Jackie Oliver reunited with Lola T70

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAYSON FONG

Just another race, just another distant memory. Jackie OIiver reckons he doesn’t remember much about the 1970 Buenos Aires 1000Kms and his drive in the Lola T70 MkIIIB you see here, which he shared with rising local hero Carlos Reutemann. It was, after all, 55 years ago. But at 82, Oliver is still as sharp as he ever was, still at heart the chippy Essex racer who evolved into a world-weary but fiercely independent Formula 1 team owner. Press him gently and the memories begin to flood back.

“I’ve got no idea,” is the unpromising response when we ask him how he ended up driving the T70 for ‘colourful’ Swedish privateer Ulf Norinder, who had bought the Lola and campaigned it through 1969. We’re at Silverstone, at the annual British Racing Drivers’ Club test day, and Oliver has accepted our invitation for a reunion with a car that passed through his hands briefly, first for a couple of races in Sweden in 1969, then for a two-race jaunt to the Argentine capital in the first January of the 1970s.

The Lola was deep blue with a gold stripe when it converged with Oliver and Reutemann in Buenos Aires. Now liveried in deference to Norinder’s sponsor Valvoline from 1969, chassis SL76/141 thrives under the ownership of Grahame and Olly Bryant who after happy and prolific years of historic racing are now preparing to let it go to a new patron, via the salesroom of fellow classics racer Sam Hancock.

It seems likely another Swede, Jo Bonnier, had a hand in Oliver’s deal. The 1959 Dutch Grand Prix winner was Lola’s European agent and had sold the new T70, one of the original 16 MkIIIBs built, to Norinder for the 1969 sports car season, see sidebar overleaf. “The reason why Carlos was there was because of his nationality,” says Oliver, who claims he already knew Reutemann even though the future 12-time Formula 1 GP winner had yet to race in Europe. He’d travel over later that year for a season of Formula 2 with support from Automóvil Club Argentino. “As for me, maybe my success at Le Mans made me of interest,” suggests Oliver.

Indeed, Jackie was in demand – at least in sports cars. Formula 1 had become a struggle in a seriously misfiring BRM team. It had seemed a good idea, switching from Lotus. Having been thrown in as replacement at Monaco in 1968 for a dead Jim Clark, it became all too clear that Colin Chapman didn’t rate or particularly want him. The trouble was the alternative, BRM’s 1969 P139, turned out to be a disaster. In contrast, sports cars in John Wyer’s Ford GT40 couldn’t have gone much better. He tolerated rather than liked sharing with Jacky Ickx, but the pair won the Sebring 12 Hours and Le Mans together, despite the enigmatic Belgian’s protest walk-don’t-run start at the 24 Hours that almost lost them the race. Ickx only crossed the line 120m ahead of Hans Herrmann’s Porsche 908 LH at the chequered flag.

In the wake of such success, Oliver chose to walk away from Wyer. “The Ford GT40 was a great car but ageing by 1969,” he explains. “So JW Automotive built the Mirage for the shorter races. It was a poor design: heavy, handled badly and was uncompetitive and I told them so. Probably not very diplomatically but I turned out to be right about that car. Furthermore, Tony Southgate’s BRM design for the 1970 season [the P153] had promise and my Can-Am programme in the USA was going well, so I was busy.”

Still, here he was pitching up in Buenos Aires, for a drive in unfamiliar circumstances. Fortunately for this story, in the process of looking around the Lola in a Silverstone garage, a few memories have been thrown up. So to speak.

“An usual experience because it was a privateer team when all the other drives I’d had were with Lotus, BRM and Wyer,” Jackie reflects. “It was nice and friendly, if a little bit disorganised. I didn’t know, for example, that it was an early morning start for the 1000Kms. I ended up eating breakfast in the taxi on the way to the track, and unfortunately the breakfast came up in the Lola. It was not a problem, I just pushed it into the passenger seat. But it was warm by the time Carlos was taking over and when he opened the door the smell wasn’t very good. He wasn’t too happy to get in, but the team insisted. ‘It’s not that bad.’ Interesting moment.”

