Don Nichols: Shadowman

We would meet of a misty morning at his stored old racer’s warehouse, a graceless steel shed in an unlovely part of plebeian Salinas, over the hill from patrician Monterey, California. The cavernous interior was stuffed three tiers high with treasures: complete racecars or monocoques, body sections, suspension and running gear parts, engines and transmissions or their elements, racks of new metal stock and boxes of old junk, design drawings, pictures, banners, trophies, filing cabinets… thousands of keepsakes of bygone times. The Wizard’s Cave, I called the magical space.

The old Wizard was lean enough — he denied himself midday meals — to claim proudly that he could still wear his old Army Captain’s dress uniform. He would sit with us for hours in his shabby office, his lanky frame bent into a rickety old swivel chair, knitted stocking cap and upturned jacket collar defying the chill of his unheated space, answering our questions or trying to. Oft-times the memories came hard, sometimes not at all.

But then there would be a sudden spark and he would leap up and dash out across the shop floor to find something he had thought to show us. He knew just where it was and, much spryer than I, the 88-year-old would clamber like a young gymnast up and up through precarious levels of rough timber flooring. He gave me to think that he had erected this scaffold-like structure with his own hands 20 years before.

In motor sports history, Shadow is not ranked among the premier teams. It did win races, but never regularly; its cars were often fast, but too often fragile; the one drivers’ championship, by Jackie Oliver in the Can-Am of 1974, was a worthy achievement by a well-run team, but unfortunately came against thin opposition at the tag end of a dying series.

Asked about his fondest memory from the Shadow days, Nichols paused to consider it. The pause grew long. Finally his agelessly acute eyes refocused and he said slowly, “Maybe winning the Race of Champions with Tom [Pryce], the first F1 win for Shadow.”

Ah, yes. That was at Brands Hatch in March of 1975. Despite the event’s name this early-season sprint for F1 cars, together with a few F5000s, was not a grand prix, not part of the world championship, so not all GP teams and drivers participated. But the grid did host the likes of Donohue, Fittipaldi, Ickx, Jarier, Peterson, Scheckter and Watson. Beside Shadow’s team of two, there were full-on works entries from McLaren, BRM, Ensign, Lotus, Penske, Surtees, Tyrrell and Williams. Young Shadowman Tom Pryce out-qualified them all. Then he beat them all.

It was still early in the American team’s third season of international F1 racing, a season that started with exciting promise. Shadow’s new DN5, its third single-seater model, showed immediate speed. In January, lead driver Jean-Pierre Jarier qualified fastest for both the two opening grands prix, Argentina and Brazil. They were Shadow’s first pole positions in Formula 1.

“It pleases me,” the old warrior told me, “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 that 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.”

What a complex personality, I was thinking as I reviewed my own impressions of him. Naturally artistic, but instinctively adversarial. Man of combat, man of fellowship. A face held inscrutably impassive to conceal a mischievous wit and a wicked sense of humour. Inspirationally motivational as a promoter of his ambitions, yet ruthlessly avaricious in business, he could be genial in one circumstance, almost breathtakingly greedy in another. Abstemious in his personal habits, he was known not to drink or smoke, yet should wealth fall to him he seemed incapable of frugality. Affectionate with associates and often generous to family, but miserly at other times and seemingly coldly, even brutally indifferent to creditors.

The same shoulders that warmly embraced old friends could turn icy against others. The same father of eight who, as age advanced, had great difficulty remembering their names, but who could effortlessly and proudly rattle off the particulars of every professional driver who ever conducted one of his Shadows… some 37 of them, by his tally. A teller of tales, a holder of secrets. A man loved… and loathed. Everyone has a spectrum, but his extremes reached far beyond the norm.

Shadow: the Magnificent Machines of a Man of Mystery
by Pete Lyons, is published by Evro.
ISBN: 978-1-910505-49-6
Available from the Motor Sport shop priced at £75,
motorsportmagazine.com

AVS MkI – The tiny one

Having left the military, Don Nichols embarked on a radical project that resulted in a miniature ‘rollerskate’ racer – unusual even for the free-thinking Can-Am series

Don Nichols returned to the US from his entrepreneurial years in Japan with ample wherewithal for his next adventure, and an eye out for what it might be. He spotted it in Trevor Harris’s concept sketches for a radical new Can-Am race car.

Slung ultra-low between ultra-small wheels, and wrapped within super-slender bodywork meant to pierce the air like a missile, this knee-high vehicle promised to show straightaway velocities far above the reach of conventional machines of the day. Would it actually reach them? And would straight-line gains make up for any speed sacrificed around corners? Back then few race teams had another way to evaluate something new. Only a few of the largest automakers had computers; our effortless, ubiquitous desktop simulation was unimaginable.

Engineering experimentation carried out in the open air, where everybody could watch the craziest brainstorms succeed or fail, was the very thing that made Can-Am race cars so exciting. But seriously, what a strange-looking contraption. Seemingly the product of an uncontrollably inventive mind, with every detail driven by the myriad challenges of very small tyres, Harris’s AVS MkI departed from convention at almost every point.

