By MSHFA rules, only a non-American’s achievements in North America should be considered for induction. “Big John’s” record was profound. The Briton captured the inaugural (1966) Can-Am title with three wins over an international field that included inductees Mark Donohue, Dan Gurney, Jim Hall, Phil Hill, Denny Hulme, Parnelli Jones, David Hobbs, Sam Posey, and Bruce McLaren. His other victories include the 1963 Sebring 12 Hours, 1965 Player’s 200 at Mosport, 1965 Player’s Mont-Tremblant, 1966 Mexican Grand Prix and 1967 Las Vegas Can-Am. As a constructor, his eponymous single-seaters won seven U.S. F5000 races with Hobbs and Posey and finished 2nd in the championship three times. Surtees remains the only person to have won world championships on two and four wheels.
By Preston Lerner
John Surtees is almost invariably described as the only man to win world championships in Formula 1 cars and on Grand Prix motorcycles. But this encomium, stupendous as it is, shortchanges his accomplishments as a racer, as an engineer and as a constructor. Although the Can-Am series is often remembered as “The Bruce and Denny Show” or the private preserve of Mark Donohue and Roger Penske, it was Surtees who was crowned as the inaugural champion in 1966, and chassis he built later were major players during the glory years of Formula 5000.
The son of a motorcycle dealer/racer in London, Surtees won his first race, in a sidecar attached to a bike ridden by his father – and was promptly disqualified because he was only 14. He started racing himself the next year, first on Vincents, then on Nortons. By 1960, when he exchanged two wheels for four, he’d amassed seven world championships on MV Agustas, with six Isle of Man TT titles in his logbook.
Surtees transitioned to cars with almost miraculous ease. In his first automobile race, at Goodwood in a spindly Cooper-Austin Formula Junior, he qualified on the front row and finished second to Jim Clark. A mere two months later, he was racing a works Lotus 18 in the Monaco Grand Prix. In 1963, Enzo Ferrari rebuilt his struggling team around the talented Briton. Surtees rewarded him with a magnificent win at the Nurburgring and, the next year, a world championship after finishing second in a nail-biter in Mexico. The tifosi called him “Il Grande John” as much for his indomitable will as his physical stature.
Surtees displayed his legendary grit after he ruptured both kidneys and broke countless bones at Mosport in 1965 when an upright broke in his Lola T70. After months of arduous rehabilitation, he visited the factory in Maranello. “All the mechanics were crying,” he recalled. “They got a hold of one of those little hoists that they used to move the engines about, and they winched me into the Tasman Dino 246, which was still there waiting for me.” Surtees won a dramatic race at Spa in wet-dry conditions and probably would have claimed a second F1 championship if political intrigue hadn’t inspired him to quit Ferrari in mid-season.
This freed Surtees to enter the freshly minted Canadian-American Challenge Cup in 1966 with trusty mechanic Malcolm Malone, a single T70 and a pair of Traco-built Chevy V-8s. “We bought a Chevrolet van, put the car on the trailer and went off to the races,” Surtees said later. He won three times enroute to earning the inaugural Can-Am championship and a permanent place in American racing lore.
After winning two more Grands Prix in a Cooper-Maserati and a Honda, Surtees started building open-wheel cars to his own specifications. Team Surtees chassis were especially formidable in Formula 5000 here in the States, with inductee David Hobbs nearly driving a TS5 to the championship in 1969. Although his cars were less successful in F1, Surtees didn’t dwell on the failures. As he put it: “It is a privilege for anybody to actually earn a living from something which is their hobby.”
Preston Lerner has written about racing for magazines ranging from Automobile and Road & Track to Wired and The New York Times Magazine. He’s also the author of seven books, the most recent recounting the saga of Shelby American.