How Shadow's F1 story ended in shambolic fashion

To suggest the Shadow DN11 was a great Formula 1 car would be something of a stretch. After all, it started only one grand prix. In five attempts during the first half of the 1980 season, perennially underrated Geoff Lees made the grid just once, at Kyalami; Irishman David Kennedy tried seven times but always came up short; and promising young Swede Stefan Johansson failed to make his grand prix debut on two occasions.

So why are we bothering with this footnote of the first ground-effect era? Largely because it’s a Shadow, first and foremost.

The American-owned team created by the enigmatic Don Nichols remains a cult favourite of the 1970s, as celebrations of the constructor at both Goodwood’s Members’ Meeting and the Festival of Speed this year have reminded us. Shadow was always a crowd-pleaser.

Those sharp and moody good looks, usually in black (but not always), and the string of cool drivers who raced them created an unmistakable aura. There was something exotic about Shadow – even if the cars were actually designed and built in prosaic Northampton.

Jackie Oliver, George Follmer, Jean-Pierre ‘Jumper’ Jarier. Welsh wizard Tom Pryce, surely the archetypal Shadowman. Riccardo Patrese, Brian Redman, Clay Regazzoni. Alan
Jones – who took the team’s only grand prix win, a taster before his defining years at Williams – Elio de Angelis, Jan Lammers and more. It was a rolling cast of gifted, grizzled character actors, all of whom played their part – for a few short scenes or over many key acts – in the rowdy theatre
of F1 in its most way-out decade.

Then there was Nichols himself, a shady figure cloaked in a cape and flat-brimmed sombrero cordobés. Motor racing was full of colourful characters, and still is. But F1 folk had never seen anyone quite like the bearded American.

Shadow owner Nichols cast a mysterious figure which only amplified the allure of his cars

Photo by: David Phipps

The shadows
of his heavily active combat record in WWII, including as
a pathfinder paratrooper on D-Day, and subsequent life
in military intelligence that he’d never talk about only
added to the air of mystery, and from the start his approach
to motorsport was novel. Founded as Advanced Vehicle Systems in 1968, Nichols’ company first cast its shadow in Can-Am with the low-line, ‘cotton reel’-wheeled Mk1. There’s often a good reason why original thinking in motorsport is best described as radical…

It was only when Shadow became more conventional in its design approach that
it became successful. In 1974, in a declining post-McLaren and Porsche Can-Am, Jackie Oliver secured what would
prove to be Shadow’s only championship title.

It was the ex-Team Lotus, BRM and McLaren racer
who convinced Nichols to migrate his team, with its stylish support from UOP (United Oil Products), to F1 in 1973.
From the pen of Tony Southgate, with whom Oliver had worked at BRM, Shadow F1 cars looked right from the
start – although the DN1 needed work to combat the near-ubiquitous Cosworth DFV’s notorious vibrations.

Southgate’s DN8 revived hopes for 1977 – until horror struck at the third round at Kyalami

Still,
Oliver might have won the chaotic wet-weather Canadian GP at Mosport for what would have been the only grand prix victory of his career – and some lap charts claimed he did.
In a race that featured the first use of a safety car in F1, confusion rained (sorry). After a long delay, McLaren’s
Peter Revson was declared the winner. Oliver was third.

The following year Revson switched sides and joined Shadow – only to die in a practice crash at Kyalami when
a component failed. Southgate was devastated. It would
not be the last time tragedy darkened the Shadow tale.

Tom Pryce landed his big break with Shadow later that year, after Revson replacement Brian Redman chose to walk away from F1. The following season, in Southgate’s refined DN5, Pryce achieved what Nichols would say years later was his team’s apogee: a dominant victory in the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, beating a field that included reigning world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, Ronnie Peterson, Jacky Ickx and Jody Scheckter.

Two months earlier, in January 1975, team-mate Jarier had scored pole positions at the two season-opening grands prix in Argentina and Brazil. But Shadow reliability remained a bugbear: Jarier retired from 10 races that season, Pryce from six. UOP dropped its support at the end of the year.

