I would say the Can Am series from 1977-87 was a bad choice of title. I always disliked those cars, but mostly because of the misappropriation of the name. OK. SCCA owned the copyright , but they would have been better off to promote the new series under a different title.
Oh dear, here we go again.
The first Can-Am was very successful for six or more years but most categories of racing have a natural shelf life unless they are very carefully managed and after the Porsche steamroller of 1973, the promoters saw the public's interest declining rapidly and started to move races to F5000. Yes, it was the promoters that did this; in particular the promoters of the two important fall races at Laguna Seca and Riverside that had been part of the bedrock of professional road racing in the US for over a decade. The SCCA had the (rare) good sense to drop Can-Am after the 1974 season before the brand became even more tarnished.
The promoters then lobbied the SCCA to give them a better package to promote. Fans had loved F5000 because of the close grids and competitive racing but in 1975 and 1976, it was all Lola T332s with Chevrolet engines and with no variety in either the front or the back of the car, the clamour was for a return to the Can-Am name, but to keep the close racing and larger grids that came with F5000. Any brand new formula would take time to build up so they needed to keep the current F5000s eligible so the answer was a sports car version of F5000 using the Can-Am name.
So that's what Can-Am II was, and I need to remind you that after a couple of seasons struggling to establish itself, it boomed between 1979 and 1981 and was one of the best forms of racing on the planet. Ickx, Tambay, Jones, Rahal, Rosberg, Holbert, Follmer, Unser, Sullivan - nobody can fault the list of drivers. As well as the Schkee, the Prophet and the Spyders, we also had the brutalism of the Lola T530, then the beautifully engineered VDS and Frissbee. Oh yes, all of those were based on Lola's excellent T332, but blame Lola for making one of the best racing cars of the 1970s and 1980s. We also had March 817s, the Shadow DN10, Al Holbert's CAC, Vern Schuppan's Elfin, and a host of others.
After 1982, CART started to take away the best Can-Am talent and we saw a brain drain of drivers, teams, engineers and races from Can-Am to CART. I've already written about this elsewhere so I'll save myself some time:
This was the season Can-Am fell from grace, crushed by the expansion and success of CART. Firstly, the race promoters decamped, most damagingly the high-profile Laguna Seca and Riverside "Fall Series" meetings, a mainstay not just of the Single-Seat Can-Am but before that through F5000 and the first Can-Am back to USRRC in the early 1960s. Both moved to CART. Mid-Ohio, another regular date going back to USRRC days, cancelled their Can-Am round too and the SCCA's inability to deliver ten races led to the loss of title sponsor Budweiser. The top teams were also on their way, with Galles Racing, VDS and Paul Newman all moving across to CART, the latter joining forces with Carl Haas. Jim Trueman of TrueSports had left a year earlier, taking Bobby Rahal and VDS chief crew Steve Horne with him, and they had proved immediately successful. Most drivers went in the same direction; the exception being Al Holbert who moved to IMSA.
What the SCCA should have done was to close down Can-Am again quickly after the 1983 season but instead they did a dreadful deal with Don Walker to continue it for 1984. Then it really should have been killed but again it was allowed to continue, now as little more than club racing with the Can-Am "brand" now being systematically trashed. It seems unbelievable now that it was allowed yet another season before the SCCA finally saw sense. An attempt to use the power of Carroll Shelby's name to reinvent Can-Am as a spec series was not a success either and since then it's all been nostalgia. Unfortunately, what tends to be remembered about Can-Am II was the fendered grid fillers of converted F5000s and the sheet steel monstrosities of its declining year; and what tends to be forgotten about Can-Am I was the predictable McLaren 1-2s,
Those of you who grew up on the original Can-Am won't be convinced, but any objective look at the second Can-Am shows it was a worthy successor.