Buenos Aires was back in vogue as a premier-level motor racing destination at the dawn of the 1970s and would become a regular F1 host through the decade and into the early ’80s. This non-championship edition of the 1000Kms was the first since 1960 and the organisers worked hard to impress. The placement of Argentine drivers and presence of Juan Manuel Fangio as race director overseeing a 25-car international entry contributed to a decent crowd of 40,000 turning out. Matra was there with an MS650 for Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Henri Pescarolo; there were new Alfa Romeo T33/3s for Andrea de Adamich/Piers Courage and Nanni Galli/Rolf Stommelen; Wyer’s Gulf Porsche 917Ks stayed away, but David Piper was there sharing his with Brian Redman; and there were nine Lola T70s – now the go-to top-class customer option for privateers – eight private Porsche 908s, two GT40s and the novel Serenissima for Jonathan Williams/Maurizio Montagnani.

“I went there subsequently with the Gulf 917 Porsche,” says Oliver, who returned to Wyer’s team for 1971. “The circuit had high-speed corners, including the famous big hairpin – almost 360 degrees which you could take nearly flat out. Argentina was a great country and the circuit was close to the city.”

In qualifying, Redman stuck the 917 on pole position, avoiding a track-invading cow, from the Courage/de Adamich Alfa. But there was a cloud of tragedy: an accident involving Richard Broström’s Porsche 908 resulted in the death of a marshal. As ever back then, racing life rolled on.

Oliver started the first of 164 laps from the sixth row, and while Redman scorched away up front, perhaps that rushed breakfast on the move was already taking its toll: Jackie had a slow start. A couple of punctures reined in Redman who then sustained race-ending damage when he collided with a wandering Lola while lapping it. Race director Fangio called in the offending driver, Jacques Rey.

“At one point I remember thinking, ‘We’re in P1, everyone else must have stopped for fuel’”

The de Adamich Alfa opened up a healthy lead over the Matra, with Jochen Rindt – at the start of his final, tragically posthumous F1 title season – running third in a Porsche. Then when the Alfa lost 17min in the pits, Beltoise and Pescarolo took a definitive lead, eventually winning by a lap over Rindt and Alex Soler-Roig. As for Oliver and Reutemann, they were the last but one classified finishers, in 11th. Some of the delay, Jackie recalls, was down to running out of fuel. “That was part of the disorganisation,” he says. “At one point I remember thinking, ‘We’re in P1, everyone else must have stopped for fuel,’ and then suddenly through a corner… Fortunately the pits were a very short distance away so I cruised in. We had to push it the last 20 or 30ft, which injured the result somewhat.”

A week later, on January 18, Oliver was back at the same circuit to race the Lola again, this time solo, in the Buenos Aires 200 Miles. He finished fourth behind the Courage/de Adamich Alfa, Masten Gregory in a Porsche 908/02 and Beltoise and Pescarolo in the Matra – but he has no memory of that occasion.

Oliver’s F1 driving career puttered on thereafter, from BRM to briefly McLaren in ’71 and finally to Shadow before he took the step towards team ownership. But in sports cars and Can-Am he remained a force. On his return to Wyer, he won at Spa and Monza, and completed the set of the big three endurance races by winning the 1971 Daytona 24 Hours, sharing with Pedro Rodríguez. Overall wins at Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans makes for an elite club, because few have gone the full distance for this unofficial triple crown: Oliver, Hans Herrmann, Hurley Haywood, AJ Foyt, Al Holbert, Andy Wallace, Mauro Baldi, Marco Werner and Timo Bernhard, with Porsche’s Nick Tandy making it a round 10 earlier this year. In this illustrious context, perhaps Oliver deserves more credit for his exploits in the cockpit.

“I drove 50 GPs for four different teams and didn’t win one of them,” he says. “So it’s kind of you to say I won all those sports car races. But I would have liked to have won an F1 race. Maybe they are more difficult, but I don’t think so.”

