Lola: The T70 and Can-Am Cars

By Gordon Jones

Foreword by George Follmer

In the most glittering era of sports car racing, the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Lola T70 and its descendants radiated star quality. 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 400 photographs. All sports car devotees will treasure this labour of love.

• The introduction is a celebration of the genius of Eric Broadley, detailing the Mark 1 sports car and all the other Lola racing cars up to the introduction of the T70, including the involvement of Peter Jackson’s Specialised Mouldings.
• The story of the ground-breaking Mark 6 GT, its Le Mans baptism, its links to the Ford GT40 programme, and its subsequent restoration by a Shelby Cobra racer.
• The sad saga of the Lola-Aston Martin’s 1967 Le Mans adventure.
• Full details are given for every Roadster and Coupé T70 built and raced.
• The creation and racing lives of all the T70’s successors: every T160, Peter Revson’s T220, Jackie Stewart’s T260 and David Hobbs’s T310.
• Covers every race from 1963 to 1974 in which these Lolas ran, split by World Sports Car Championship, European and South African racing, and separately all the SCCA, USRRC and Can-Am series races, detailing the cars and drivers, the opposition, the practice times and grid positions, the story of the races, the results and post-race analysis.
• A comprehensive list of every Lola, in every race, in every year from 1963 to 1974, giving entrant, driver(s), chassis number, engine, car colour, race number, race result and commentary.
• A history of horsepower and torque: Ford and GM; Small Block and Big Block; American engine wizards of the sixties.

Gordon Jones

Gordon Jones’s first encounter with a Lola came in 1959 while marshalling at Goodwood, where three Lola Mark 1s sat on the front row of the grid and finished 1–2–3. Later, when the T70 came along, he found one close at hand as hillclimber David Good ran a spyder version from a nearby workshop. He watched, and wrote about, the wonderful T70 coupés as they appeared — a fascination that has lasted ever since. He co-wrote with John Allen The Ford That Beat Ferrari, an acclaimed Ford GT40 history first published in 1985 and reissued by Evro in 2019. He lives in France.

Hardbound | 576 pages | 689 color & b/w illustrations