Pryce had won the Race of Champions for Shadow in 1975 and took a world championship podium in Austria, but the team's strong momentum faded after his death in 1977

Photo by: David Phipps

Money was tight from here on, but Southgate’s DN8 revived hopes for 1977 – until horror struck at the third round at Kyalami. A fuel fire lit up Renzo Zorzi’s Shadow after he pulled off on the main straight during the South African GP, triggering two marshals to cross the track from the pitwall. The second, 19-year-old Frederik Jansen van Vuuren, was carrying a fire extinguisher.

Cresting the brow of a rise, Hans Stuck’s Brabham narrowly missed the marshal, but Pryce wasn’t so lucky. Both the marshal and the 27-year-old driver were killed instantly, Pryce by the impact with the extinguisher. For those who witnessed it, the sight of the Shadow careering along the straight all the way down to crash at Crowthorne remains a grisly memory of unspeakable trauma.

It was later that season that Alan Jones came from 14th to win a wet Austrian GP, inheriting the lead when James
Hunt’s engine let go and beating world champion elect
Niki Lauda. But it’s probably true that Pryce’s loss was the moment the heart and soul went out of Shadow. Nothing could ever be quite the same after that. Jones’s win was
very much an anomaly before the team’s most infamous episode played out in 1978. Enter the ‘Sharrows’.

Having started the F1 love affair, Jackie Oliver remained at Shadow after his last full season as an F1 driver in 1973. Dovetailing a colourful life behind the wheel in the US – including a stint in NASCAR – he was the gears that kept Nichols’ wheels turning in grands prix. After a final one-off return to the F1 cockpit – ninth in the 1977 Swedish GP – Oliver’s thoughts took an all too obvious turn.

“The UOP sponsorship had stopped and I was spending more time raising money for the F1 team than I was driving cars – and at the South African GP I saw the death of Tom Pryce,” says Oliver. “I thought, I’ve got to give this up.

“Franco Ambrosio” – an Italian businessman trading in pasta, and a (less than reliable) Shadow sponsor – “said to me, ‘Who is this Don Nichols? You seem to do all the work. Why don’t you do it for yourself?’ I said to Don, ‘Are you going to take the team back to the US now you’ve run out of money?’ He said he didn’t know.

“I asked him, ‘Do you want to sell it to me?’ He said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ That was in the August of 1977. By the September I went to him again. I said to him, ‘You haven’t paid me for the last 18 months, so I’m sorry
but here’s a writ. Either sell me the team or pay me.’ He didn’t, so I decided with Franco to go my own way.”

Naturally, Bernie Ecclestone was quickly on to Oliver’s plan. Still primarily the boss of Brabham, The Bolt was already taking a bigger-picture interest in F1 affairs, particularly in
the British-based ‘garagiste’ teams. He tried to arbitrate between Nichols and Oliver, setting up a meeting at the Brabham factory. But Nichols didn’t show.

Increasingly frustrated at the team's struggles, Oliver led a mass exodus of staff to the new Arrows team but Shadow limped on

Photo by: LAT Photographic

“I bought the debt to Shadows’ suppliers,” says Oliver. “I thought that would be leverage for Don to decide what to do. Either he could pay me the debt or sell me the team. It didn’t work out that way, it turned into a bloody fight in the end. So I ended up with my own F1 team, Cosworth engines, an aluminium monocoque and 18 people in a factory in Milton Keynes – in six months. And I took one car to the 1978 Brazilian GP.

“You couldn’t do that now. I spent a million quid that year. That was my total budget, including legal costs…”

How the nascent Arrows hastily built a car in the shape of the FA1 (named in deference to sponsor Ambrosio) which looked suspiciously like the Shadow DN9 has gone down in infamy as F1’s prime ‘copy-cat’ case.

The team chased the crowd in following the revolution in aerodynamics led by Colin Chapman’s Team Lotus, but it didn’t work very well

“The most important person in a team is not me or the drivers, it’s the bloody designer,” says Oliver. “I had to get Tony Southgate to join me. I said to him, ‘Are you going to come?’ He said, ‘If you start your own F1 team you’re out of your f***ing mind,
I’ve got better things to do.’ Sorry to hear that but if you change your mind let me know.

