A fleet of transporters ferried all the cars and material the 580 miles from Detroit to Montreal and when practise was due on Friday morning everyone was in pretty good shape, having overcome or repaired the ravages of the Motor City race. We are now at the fifth year of the Canadian GP and the roads around the exhibition grounds on the island in the mighty St. Lawrence river, no there were no obvious problems in preparing the circuit fur the race or organising the transport between the centre of town and the island and from the garage / workshop area to the pits.
For three days Montreal had been in a heatwave but someone “up there” decided Friday would be a good day to turn off the heat and in doing so they exaggerated and it rained! Everyone was ready for practice so they all went out and skated about on the slippery surface, until Arnoux and Winkelhock skated into each other, which stopped things for a bit. The idea was to get the cars sorted out for the Montreal circuit, but the conditions rather frustrated the idea. However, it gave the teams the opportunity to get things underway, even if some of the things were in the wrong direction.
While the big teams were in pretty good order some of the smaller ones were struggling. The ATS team were down to two cars, one of the crashed ones in Detroit having been dismantled and its monocoque sent home for repair while the second which crashed was sent home for good. All-night work had got the repaired monocoque back to Montreal and built up into a car for Winkelhock and now it was bent again. Theodore were bedding-in their new car as the original one had been bent in Jan Lammer’s practice accident at Detroit.
