The Lola T160 Can-Am monster that used to be a road car

One of the most well-known Lola creations is the T70, which the company manufactured in both Coupe and Spyder form. Yes, T70s ‘only’ won one world sportscar championship race – the 1969 Daytona 24 Hours – but motorcycle World Champion and F1 World Champion John Surtees took the inaugural Can-Am crown in 1966 with a T70 Spyder, for example, winning all but one race that year. Lola T70s also took numerous pole positions and race wins in other series, too, taking the fight to the likes of the Porsche 917, Ferrari 312P and Ford GT40. There were even eight Lola T70s at the 2022 Goodwood Revival.

The T70, then, is something of a titan, and probably the reason why you may never have heard of this, the Lola T160. The T160 is one of ‘the other’ Lola creations, but one we think you should know something about. 

 The T160 was built for Can-Am, and while this particular example hasn’t had any wild race victories or won any championships, it has had a curious and colourful history. It’s owned by Goodwood regular Marcus Black, a man who knows a thing or two about classic racers. Sadly for him, despite having owned the car for nearly two years, his first experience of the car before running up the Hill at the 2023 Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard was on the Tuesday before the event... In the rain. 

“Somebody said to me yesterday on my first run, which was in the pouring rain, ‘Was it slippy?’” Marcus explains. “I just felt like saying ‘Well, I don’t want to find out whether it’s slippy because, if I find out, it means I’m already going backwards.’”

“This particular car was one of two works cars, built in ’68,” Marcus tells us, “and it’s very first test was at the Goodwood Motor Circuit. So, it’s very much like coming home for the car really.”

From that first test the car went out to the USA via a man named Carl Haas at Haas Racing (no relation to Gene Haas), the sole official Lola distributor in North America. It was raced in Simoniz colours by the team, with drivers Skip Scott (class winner and third place finisher in the 1966 12 Hours of Sebring and the 1000km of Spa-Francorchamps in a Ford GT40) and Chuck Parsons (who won the aforementioned Daytona 24 Hours alongside Mark Donohue) behind the wheel of either it or the other works car.

In 1969, the car went to a man named Doug Shierson, who raced it for a time in that year’s Can-Am championship until a huge accident made him vow never to drive a Can-Am machine again. Instead, the car returned to Lola, was rebuilt and fitted with T163 bodywork in the livery you see here and then, for 1970, Doug turned from driver to team owner, asking Chuck Parsons to once again get behind the wheel and compete on his behalf. It was here that this particular T160’s story became particularly intriguing.

“Chuck Parsons in period used to run a very, very oversized brake pedal,” Marcus says. “This was because, when he was a youngster, he had an accident on a tractor, and ever since then he had a poor performing leg. So he used to brake with both feet.” Yes, you read that correctly, Chuck Parsons had a brake pedal big enough that he could stamp on it with both feet. “I’ve never come across a brake pedal that looks like it,” Marcus continues, “it’s an amazing thing. But he never used the clutch – he used the clutch to get off the line, but that was it.” You think you’ve heard it all, and then you hear a tale like that. Bear in mind that this car ran both small (anything from 4.3 to 6.6 litres) and big-block (5.7 to 8.2 litres) Chevrolet engines depending on the circuit, and was throwing down between 600 to 900PS (441-662kW).

The second of this car’s particular curiosities is that it was at one point a road car. “It was owned at one stage, I think in the 1980s, by a chap called Rod Leech,” Marcus explains, “and he put it on the road.

“It was painted red at the time, with some fairly ghastly brake lights on it and what have you. And I have a photograph of Rod in the car on an A-road, and two policeman peering down into the cockpit while Rod is probably giving a fairly elaborate story as to why it’s fine for him to be on the road – who knows what speed he was doing.”

Smiling, Marcus says: “It even has a number plate.’ Goodness, imagine trying to take a car that’s used to bombing along at 190mph at tracks like Riverside and Road America to a UK supermarket in the 1980s.

The car itself remains true to its Can-Am condition as it storms up the Hill at the Festival of Speed. Marcus tells us how it uses an LG600, five-speed gearbox, that the brakes are “probably just not quite adequate,” how “it feels very stiff because it’s a tub, rather than a tube chassis that will flex – it is lovely to drive,” and that at the moment it’s fitted with a 5.0-litre Chevrolet small-block V8 with more than 600PS (441kW). When asked if he’ll ever fit the car with a big-block, Marcus responds with a smile: “If I can really master it and finally get to the end of small block power I can go up a gear to 7.0 litres-plus.” That certainly sounds spicy in a car that weighs somewhere around 750kg.

The final entertaining nugget in the tale is how Marcus came to own the car. Already an owner of a McLaren M1B, another Can-Am legend, Marcus went round to a friend’s house to look at an old motorcycle he was selling. By quite a happy coincidence, the friend mentioned that he’d be up for parting with a car he owned, too, stored “in a barn in Leicestershire”. Having once seen the T160 in an auction catalogue years before and decided it was one of the coolest cars he’d ever seen, “I didn’t buy the motorbike,” says Marcus, “but I came back with this, and my wife was horrified”.

It's easy to get carried away with the successful cars, to only highlight those that have won so many races or dominated championships. But the simple truth is cars like this are still beautiful, fast and come with fascinating stories, told by passionate individuals like Marcus. Here’s hoping we’ll be seeing, and hearing, plenty more of this absolute monster in the future.

Photography by Nick Wilkinson, Joe Harding and Motorsport Images.