This Hamill SR-3 is a visceral relic of Can-Am

The Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am, represented an opportunity for manufacturers great and small to try their hand at producing the world’s fastest racing car, and one engineer who answered the call was a man named Ed Hamill.

He had grown up surrounded by motorsport. As a child he used to frequent his local car garage on his way home from school, where the owner would often be working on Midget racing cars, cars that would then race on the local oval track just three miles from his home. His interest grew into sportscars, and he became a proud owner of an Austin-Healey, but it was a chance meeting with Carroll Shelby at a race event at Riverside that sealed his future in the industry.

As Shelby was busy testing and demonstrating his new Cobra concept at venues across the US, Hamill had been engineering a Chevrolet V8 into his own AC Ace. He took the opportunity to tell Shelby about his efforts, and almost immediately he was offered a job at the Shelby workshop. Hamill became an engineer on the Cobra project in early 1962 as one of a four-person team. He would be forced to leave after just six months, but that was not the end of his story, rather the beginning.

After serving in the military, and a period selling Cobras for Shelby, Hamill returned his attention to motorsport, and set about building his own cars. Between 1963 and 1966 he built four cars, the last of which was racing at the Goodwood Revival this weekend.

There were two Hamill SR-3s, one was built in 1965, the other, this one, in 1966. They were built to race in the inaugural season of the new Can-Am Cup, and competed against giants of the industry in Lola and McLaren, against drivers like John Surtees, Graham Hill and Dan Gurney. The regulations had done their job, and Ed Hamill arrived at the first race at Mont-Tremblant in a Chevrolet-powered car of his own making to compete on a huge stage.

He was never realistically going to be able to contend with the might of the Lola T70s and McLaren M1Bs that dominated the grids of ’66, but simply being there at all was an achievement in itself.

We caught up with Roland Lewis, the owner of the SR-3 racing in the Whitsun Trophy at the Revival, to find out more about its legacy.

“By way of legend John Surtees said to Enzo Ferrari ‘don’t build Can-Am cars’… There will be some devils out there with this series, don't degrade the Ferrari name.

“That is precisely what the Hamill is. It’s a privateer’s car built to race in what was described as the maddest, fastest series ever, which to me was actually the epitome of what Can-Am should be.”

But despite its intimidating reputation and terrifying presence, Lewis, who describes himself as a “very amateur gentleman driver”, insists those are exactly the reasons he bought it. “Suddenly you’re in a car where there was a lot of noise, apparently, I don’t think you notice that as you’re driving, but it was instant push.

“It wasn’t a car where you had to dance through the gearbox. It was what it is: huge engine, lots of torque, and I think it’s credit to the cars that, as long as you realise that the right foot has to be pretty gentle, it’s a fantastically nice car to drive, something that exudes confidence.”

There’s no doubt the Hamill is simplicity at its finest, while it may not have been particularly competitive in period, it has come into its own as a regular fixture in historic racing. But Lewis says the car remains much as it would have been all those years ago.

“The construction’s so simplistic and I’m sure the geometry is something that Ed worked out, but having done that one’s not chasing tiny bits of time. It’s very original, it is what it should have been.” And that is exactly what we love to hear about cars racing at the Revival, the authentic celebration of these stunning artefacts, but in this case, it is also a celebration of the man who built it.

You can tell a lot about Ed Hamill by spending a bit of time with this car. “He was a privateer,” Lewis says. “It was a car he built to go quickly in a new series. When you look inside there was nothing in there to make it look good, no aesthetics at all. It was ‘how can I make it simple?’” And by extension, how could he make it fast?

Performance and results, Lewis suspects, were never the priority for a man like Hamill. “I wouldn’t necessarily think that Ed was looking at it. He was very much the guy in his garage, loving cars.” A mindset that we very much appreciated as we watched the car in action during the Whitsun Trophy on Saturday afternoon.

We spoke to the man himself in the build-up to the Revival and, while he retains custody of the original SR-3, he remains deeply interested in his other creation over the pond. “It’s very satisfying,” he said. “I was thrilled to find out that it had ended up [at Goodwood] and was active in competition and apparently quite well, which was very pleasing.”

We’re certainly very pleased to have cars like this in action at the Goodwood Revival, the Hamill in particular is a wonderfully visceral reminder of just how extraordinary the Can-Am series was in 1966.