For the 1978 season, the American team Shadow Racing Team enters the championship with the new Shadow DN9 single-seater. For the car’s design, founder Don Nichols entrusts the work to Dave Wass and once again to Tony Southgate, the engineer who had contributed to the team's early successes before moving to Lotus from 1975 to 1977, where he played a role in developing the revolutionary "77" and "78" cars. However, on the eve of the championship, Shadow is shaken by a major internal crisis: Nichols' partners, Jack Oliver and Alan Rees, leave the team to found their own outfit, Arrows, taking with them the sponsor, Southgate, and Wass, along with the DN9’s design, which is transformed into the Arrows FA1 with only minor modifications.
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| SHADOW DN9, Clay Regazzoni Montecarlo, Monaco GP 1978 |
Nichols immediately initiates a lawsuit for plagiarism, which he formally wins, but he is left without a technical staff and sponsor, forcing him to rebuild the team in record time. To replace the departing engineers, he hires John Baldwin from Ensign and secures a new sponsor from a Swiss cigar manufacturing company. On the driver front, Shadow fields two highly experienced names: Swiss driver Clay Regazzoni and German driver Hans-Joachim Stuck. After starting the season with the previous DN7, the new DN9 debuts with Stuck in the fourth race of the season and with Regazzoni in the following race.
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| SHADOW DN9, Hans-Joachim Stuck Montecarlo, Monaco GP 1978 |
The DN9 is a monocoque chassis single-seater, equipped with the proven Ford Cosworth DFV V8 engine and a Hewland FGA400 five-speed gearbox. Though a simple car, lacking ground-effect aerodynamics, the DN9 delivers decent performance, but the season is largely disappointing. The only notable results are two fifth-place finishes—too little for a team that, just a few years earlier, had entered Formula 1 with great ambitions.
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| SHADOW DN9, Clay Regazzoni Brands Hatch, British GP 1978 |
In 1978, a third DN9 is entrusted to the private team Interscope Racing, which enters it for American driver Danny Ongais in the Long Beach and Zandvoort Grands Prix. However, on both occasions, the car fails to pass pre-qualifying. At the end of the season, Shadow collects only 6 points, finishing eleventh in the Constructors' Championship.
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| SHADOW DN9, Clay Regazzoni Brands Hatch, British GP 1978 |
The internal turmoil and the loss of key personnel mark the beginning of Shadow's decline. From this point onward, the team struggles increasingly to remain competitive, heading down a rapid path of decline that will ultimately see it exit Formula 1 in the early 1980s.
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