The 81st Goodwood Members’ Meeting headlined a celebration of the original era of the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am as it was commonly known as.
A total of 24 Group 7 sportscars were enthusiastically demonstrated at the Goodwood Motor Circuit for the first time, including a fleet of seven Shadow cars which were managed by Era Motorsport and congregated in the Goodwood paddock.
Whilst the series reigned between 1966 and 1974, it was a platform which showcased the most powerful and ferocious machines, boasting over 1000 horsepower, weighing just 800 kg and producing a significant level of downforce.
Despite the premature cancellation at the end of 1974 fuelled by its lack of restrictions, it signified one of the most valuable and memorable chapters within the history of motorsport and that was celebrated at Goodwood.
Jim Bartell, the owner of six of the Shadows, described to Motorsport Week how he began his collection 20 years ago and spoke about his memories of the fascinating Can-Am era.
“I was working at Ford as an engineer and… I grew up 40 miles from Road America in Wisconsin where the Cam-Am was king.
“It’s a four-mile track, mile-long straightaways, 200 mile hour speeds.
“They come out of Canada corner and you could feel your chest pound from the energy of the engines.
“And so I always liked Cam-Am and I always hoped to have a Shadow just as if I had one, that was something I would be really proud of.
“So I had a [Formula]5000 car and I restored it, drove and sold it to start a business. And I said ‘If the business goes, I’d like to have it back’. And I did get it back because the guy who bought it crashed it.
“And every Shadow I bought has been a ‘basket case’. Not one of them was a finished car.”
His second Shadow was the 1974 DN4B, which was a sibling prototype car before acquiring the DN4 in which Jackie Oliver claimed the Can-Am championship title 50 years ago.
Don Nichols, co-founder of Shadow Racing Cars, offered the DN4 to Bartell after hearing he had the DN4B. After Shadow discontinued their racing operation at the beginning of the 1980s, their cars were subsequently sold by Nichols.
In 2018, Bartell’s Shadow Can-Am collection count expanded from two to 12 – with the added 10 each disassembled, therefore ‘in pieces’. And so he went about restoring and reassembling the collection.
“The idea was to gather them together to tell their history and save their heritage,” said Bartell at Goodwood.
“So we tried to do it in [20]20 and had it set up to do it in the US, at Road America and COVID hit and it all fell apart.
“We even went to the extent of putting Jackie Oliver on an IMSA crew list, because that’s the only way you could get in the country during COVID was if you’re on some race team, but he had to cancel.
“And then we talked, we said ‘We gotta do it and now let’s do it at Goodwood’ and in reality, I’m glad the other [event] fell through.
“There’s nothing like Goodwood, there’s nothing like this.”
Bartell noted how crucial Jackie Oliver’s commitment was to making the Can-Am demonstration possible and the event coincided with a special 50-year milestone. Oliver dominated the 1974 championship and was delighted to be back in his title-winning machine.
“Suppose you were my age, and you were doing something in your thirties that you really enjoyed, and you did well, and you won a championship, and then someone said to you, fifty years later… ‘Why don’t we bring the car over to Goodwood so you can sit in it again and demonstrate it?’
“So what sort of effect do you think that’s had on me? Unusual isn’t it? And what a treat!”
With the dominance of Porsche followed by McLaren, Shadow emerged with their turbocharged DN4 racer with its mighty 8.1L V8 Chevrolet engine.
Oliver explained what made the Can-Am era so uniquely extreme, and recalled what the cars were like to drive having participated from 1969 to 1974, the latter of which he won all four races in tense competition with teammate George Follmer.
“The Can-Am championship – [in] all the years I did it for Shadow – was unlimited regulation,” Oliver explained.
“So in an unlimited championship, innovation was limited to how big an engine you can put in the back. And the bigger you put the engine in, the bigger you can put a wing on it.
“Then they didn’t understand about ground effect cars, which is a much more efficient way.
“So what you ended up with was – with an unlimited formula – with massive wings, a big scalloped nose like that, and 1100 horsepower. It came with a problem with a huge amount of drag. So when you got to 180, 185 miles an hour, it wouldn’t go any faster.
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“So what you did is you sat there with the engine growling, trying to push against that drag, and the nose skipping on the ground. And the first corner you came to, it was flat out, you took it flat out, because it had so much downforce.
“So the problem with an engine that is that big [is] the slow speed corners [where] you have to be careful because it had a thousand feet of torque and no ground effect, no downforce.
“So the slow speed corners were more of a problem than the high speed corners. That’s what it was like to drive them.”
Can-Am ran at increasingly high costs during a recession in North America due to the oil crisis and received less and less interest so that the 1974 season prematurely ended with the Road America season-finale cancelled.
The presence of all the Shadow Can-Am cars at Goodwood was both impressive and special, including the 1969 Mark 1 prototype which featured one of the earliest forms of active aerodynamics in motorsport with a series of ‘air-brakes’ that could be deployed at the press of a button behind the steering wheel to improve braking performance.
For Bartell and for Era Motorsport, the next major Goodwood outing will be at the iconic Festival of Speed in July, where they will also demonstrate Shadow F1 and 5000 cars.
The Members’ Meeting gave spectators a first-hand opportunity to see Can-Am up close and personal with the added benefit of hearing the powerful engine sounds. Can-Am’s iconic era may be resigned to the history books, but it forever lives on with credit to the likes of Bartell, Kirt Bennett and Era Motorsport.
“I feel I’m a temporary keeper of the cars,” concluded Bartell.
“And my vision going forward is [that] I want to find the next caretaker that keeps them together.
“It took 50 years in total, and I spent 15 years putting them together and restoring them.
“I don’t want to see them scattered to the wind. It’s not right. They deserve better.”
Congrats to Jim Bartel and Crew for an Awesome Showing of the Shadow Racer Collection at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2024. Automotive Racing History at its Best!