| 1976 SCCA/USAC Formula 5000 Championship season | |||
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The 1976 SCCA/USAC Formula 5000 Championship [1] was the tenth running of the Sports Car Club of America's premier open wheel racing series [2] and the third to be co-sanctioned by the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and the United States Auto Club (USAC). [3]
The Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) is an American automobile club and sanctioning body supporting road racing, rallying, and autocross in the United States. Formed in 1944, it runs many programs for both amateur and professional racers.
The SCCA Continental Championship was an annual, professional, open-wheel motor racing series organized by the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), under various names, from 1967 to 1976.
The United States Auto Club (USAC) is one of the sanctioning bodies of auto racing in the United States. From 1956 to 1979, USAC sanctioned the United States National Championship, and from 1956 to 1997 the organization sanctioned the Indianapolis 500. Today, USAC serves as the sanctioning body for a number of racing series, including the Silver Crown Series, National Sprint Cars, National Midgets, Speed2 Midget Series, .25 Midget Series, Stadium Super Trucks, TORC: The Off-Road Championship, and Pirelli World Challenge.
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The championship was won by Brian Redman driving a Lola T332 Chevrolet. [4] It was Redman's third consecutive SCCA/USAC Formula 5000 Championship title win. [5] For the first time in three years, a vehicle other than a Lola won a race, with March and Shadow winning one race each. [5] 1976 also marked the first race win by a non-Chevrolet powered car since the 1971 season, with a Dodge-powered Shadow winning at Road America. [5]
Brian Herman Thomas Redman, is a retired British racing driver.
The Lola T332 was a race car designed and built by Lola Cars for use in Formula 5000 racing and made its racing debut in 1973. The T332 was successful around the globe with race victories in places such as Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the United States. The Lola commonly used the 5.0-litre Chevrolet V8 engine, though some competitors in Australia and New Zealand used the slightly cheaper and less powerful Australian made 5.0-litre Repco Holden V8.
Chevrolet, colloquially referred to as Chevy and formally the Chevrolet Division of General Motors Company, is an American automobile division of the American manufacturer General Motors (GM). Louis Chevrolet and ousted General Motors founder William C. Durant started the company on November 3, 1911 as the Chevrolet Motor Car Company. Durant used the Chevrolet Motor Car Company to acquire a controlling stake in General Motors with a reverse merger occurring on May 2, 1918 and propelled himself back to the GM presidency. After Durant's second ousting in 1919, Alfred Sloan, with his maxim "a car for every purse and purpose", would pick the Chevrolet brand to become the volume leader in the General Motors family, selling mainstream vehicles to compete with Henry Ford's Model T in 1919 and overtaking Ford as the best-selling car in the United States by 1929.
1976 was to be the final year of the SCCA/USAC Formula 5000 Championship as the SCCA replaced it with a revived Can Am Series for 1977. [6] The rules for the new series were to allow the Formula 5000 cars to compete with fully enveloping bodywork. [6]
Formula 5000 was an open wheel, single seater auto-racing formula that ran in different series in various regions around the world from 1968 to 1982. It was originally intended as a low-cost series aimed at open-wheel racing cars that no longer fit into any particular formula. The '5000' denomination comes from the maximum 5.0 litre engine capacity allowed in the cars, although many cars ran with smaller engines. Manufacturers included McLaren, Eagle, March, Lola, Lotus, Elfin, Matich and Chevron.
