Sonoma Historic Motorsports Festival 2014 Wrap-up

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Images© and story by Michael Rockich, Contact Photographer For Information on Photos of this Event

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At the Sonoma Historic Motorsport Festival May 16-18 the Sonoma Raceway thoughtfully put on a truly informative seminar about the vintage Can Am race cars known as UOP Shadow.

Seminar panel members
• Entrepreneur Don Nichols, founder of Nichols Advanced Vehicle Systems (AVS) in 1968, and principal, Shadow Racing Inc..
• Driver George Follmer, winner of the 1972 Can-Am Championship and driver on the Shadow team, as well as the only US professional driver to compete in Indy Cars, NASCAR, Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship, Can-Am, Trans-Am and IMSA.
• Physicist Trevor Harris, the designer of the first AVS Shadow Mark 1, and the chief designer on the Shadow Formula 1 team, and Dan Gurney's AAR Indy Car team. He also designed the Galles GR3 Can-Am car winning the '82, '83 and '85 Can-Am titles, and designed for numerous race teams and manufacturers through the 2000s.
• Photographer and journalist Pete Lyons, author of books covering the Can-Am Series.
• Other participants included current Shadow competing owners Fred Cziska, of Petaluma, Calif., and Dennis Losher, of Twain Harte, Calif.

Don Nichols, George Follmer, and Trevor Harris of UOP Shadow

These experts gave great insight into the design, development, and successes of these unique race cars. The design and development of a race car can be an arduous process requiring great patience for trial and error. Why - because other "hidden" factors affect textbook theory. Welcome to the real world. Physicist and designer Trevor Harris explained his design efforts by reminiscing past experiences.

One of the Shadow Can Am cars once under development was a very low profile car making it cramped with the control pedals demanding difficult positioning and contorting of legs and feet. Test driver as well as race driver George Follmer was the perfect answer. Follmer was continually lauded by the other panelists during the seminar for the way he handled difficult race cars in the development phase while simultaneously providing valuable performance test data to designer Harris. At one point during development one of the cars was found to be airborne much of the time due to the friction type shock absorbers being evaluated. As in any sport, when you are airborne you can neither accelerate, change direction, nor stop. But once again Follmer came through and made a difficult car behave. Follmer seemed to find no problem with the car leaving the tarmac, and noted that he did however possess a pilot's license. When racing Follmer's performance was also stellar. His first Grand Prix start in a Shadow F1 resulted in a 6th place finish. He soon made it to the podium in an F1 in a race with Ferrari's Jacky Ickx. These are not easy feats to achieve, especially so quickly.

A really great seminar but sadly I can not relate it all here. Can Am cars have always been one of my favorites as the ultimate muscle car. To me they provide one of the great sounds in all of motorsports when they blast up the long, straight grade at Sonoma Raceway. Still in a pack on lap 1, their sound is a crisp, deep, continuous rolling thunder all the way to Turn 7 at the top.

Jim Gallucci's McLaren #51 Can Am entry

Jim Gallucci's Lola #5 T163

Sonoma Raceway's road course
The weekend was loaded with vintage racecars in competition on Sonoma Raceway's excellent road course. Historic Trans-Am Cars and Grand National Stock, Formula Cars and Historic Can-Am Cars, various classes of Sports Racing Cars, and many, many more all took to the 2.52 mile 12 turn undulating track.

Bruce Miller's Corvette #151

Ferrari 308 Quattrovalvole

McLaren 2015

McLaren 2015

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