Nine-time Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen spoke to Motorsport Week about what it was like to drive the 1974 Shadow DN4B Can-Am car after the first of two demonstrations at the 81st Goodwood Members’ Meeting.
The decorated sportscar driver gave a technical insight towards the DN4B, a car that has been driven by its fair share of racing legends having previously been piloted by Williams’ first Formula 1 champion Alan Jones.
Moments after stepping out of the DN4B, Kristensen spoke about how it felt inside the cockpit and how he interacted with the car during the 15-minute demonstration at the iconic Goodwood Motor Circuit.
“You sit very awkwardly… your feet are very near any kind of front impact away from bumble bees or flies or whatever,” he told Motorsport Week.
“If something harder you don’t want to have a head-on, that’s for sure. [You are] sitting very low.
“Everything works very mechanically. It’s a 5-speed gearbox. When I’m in third gear, I couldn’t turn left because the hand gets on the steering pin – the gear knob.
“The engine is very nice, it has power [and] a very wide torque curve. I guess I get to around 8000 now, 7500 [rpm].
“Aerodynamically, it feels like you have both good mechanical grip but also good aerodynamics.
“Understeer is a little bit [present]. I believe that even we could feel that after some laps, but, probably there’s also some drag on the car which makes them efficient on the small narrow circuits they were racing at in Can-Am.
“So it’s obviously a short wheelbase; that gives this impact of having a car which has good mechanical grip and then it’s incredibly agile.
“And if you then give it some [throttle], it’s quite wild… I can imagine they had such a heck of a good time back in Can-Am back in the day, they’re such ferocious cars.
Having driven various legendary modern endurance prototypes during his illustrious career in the discipline, Kristensen drew comparisons as to what role the unrestricted Can-Am era had performed.
“There’s a lot of similarities [to more recent high downforce prototypes],” he said.
“But of course, you get to every year – you get with efficiency [and restrictions] within the regulations.
“There’s a difference between the different centenaries during the different decades.
“There’s a lot of this basic thinking in [current] prototypes, which was for sure also learned in Can-Am.”
Kristensen is set to drive the Shadow once again on Sunday 14 April at 1.50pm local time for a second time as Goodwood rounds off its celebration of Can-Am.