“The Lola was bought by a movie production company, Solar, for a big project that summer”

As Oliver returned to Europe to focus on BRM after his Argentine escapade, the Lola took a quirky turn. It was bought by a movie production company, Solar, for a big project taking place that summer in north-west France: yes, it became a stunt car for Steve McQueen’s Le Mans, and you’ll know it well. Remember how Michael Delaney gets distracted by a Ferrari exploding in his peripheral vision, then ping-pongs between the barriers in Gulf 917 No20? That’s ‘our’ Lola in disguise. And it all happened by remote control.

During filming, a German BP executive named Hermann von Wolfe was staying at Le Mans’ Hotel Central. He bought the damaged car, but left it unrepaired for years until American Lola enthusiast Mac McClendon acquired it in 1983. On a new chassis he eventually restored the T70 that is verified by Lola Heritage as SL76/141, and returned it to Norinder’s Valvoline colours. After changing hands several times, the Bryants took possession in 2007 and commissioned former Lola employee Clive Robinson to complete another restoration in readiness for its historic racing return.

“T70s are just fantastic to drive, with a great balance, good power, good brakes and plenty of grip,” Olly Bryant tells Motor Sport while Jackie takes a moment to slide into the Lola, just for old time’s sake. “The gearbox takes a bit of getting used to. You have to make sure you match the revs on the up and down shifts to be smooth. But we’ve enjoyed a lot of success with it over 18 years. Today we’ve had technology creep in: you have better fluids, brake pads and tyres than when Jackie was racing it. They are a phenomenally fast car now. We do a 2min 28sec lap around Spa which is only 10sec off a modern GT3; on treaded tyres that’s quite impressive. Of course the modern-day prototype is way up the road, but this is a proper race car. They are very rewarding and fun to race.”

The Lola T70 MkIIIB, developed from the original spyder, was born in that transitional time when the power of downforce was only starting to be realised. It was already dated compared to the Can-Am cars Oliver was also driving back then. “During that period when I raced Can-Am for the Titanium corporation in the States they used the same Chevy engine with a big alloy block,” says Jackie. “The T70 had the same power but it didn’t have the same downforce. When I drove it I asked, ‘Where’s the wing?’ I was used to horsepower and torque, but there was no downforce. The circuits in the States, I took a lot of corners flat out in Can-Am cars. Not in the T70.”

“It has a very large rear tyre, so there’s too much rear grip if anything. Understeer is an issue”

Bryant concedes the point, but in historic racing the T70 has done just fine. Better, in fact, than it ever did in period. “It has a very large rear tyre, so there’s too much rear grip if anything,” says Bryant. “Understeer is the main issue with the balance. We used to run with dive planes on the front and we have pictures to show they used them in period, but that’s something the FIA has made us take off now. We just stay on the brakes a bit longer to get the nose in. The Chevy engines were a weak point in period, but they are pretty tough now. It was always one of the more cost-effective cars to run, with the engine and Hewland gearbox. GT40s are quicker at Le Mans, but at most tracks it’s the class of the field unless you get a 917 coming out, which is rare these days. The Ferrari 512s when driven properly are a match for it. We had a very good race at Silverstone Festival in 2023: Alex Brundle was in Carlos Monteverde’s Ferrari and he won and I came second. It’s still up there, the weapon of choice at Spa.”

Oliver isn’t the sentimental type, but as he unfolds himself from the Lola there’s a glint in his eye. He knows how lucky he was to race in this era – and to survive, for that matter. “They’re classic cars now,” he says wistfully. “The cars I used to race are a hobby for enthusiasts. To see the enthusiasm and energy they put in, it’s a great hobby too.”

Thanks to Grahame and Olly Bryant, Sam Hancock (samhancock.com), the BRDC and Jackie Oliver for their help with this feature.

Lola T70 MKIIIB

Chassis Aluminium riveted and bonded monocoque
Engine 4940cc Chevrolet V8, 16 valves, OHV
Gearbox Hewland LG600 five-speed manual
Front suspension Double wishbones, coil springs, adjustable telescopic dampers, adjustable anti-rollbar
Rear suspension Top link with radius arm and lower wishbones, coil springs, adjustable telescopic dampers, adjustable anti-roll bar
Brakes Girling ventilated steel discs, hydraulic actuation, four piston alloy callipers
Tyres Avon (treaded)