Shadow boss Don Nichols was first active on the sports car scene in the United States. Jackie Oliver drove a Shadow CanAm car in 1971 and Nichols persuaded Universal Oil Products (UOP) to back the team.

Oliver regularly ran at the front of the field with the black-painted cars in 1972, and Shadow announced its plans to go Formula One the following year. Nichols recruited former BRM designer Tony Southgate, with Oliver and veteran American sports car ace George Follmer to drive. Kit cars were supplied to Graham Hill's newly established team.

Nichols set up a British base for his team in Northampton after Southgate had built the first car in the garage of his Lincolnshire home. The Cosworth-powered DN1 was not spectacular, but it ran in the top half of the field regularly.

Oliver drove only the CanAm cars in 1974, winning the championship against thin opposition, while rapid Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jarier and American Peter Revson were drafted into the Formula One team. Things looked promising until Revson was killed in a pre-season testing accident at Kyalami. Brian Redman raced briefly, before handing over to Welsh hot-shoe Tom Pryce.

As young drivers fought to establish themselves in the post-Stewart era, it was evident that Shadow had two of the quickest, even if reliability was not all that it might have been.

Pryce won the Race of Champions for Shadow at the beginning of 1975 and Jarier sometimes got very close to the qualifying pace of Niki Lauda's dominant Ferrari. Still, solid results did not come and the team struggled when UOP withdrew its support at the end of the year. Oliver had now hung up his helmet and was the team's main sponsorship sourcer. The DN5 had become a little long in the tooth, but Southgate's new DN8 looked highly promising.

The only problem was that Southgate himself had been lured to Lotus temporarily before returning to Shadow. Main backing was now coming from Tabatip cigarillos, but Italian financier Franco Ambrosio also became involved until he was jailed on charges of financial irregularity.

Shadow started 1977 with Pryce and Italian Renzo Zorzi, who had sprung a surprise by winning the Monaco Formula Three race in 1976. At Kyalami, though, tragedy struck. Zorzi stopped on the far side of the main straight, just after a hump in the track. There was no problem and he was getting himself out - and trying to extricate his helmet oxygen supply - when a young marshal ran across the track to stand by in case of fire. Pryce crested the brow, killed the marshal instantly and died when he was hit in the face by the fire extinguisher.

Alan Jones replaced Pryce and brought a partial sweetener to a sad year with the team's one and only win. Niki Lauda was on the way to regaining his title following his accident at the Nurburgring the previous year, when the circus arrived at his home Osterreichring track. In a wet-dry race, Jones outdrove the Austrian and beat the Ferrari into second place.

Financial problems led to a team split in 1977, with Oliver, Alan Rees and Southgate heading off to form their own Arrows set-up. The Arrows A1, unsurprisingly, looked very similar to Southgate's unfinished drawings for the Shadow DN9. Nichols got a decision in his favour from the High Court which led to Arrows having to build a new car. Meanwhile, John Baldwin finished the DN9 and Shadow continued with Hans Stuck and Clay Regazzoni.

The team went into 1979 with the young Elio de Angelis/Jan Lammers pairing, then ran Geoff Lees and David Kennedy in 1980, but the team finally collapsed after failing to qualify for the French Grand Prix in 1980.

Reproduced from The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Formula One published by Carlton Books