Lola’s Eric Broadley was a prolific designer and constructor of racing cars.

Unusually for the time he pursued a business plan that relied on customers exclusively, with no factory or even factory-backed team to carry the flag in competition.

Lola’s cars had to be right, because essentially all the development was carried out by clients’ teams who were not, as fierce competitors, likely to share their setup sheets with other Lola teams.

As the proliferation of highly successful multi-car teams in all forms of motorsports today show, that was an inherent challenge.

It was as well a different era commercially where purses of a few thousand dollars were sufficient to attract teams and drivers from all over the world to travel across America in the annual late-season romp called the Canadian-American Challenge Cup series, the Can-Am.

It was, however, huge money at the time, with purses in the series’ first three years amounting to just over a million dollars plus sponsor and contingen...