Ford Cosworth, 3,0, Shadow, Formel 1

 The car is Shadow DN11 #1 – out of three built for the 1980 season. – it was described as such in an old advert: DN11-01 was Sahdow’s spare car at the South American races and it is likely that they drove it there or in testing before the start of the season. There is some debate over the precise role of Shadow DN11-01 which was one of three such chassis loaded up on the FOCA charter for the first two races of the 1980 season: the Argentine GP at Buenos Aires and the Brazilian GP at Interlagos. The chassis ‘log book’ published in Autocourse annual at the end of 1980 shows chassis number 1 to have been the spare car in Argentina and then the designated race chassis for the US GP West at Long Beach when Geoff Lees drove it in practice but failed to qualify.

After Shadow wound down their Formula One activities the three Dn11’s remained with Shadow founder Don Nichols. He sold chassis #01 to Pete Racely in 1995 whor prepared it for historic racing – which the chassis has done more or less frequently since. First in the US, then sold to Japan and in 2007 back to the States. Then sold to Germany in 2015, where Britec restored the car in 2016. We bought the car in 2019 without an engine and acquired a fresh engine and had Britec install that. Since then the car was shake down tested and has only been demoed a couple of times (by Tom Kristensen) but not raced.