwell, Kar Kraft, and others who designed cars to suit them.
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CAN-AM The Speed Odyssey
CAN AM THE SPEED ODYSSEY takes you on the wildest ride in road racing. 1966 - 1973 CAN AM Challenge Cup: The quintessential epic adventure in an era of change and discovery where heroic star drivers McLaren, Hulme, Stewart, Andretti, Surtees, Donohue, Gurney, Hall, Follmer, Revson, Oliver, Scheckter and others from Formula One and around the world revel in their brutally fast CAN AM machines, battling on the daunting race tracks across the USA and Canada. A ROAD RACING COUNTER-CULTURE: Unique to the world, the CAN AM rule book had virtually no technical restrictions, allowing its race car designers the freedom to innovate. Here we discover the worlds first radical inventions of wings on race cars, sophisticated ground effect aerodynamics, and to this day the worlds most powerful road racer, the Porsche 917-30. These iconic CAN AM machines and their brave drivers pushed the limits and sometimes beyond... CAN AM legends JIM HALL and SAM POSEY take you inside this spectacle of pure speed, fierce race competition, radical innovation, intrigue and ground shaking sounds. CAN AM THE SPEED ODYSSEY is crafted exclusively from rare CAN AM color motion picture archival footage.
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Porsche 917: Zuffenhausen’s Le Mans and Can-Am Champion
After knocking on the door for decades, Germany's Porsche finally stepped into the big time of international auto racing with its Type 917 in 1969. Its phenomenal air-cooled flat-12 engine powered the 917 to 15 wins in world sports-car championship races from 1969 to 1971, after which it was outlawed by a rules change. Included were two wins at Le Mans in 1970 and '71. First built in a series of 25 coupes that Volkswagen chief Ferdinand Piech called the biggest risk he's ever taken in business, the 917 was raced in both short- and long-tailed forms, pumping out 630 bhp by 1971. It went on to even greater glory in turbocharged roadster form in Can-Am racing as the 917/10, series champion in 1972. In '73 the incredible 1,000-horsepower 917/30 Porsche dominated the Can-Am series in the hands of Mark Donohue, who called it "the perfect racing car". The 917 stands proud in Porsche's history as the costly and daring machine that decisively ended the company's underdog status in international motor sport.
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To Finish First: My years inside Formula One, Can-Am and Indy 500 racing with Cooper, Brabham and McLaren
This book fills an important gap in the history of top-level motor racing during the historic era of the 1960s and 70s. The author was at the center of it all, first as Sir Jack Brabham's right-hand man during his leadership of the Cooper team, and later when he formed his own Brabham Racing Organization. Subsequently, when Phil Kerr joined his great friend Bruce McLaren, to become joint managing director of an ever expanding company, which was to achieve unrivalled success in Can-Am racing as well as being at the forefront of Formula One, he and his colleagues had to cope with the tragedy of the founder's untimely death while testing a Can-Am car at Goodwood. The author's description of how the shattered team was saved and ultimately restored by the bravery of Bruce's co-driver Denny Hulme, already sidelined by agonizing burns to his hands, is a poignant highlight of his story. Includes a balanced mix of racing and off-duty pictures, many being seen for the first time and 15 reproductions of paintings by the renowned artist Michael Turner.
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