That docu I said I'd upload, but can't name.

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•Dec 2, 2014
I'm ratting him out......

Tony King
It's called 'Circuit,' and as somebody says below, the tagline is "Life Begins at 180mph." I got my hands on a decent VHS copy a couple of years ago and digitized it. Very, very good action footage of actual races from the '81 season, mixed in with a goofy fictional plot line about a woman journalist following Danny Sullivan around (The roar of the engines! The surge of the hormones!).

Footage from the Laguna Seca and Riverside races is particularly good. I fast-forward past the romance and watch the cars, who are better actors than the drivers. I knew a local guy who got a drive in the VDS car at the tail end of the Can-Am series around 3-4 years after this vid. Like you say, most of the cars are Formula 5000s. Particularly popular were Lola T300-series that were retrofitted with extra bodywork and ground effects, and sold to customers by Brad Frisselle's team, who called them "Frissbees." Lots of folks bought Frissbee GR2s and GR3s;

I knew another local guy who had a Frissbee and campaigned it in the final couple of seasons of the series. I always thought they were hot looking cars, and impressively fast. Both Paul Tracy and Al Unser, Jr. had a lot of good things to say about the Frissbees they drove early in their careers

(Tracy won his very first Can-Am attempt in a Frissbee in '86). Paul Newman's team (Fabi driving) in this vid is fielding a March 817, I think it was nicknamed the "pontoon car" by some folks at the time. I thought I had read back in the 80's that the car was based on the 81C Indycar chassis, but I

may be mistaken. Some Can-Am purists from the first series ('65-'74) look down their noses at this generation of second series ('77-'87) cars, but I've always been fond of them, probably because I was around them during my involvement with the SCCA back then.

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oldSCCAguy yah
2.67K subscribersF5000 with fenders. Al Holbert, Danny Sullivan, Geoff Brabham, Teo Fabi.