Looking back these long years afterward, Trevor freely admits that in the heat of youthful enthusiasm he made many problems for himself. His tyre choice did yield that marvellously minimalistic body profile, but it carried adverse knock-on consequences affecting braking performance, suspension layout, road-holding and handling, weight distribution, aerodynamic stability, engine cooling, transmission gearing, chassis design, fuel capacity, cockpit configuration, driver comfort and control — almost everything needed to put a competitive car on the grid.

As problem after problem came to light, Harris was forced to alter just about every fascinating feature of his original design, in some cases even to abandon them. And that burned up time, along with Don Nichols’ money. AVS’s original plan was to compete in the 1969 Can-Am season. But as the days ticked down toward June’s opening date, reality hit the little novice team like a cold wind. The car wasn’t even built.

The tiny AVS team finally made its debut on June 14, 1970 at Mosport. Driver George Follmer remarked that the Shadow was so much lower than other cars that sometimes their drivers seemed unable to see him alongside. On the other hand, even with a large wing now in place, Trevor Harris’s low-drag concept did yield higher terminal velocities. Along Mosport’s long, uphill back straight the Shadow was easily the fastest car in the field, by some 18mph — 194mph versus McLaren’s best, 176. Remarkably, Shadow achieved that despite having the smallest-displacement ‘Big Block’ in the field, Chevrolet’s everyday, off-the-shelf, 427 (7-litre) with standard iron block — the only spec the team could afford. Soberingly, the Shadow’s straight-line speed advantage was more than lost into and around the corners. Front-wheel braking was nearly non-existent, and roadholding frankly terrible. Trackside observers were alarmed to see the tiny tyres bouncing completely clear of the road. Yet fearless Follmer qualified the little ‘rollerskate’ sixth-fastest overall.

The McLaren M8D ‘Batmobiles’ of Dan Gurney, the ultimate race winner, and 1968 series champ Denny Hulme, his paws wrapped in bandages, topped the times. Keep note of who came next: future Shadow Can-Am champion Jackie Oliver driving the Peter Bryant-built Ti22 ‘Titanium Car’. Then it was Peter Revson’s new Lola T220 and Lothar Motschenbacher’s McLaren M6B.

Follmer’s grid time was a whopping 3.1 seconds slower than Gurney’s in the new McLaren. But such gaps were routinely seen in the old Can-Am. It may have been a driver’s championship, but the bellowing, bestial, wildly individualistic cars were what Can-Am fans came to see.

In the race Follmer passed Motschenbacher for fifth place, but the Shadow’s temperature gauge was rising and he eased back to avoid an engine failure. He knew the team couldn’t afford another. Their pre-race testing had been hard on their dwindling stock of tired iron engines. After only 24 laps of the scheduled 80-lap race, George finally pitted and switched off. Perhaps he wasn’t too bitterly disappointed.

But Nichols and the team certainly were. This opening race was to be televised across North America, giving the distinctive orange Shadow oddity the best possible publicity. That might result in sponsorship. But when the race began, TV was still covering something else. As Harris remembers it, “They didn’t start broadcasting our race until lap 25… The one right after we dropped out.” So Don Nichols’ bold play did “lose big.” A whole year late and many dollars beyond projections, his Advanced Vehicle Systems’ ultra-advanced vehicle appeared in only three of the 1970 season’s 10 rounds, showing a bit more performance than perhaps outsiders had expected, but a lot less reliability than any team can accept.

Racers are risk-takers, they always aim high, but bitter experience teaches them not to over reach. Not to allow what was supposed to be a competitive vehicle to become a science experiment. Trevor Harris would rebound from his overly ambitious Shadow MkI experience to become one of the most sought-after creative engineers in motor sport. His long resumé of successful car designs includes championship winners for Brock Racing Enterprises, Gurney and Nissan; he also holds numerous patents for innovative designs such as bicycle transmissions and high-angle constant-velocity joints. Eventually he reconciled with Don Nichols and rejoined him for two further projects.

Versatile Vic Elford, having shown his eagerness to try something novel, got a call later that summer from Jim Hall, inviting him to drive Chaparral’s similarly experimental 2J ground-effect vehicle. Unlike the tiny tyre Shadow, the Chaparral Fan Car was fast. Tiny tyre maker Firestone had taken its best shot; now it was time to move on. The expense had probably been higher than anticipated, but supporting the Shadow experiment was a normal cost of business.

The money was well spent, in fact. The Akron race tyre engineers could in good conscience report back to their Detroit client that they had tried their hardest to make ultra-small tyres work in the red-hot crucible of auto racing. Oldsmobile could be satisfied that failure was not due to lack of effort.

And indeed, the automaking industry did not go in that direction. Styling’s ‘hidden wheels’ idea was quietly forgotten.

Digital extra