“All the people I hired in the first place in 1973, I asked them if they wanted to come and most of them said yes – everyone except the cleaner and the truck driver. One Monday when Tony turned up at the Shadow factory in Northampton, he got on the phone and said, ‘F*** me, there’s only two people here. Is that job offer still open?’ It certainly is, Tony.

“But he took a few Shadow drawings with him. I didn’t know. That blew the whole thing. I said to him, ‘What did you do that for? You didn’t need to do that, all the ideas are in your head.’ He said ‘I had some legal advice and they said I owned the intellectual property rights.’ But the lawyer I hired said, ‘No you don’t!’”

As the new-old team led by Southgate and ace draughtsman Dave Wass rapidly created the entirely
legit Arrows A1, ready in time for the Austrian GP as the
copy-cat court case wrapped up in Nichols’ favour, Shadow limped on. The death of Pryce, now this mass defection of personnel… it was only a matter of time. Which brings us
back to where we came in: the DN11.

Only points of 1979 came courtesy of de Angelis at Watkins Glen - the final time a Shadow cracked the top six

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

Well, almost. The DN9 that preceded it gives context.
The first ground-effect Shadow was started by Southgate for the 1978 season before he defected to Arrows, and was finished after his departure by the equally prolific John Baldwin.

The team chased the crowd in following the revolution in aerodynamics led by Colin Chapman’s Team Lotus, but it didn’t work very well. Clay Regazzoni and Hans Stuck managed a total of six points between them, while Hawaiian IndyCar racer Danny Ongais twice failed to qualify
a DN9 entered by the Interscope team.

The decline continued in ’79 with the DN9B in which wealthy Roman Elio de Angelis cut his F1 teeth, scoring a fourth place at the season-ending US GP at Watkins Glen – and attracting enough attention to land a Lotus drive for ’80, a move Nichols attempted to thwart with a court injunction. The Shadow he’d raced had been updated by Richard Owen and F1 nomad draughtsman John Gentry, in his second
spell with the team.

Gentry had been an early recruit to the
F1 cause in 1973, joining from March, then after Shadow moved on to Fittipaldi, Wolf’s Can-Am effort which starred a young Gilles Villeneuve, and Tyrrell where he worked on the 1978 Monaco GP-winning 008 with Maurice Phillippe. His return to Shadow was squeezed in around another turn at March engineering Formula 2 drivers and working on
its BMW M1 Le Mans project.

It was Gentry who started the DN11, but then left to hook up with Rory Byrne at Toleman, an alliance that created the TG280 in which Brian Henton and Derek Warwick streaked to a landmark one-two in the European F2 Championship. Good move from Gentry, who broke his 1970s pattern by staying put at Toleman through its F1 campaigns up to 1984 – by which time Shadow and Don Nichols had long since departed.

Vic Morris completed what Gentry started on the DN11, but the team by now was nearly spent of oxygen. Not that David Kennedy cared. The Irishman came to grand prix racing via the British Aurora-backed national F1 series in which he’d finished second to Rupert Keegan in 1979 – and described shooting for the pinnacle, from where he came from, as like wanting to land on the moon. The DN11, with its yellow sidepods in deference to on-off cigarette brand sponsor Villigers, looked a beauty in his eyes. At least at first.

At his first taste of the car at Silverstone, Kennedy has
said the team tried two different configurations of sidepod
and the ground effect was so strong they were pulled out
from the chassis. But instead of beefing them up, the team used the pods that remained attached – and were therefore presumably less effective.

This was a clear sign of a team running without a budget. No wonder Kennedy failed to make the cut in Buenos Aires and at Interlagos. Past the pits he reported the chassis twisted to such a degree the steering locked and he was forced to arch his elbow into the monocoque just to hold the steering wheel straight.

The DN11 was a pretty-looking machine, but blighted by problems with porpoising

Photo by: James Mann

Beside him, the team strived to sell the second seat to either Beppe Gabbiani or Renzo Zorzi but, when the money never materialised from either driver, an on-standby Stefan Johansson found himself thrown in. Like Kennedy, he was dumbfounded by the chassis flexing and the somewhat disconcerting locked steering: set a radius for a corner and commit. There’d be no changing your line.

