The mystery of Shadow – Thank Frankel it’s Friday | GRR
As a man, Don Nichols was as strange and enigmatic as the cars he produced and raced with varying degrees of success throughout the 1970s. The fact he called them Shadows just goes to heighten further the sense of strangeness and enigma that surrounded them. So why it’s taken 50 years for the full story to be told I cannot say, but it has been worth the wait: Pete Lyons’ new book ‘Shadow – The Magnificent Machines of a Man of Mystery’, is an absolute cracker.
Nichols was not to everyone’s liking, indeed Lyons’ describes the variance in attitudes towards him as so extreme as to be ‘bipolar’, but that just makes his tale all the more fascinating. Written with the cooperation of Nichols throughout his career and particularly towards the end of his life (he died in August, 2017) and with interviews with key designers, engineers and drivers, it is comprehensive history, a riveting read, and a fascinating insight not just into the mind of a true maverick, but what it was like to go racing in F1, F5000 and Can-Am through that dangerous, daredevil decade.
It’s all there from the triumph of winning the 1974 Can-Am championship – albeit it a victory achieved in the absence of the works Porsche and McLaren teams and its sole Grand Prix win courtesy of Alan Jones in the 1977 Austrian Grand Prix, to the tragedies of which there were two. First came the 1974 testing accident at Kyalami that took the life of the great Peter Revson when a titanium ball joint in the suspension of his DN3 failed, pitching him into the barrier at unsurviveable speed. But if Shadow was at fault there, the accident that took the life of Tom Pryce at the same track three years later was perhaps the most freakish of accidents in F1 history, as the Welshman, unsighted by Hans Stuck’s March collided with a marshal running across the track with a fire extinguisher to put out a small fire on Renzo Zorzi’s sister car.
As a kid I was huge Shadow fan, and I’ll confess right now it was for no other reason than that they just looked really cool, painted from front spoiler to rear wing in the purest of blacks.
But the one I want to dwell upon just for a moment here is the very first, the Shadow Mk1, partly because this summer marks the 50th anniversary of its race debut, but mainly because it was one of the maddest looking racing cars ever conceived.
The idea was to exploit the fact that Can-Am in the late 1960s was a formula almost without rules. Open wheels weren’t allowed and the cars had to be nominal two seaters, but that really was about it. So when Nichols met up with freelancer (and free-thinking) designer Trevor Harris in 1968, the latter’s idea for a what was effectively a go-kart with an enormous engine really struck a chord.
The thinking was to build a tiny car with minimal front area, a concept great in theory but not without its issues in practice: it would need tiny wheels too, which also meant tiny brakes. And without the space to put enormous radiators in the nose, how would you go about cooling a monstrous Chevy V8? Harris hoped that by locating the radiators at the back of the car with cooling scoops mounted on the body would solve the latter problem.
The braking issue was meant to be fixed by a combination of a movable rear wing acting as an airbrake, deployable air brakes in front of the front wheels and movable vanes on the side of the car that could be used to cool both the engine and rear brakes. Then in 1969, before the car had turned a wheel, the Sports Car Club of America banned moveable aerodynamic devices…
Perhaps unsurprisingly given its tiny wheels, now inadequate braking system and a weight distribution estimated as 25/75 front to rear, it wasn’t the easiest of things to command. Originally the driver lay almost flat with feet splayed close to horizontal because the nose was so low, with a steering wheel almost as flat as that of an old London bus, but the concept was just too impractical. So by the time the car was ready to race, driver George Follmer sat close to vertical behind a higher screen, compromising the original philosophy of the car, but at least allowing it to be driven properly.
It made its debut at Mosport Park in Canada in June of 1970 where it qualified fastest of all the cars running a standard sized 427cu in big block Chevy motor. And in a straight line it was by far the fastest car out there, proving if nothing else that in this regard at least, the low frontal area philosophy worked. Overall Follmer was sixth on the grid, but in the race the brakes got hot, the bespoke Firestone tyres got hotter and the Chevy got hottest of all, forcing its retirement after just 24 of 80 laps.
The car raced just once more, at St Jovite, where it overheated again, injury being added to insult when it was smashed to pieces on its trailer leaving the circuit by a drunk driver coming the other way.
Harris and Follmer went off to do other things leaving Nichols with no designer, driver or car. But he still had another built in time for the Mid Ohio race six weeks later, this time with Vic Elford driving. This time the car lasted just nine of the 80 laps, dissuading even Nichols from pursuing the project further.
The Mk1 was dead, but the Shadow story was just about to get going. And now there’s a great book to tell you all about it.
Racing images courtesy of Motorsport Images.