After taking a few weeks off for the holidays, we’re back at it with our regular Throwback Thursday pieces. This one comes from the offseason leading to 1977 and Brian Redman reflecting on his three consecutive championships in Formula 5000. The following is from the February 1977 issue of SportsCar Magazine:
Winner’s Tales
Brian Redman: 1976 Formula 5000 Champion
Now that I’ve won the SCCA/USAC Formula 5000 Championship for the third year in a row, people have started asking if running this series year after year doesn’t get to be old stuff. I don’t see it that way. The series is always changing, in that the competition is always changing and increasing.
In previous years, the championship was more or less a one-on-one thing. In 1973, my first full year in the series and my first with Jim Hall and Carl Haas, it was Jody Scheckter and me all season. I missed two of the early races because of other commitments, so although the team got stronger and stronger as the season went on, I was still behind when it ended. In 1974 and ’75, I kept trading wins with Mario Andretti. The difference was that we were very reliable and Mario had more DNFs.
This year, however, it hasn’t been possible to point to one driver and say, “Well, if we can beat him, we’ll win the race and the championship.” In 1976, the championship was a four-cornered battle—with Alan Jones, Al Unser and Jackie Oliver all having a look in. It was certainly appropriate that the four of us were the first four finishers in the final race at Riverside, with Al winning from Jackie, while I came third, ahead of Alan. I was supposed to be taking it easy, to be sure of finishing and protecting my championship, but I can tell you that I wasn’t taking it all that easy! Al and Jackie were flying and Alan was pressing me all the way.
It was quite a season, with Alan Jones coming into the series and enjoying instant success with Teddy Yip’s cars. Then, after so much frustration, Don Nichols’ team finally got the Shadow and its Dodge engine all sorted out and Jackie Oliver won at Elkhart Lake. He had to be considered a major threat from then on, along with Al Unser. Danny Ongais kept surprising us too.
Each of the three championships has been won with a Lola T-332 or T-332C. In 1975, we tried a T-400 but the 332 was brought out of mothballs. Last year we did a lot of work with the T-430, but wound up going with the T-332C.
The T-430 is a very good car, but it isn’t quite as fast. Until it’s faster, there’s no point in running it. There was one running throughout the 1976 season—for Teddy Pillette—and it went very well on occasion. The odd times when we’ve run ours in practice, at Watkins Glen and Elkhart Lake, it did very good times, virtually as fast as the T-332, but not quite as fast. With any car, you can only reach a certain time; when you try harder, you go slower. Half a second in a 30-lap race is 15 seconds. That puts you right out of the ball park. Plus, it’s a bit harder to drive the 430, in that the steering and the gear change are heavier. We can sort out that kind of thing pretty easily, given some time to work on it. The 332 is such a good, simple, straightforward, basic car that it gives us no real problems. We know so much about it that it doesn’t take us long to dial in when we go to a new track.
I have agreed to sign again with Jim Hall and Carl Haas to compete in the 1977 First National City Travelers Checks series, probably with a further modified version of the T-332, which will also be sponsored by First National City Travelers Checks.
It’s hard to say what I’d do if I didn’t race this series. In some ways, I feel I might like to make a change and do something else, but it’s hard. We’ve been very successful and the series has been very good to us. We have such a good operation going among Jim Hall, the mechanics: David Evans and Tony Connors, and Franz Weis, who does the engines. This series is also nice in that the races are far enough apart that I can get home to England between them. I usually stay over here during July and August, when the schedule is heaviest, but the rest of the season I can get home quite a bit.
What else would I do? As I’ve said many times before, I know it wouldn’t be Formula 1. The pressure in Formula 5000 has been high enough without moving into Formula 1, with all its political implications and pressures of various kinds. We sometimes talk about Indianapolis, but I have no really serious thoughts about it at the moment. It would be strange ground for me and I don’t see finishing higher than fourth or fifth.
Unless I’m going into a series with some possibility of winning, I’d prefer not to do it.
Words by Brian Redman
Image from SCCA Archive