Talented Geoff Lees had shown glimpses of his true self in a fragmented climb to the fringes of F1. A year earlier his F1 debut had landed late via Tyrrell when Jean-Pierre Jarier contracted hepatitis. An impressive seventh at Hockenheim, passing team-mate Didier Pironi along the way, was rewarded by Derek Daly taking the drive for the next race. Now he pitched up at Shadow in place of Johansson at Kyalami.

The Shadows were “hopelessly outclassed,” reported Denis Jenkinson in Motor Sport, “and on some corners, especially fast ones, they changed direction in an alarming manner, looking very twitchy and unstable. The two young drivers
were heroes without results.”

Kennedy crashed on the second lap, bounced off the track by the car’s severe porpoising, while Lees ran ninth before his suspension failed

Still, Lees made the cut, by default. Marc Surer’s crash in his ATS had left him with two broken ankles, while promising rookie Alain Prost had a busted wrist after an off in his McLaren. In the race, broken suspension pitched Lees into the catch fencing, smashing into the abandoned Arrows A3 of Riccardo Patrese. He was classified 13th, eight laps down. The last ‘finish’ in a GP for a car bearing the Shadow name alone.

Next time out at Long Beach Lees experienced the chassis flex/steering lock phenomena – which must have been terrifying on the tight street circuit. It’s said he feigned illness after the first day of practice. No one rushed to replace him.

Something had to give, and it did. By the next race, the Belgian GP at Zolder, Shadow had a new face, in the form of Hong Kong racing enthusiast Teddy Yip, whose Theodore Racing team was now a major partner. Nichols’ last throw was the Shadow DN12, another Cosworth DFV/Hewland gearbox ‘wing car’ built around a new monocoque that was narrower at the front and wider at the rear.

Painted plain white with red Theodore Shadow logos, Lees attempted to qualify for the Belgian and Monaco GPs, to no avail, while Kennedy persevered with the DN11. He had a DN12 for the Spanish GP at Jarama and made the race, but only after Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Renault boycotted as the FISA-FOCA war for control of the sport began to rage. Kennedy crashed on the second lap, bounced off the track by the car’s severe porpoising, while Lees ran ninth before his suspension failed. The race was subsequently ruled as non-championship – much to the annoyance of Williams’s winner Alan Jones.

Lees withdrew from the Long Beach meeting after practice grappling with his awkward DN11

Photo by: James Mann

Both drivers failed to qualify in France, whereupon Theodore withdrew – and Shadow was finally no more. Yip reorganised, hired Southgate and launched Theodore under its own steam for 1981, the TY01 initially sporting a novel high-mounted front wing. But that’s another story. Nichols had made his contribution to F1 and was done.

“It pleases me,” he related to Pete Lyons for his book
Shadow: The Magnificent Machines of a Man of Mystery, “that we were able to make attractive equipment, [cars]
that were extremely well received, and we were able to
find sponsors and support.

“It’s satisfying to recall we had an opportunity to do things that we didn’t always do well, but we tried to do them in an innovative, creative and, I suppose, exciting and appealing [way]. We tried to make attractive, well-decorated cars and we tried to do programmes that appealed to us, or to me. It was something I had ability to control – our participation and our expression. We thought it was an artistic expression.”

That’s why Shadow remains so loved. Sometimes results aren’t the point, even in F1.

Race record

Starts: 1
Poles: 0
Wins: 0
Fastest laps: 0
Championship points: 0

Specification

Chassis: Aluminium monocoque
Suspension: Double wishbones with pushrod-actuated inboard coil springs and dampers
Engine: Naturally aspirated Ford Cosworth DFV V8
Engine capacity: 2993c
Power: 500bhp @ 11,000
Gearbox: Hewland FGA 400 five-speed manual
Brakes: Steel discs
Tyres: Goodyear
Weight: 605kg
Notable drivers: Geoff Lees, David Kennedy, Stefan Johansson

The final Shadow is not remembered fondly by history, unlike the team as a whole

Photo by: James Mann