Lola: The T70 and Can-Am Cars & The Racing History & Individual Chassis Record (2 Book Set)

These big racers, both brutal and beautiful, graced the Can-Am stage in North America as open spyders and the world sports car championship as closed coupés. Powered by big American V8 engines, they were massively fast and exceedingly popular, both with fans and the racers themselves. In this important new book, which has taken Lola enthusiast Gordon Jones three decades to complete, the racing history of the T70 and the Can-Am models that followed — from T160 to T310 — is exhaustively recorded, complete with a superb array of over 600 photographs. All sports car devotees will treasure this labour of love.

This is the definitive development and racing history of the Lola T70. The Lola T70 was the car that Eric Broadley wanted to build for Ford instead of the GT40. He thought the GT40 too conservative in specification for a state-of-the-art sports racing car, so he split with the giant corporation to build the T70 under the aegis of his own company: Lola. Immediately successful, the T70 carried John Surtees to the Championship in the 1966 Can-Am series. The cars were also very successful in Group 7 races until the series ended in 1966, by which time the likes of Denny Hulme, David Hobbs and Brian Redman had all driven T70s to victory. Under continuous development until the Mk IIIb Coupé of 1969, the T70 was never a great endurance racer but achieved major successes in shorter events such as the TT and Martini races. Today, the T70 is a leading force in historic racing. Over many years, John Starkey – T70 owner and ex-Curator of the famous Donington racing car collection – has compiled a huge amount of information on the cars and interviewed many past and present owners and drivers about their experiences with the T70. Uniquely, this book contains the history and specification – where known – of each individual T70 chassis. Available again after an absence of several years, here is the definitive development and racing history of the Lola T70.