The Canadian-American Challenge Cup series is unique in international automobile racing and, although only in its third year, the 80,000 fans expected at the Riverside International Raceway in California Sunday for the fifth event on the season's calendar will testify to the fact that it has already captured the imagination of the racing public. It isn't hard to see why. The series is for Group 7 sports cars, and in the lexicon of the Sports Car Club of America and the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile that means quite simply that anything goes. The cars are loud, the cars are fast (with top speeds approaching 200 mph), the cars are boisterously beautiful, with wildly carved bodywork, with spoilers, airfoils and air scoops sticking out everywhere. Most important, they are sports cars in name only. The only serious restrictions are that they have a passenger seat—although nobody rides shotgun—and that their wheels be covered. Otherwise, the only limitations imposed on design and construction are those of the imagination.
The fans have to be on their toes, for the series is brutally short. There are six races—in Elkhart Lake, Wis.; Bridge-hampton, N.Y.; Edmonton, Alta.; Monterey, Calif.; Riverside and Las Vegas—in the space of just 10 weeks, and the demands on drivers, crews and the cars themselves are punishing. Staccato-fast the races come and go, as do the brief weekends of a football season, and no one dares fall behind. It is not a series in which one plays catch-up.
