ISBN: 1-893618-86-2 Can-Am Challenger

Peter Bryant fell in love with the United States when he visited to prepare a factory-loaned Ferrari for John Surtees in the 1963 U.S. Road Racing Championship. He returned to America as a mechanic for Mickey Thompson’s team at the fateful 1964 Indianapolis 500. This time he stayed, working first with Carroll Shelby’s Shelby American team and later with the Dana Chevrolet and Carl Haas Lola Can-Am teams. In Can-Am Challenger Peter Bryant tells his own story in his own engaging style. Though packed with technical details and insights on what goes into building a successful racecar, it also includes a wealth of colorful characters and hilarious stories from a life spent behind the scenes with great cars, teams, and drivers. In Can-Am Challenger Peter Bryant delivers a personal, engaging account of a fascinating career in one of the greatest eras in motorsports history. Bryant started his career as a lowly fabricator in Colin Chapman’s original Lotus Cars workshop. He later became a freelance racing mechanic, working at circuits like Montlhèry, the Nürburgring, Reims, and Spa-Francorchamps. In 1962 he was hired as a full-time F1 mechanic, traveling all over the world with such great drivers as John Surtees, Jo Bonnier, and Graham Hill. In 1964, fate took him to America. It was here that Peter made his indelible mark in auto racing—as the designer of the most successful American-built race cars during the heyday of the Canadian-American Challenge Cup. His cars broke new ground in the use of advanced materials such as titanium, as well as emerging ground-effect technologies. It was an amazing achievement for a cockney lad with no formal training in design or engineering. But Peter overcame these limitations through a rare ability to learn by doing and an incredible capacity for hard work. He also retained an irrepressible sense of humor that reveals itself in a lifetime’s worth of anecdotes gathered on and off the racetrack. Whether it was launching rockets at the Lotus shop, dodging French police at the Reims GP, or spending New Year’s eve quarantined with Graham Hill in Pakistan, Peter never lost his boundless enthusiasm or energy.