Steve Farthing is the owner of T332 HU41 and below he tells us of all he had to go through to discover the history of his car.
I have finally got to the bottom of the Chassis number for the Lola T332 that Can-Am Cars Ltd. sold to me!
The first thing that I did was to contact Marc Bahner, the monocoque rebuilder and he confirmed that the donor tub was a genuine Lola Chassis.
Then I cross referenced all of the T332 Chassis numbers for F5000 and converted Can-Am cars for the timeline on conversion etc. and there were only two Chassis numbers that it could be, HU41 and HU57.
So I started with HU41 tracked down Barbara Baker, Bill Baker's widow and Mickey Caruso, her son, who went racing with them. They confirmed that after the crash in Round 2 at Mosport in 1976, the car was in fact repaired and Bill raced it in a few local single seater races and was planning to convert it to a Can-Am car but died at Sears Point raceway before this could be done. The car was given to their bodywork guy as payment for outstanding invoices, at this point the "Baker" trail goes cold.
I decided to try and come from the other end of the trail; Chuck Haines found the history of how the bent monocoque got to be in a hedge at Road Atlanta. Chuck contacted Fran Larkin's Race shop "The Race Shop" Binghamton NY, Fran confirmed that Rod Cusumano crashed the car at The Gateway track St. Louis in 1985, they took the wreck back to their race shop, removed all usable parts that were then sold to Macaluso. The bent monocoque and some other parts were taken by Jay Puskenales, who was one of Fran Larkins race crew, but also a corner worker/flagman at Watkins Glen, he used the monocoque to train corner workers in Extraction Techniques. After three years Puskenales moved to the Road Atlanta area and carried on using the monocoque in training corner workers there. At some time in the future, John Woerheide acquired the bent monocoque from the undergrowth and it was sold to Can-Am Cars Ltd.
After many phone calls/Emails to different leads in the story, including John Morton, who sold the Lola T332 to John Kalagian (Kalagian Ardisana Racing). I decided to trace the history of "Kalagian Ardisana Racing", John Kalagian had a life changing race accident moved to race team management and then started a Surf shop and died in 2000. I had better luck with Beth (Lizabeth) Ardisana, the other director, who is now CEO of ASG Renaissance in Dearborn Michigan, after many phone conversations and Emails, she confirmed that the car they purchased from John Morton to convert into a Lola/Frissbee Can-Am car was Lola T332 HU41.
So, after a year of detective work, we now have the lineage of my car which will now be stamped up with chassis number T332 HU41.
