Photos: The Jerry Bendl Collection

One of my absolute favourite Can-Am cars, the 1972 Shadow MkIII. What a beauty! If you think this car looks a lot like the 1971 Shadow MkII, its because it is the same car. It was essentially modified to fit conventional 15" diameter wheels, after the struggles the team had the previous two years with their tiny wheel route. The MkIII did feature a lot of upgrades over the MkII, including a much-revised nose, with radiator moved to the rear. With the extra space now available in the nose, a separate adjustable wing sat in the area where once the radiator was. However, this concept never did work very well, and by Edmonton, as can be seen here, the wing was removed.

But the Shadow team hadn't given up just yet on being unconventional. The most ambitious part of the 1972 Shadow program was in a new twin-turbocharged big block Chevy motor, developed by Lee Muir. This highly anticipated monster was expected to produce 1,200hp. It was said that on the dyno, the motor was never taken above 5,000rpm, which gave 800hp. However, it also gave 985 lb-ft torque!!! To develop it, a second MkIII was built, and which made its race debut at Round 6, at Donnebrook, in the hands of Carlos Pace. Pace also drove the second car here, at Edmonton.

Unfortunately, the turbo motor never did work properly in 1972, and the team persevered into 1973 with it. After huge effort all year, it finally made its first appearance at a race event at the final round at Riverside in 1972. Oliver was due to drive the turbo car, while stock car racer Bobby Allison would drive the normally aspirated version. But after a failure in the Sunday morning warm-up of the turbo motor, Oliver jumped in to the normally aspirated car for the race.

Unfortunately also, the beautiful Shadow MkIII never did live up to expectations; along with the issues of the much anticipated turbo motor, the failure of the adjustable front wing, and time consuming problems such as several Weisman transmission failures (requiring a switch to Hewland) and overheating issues, that required some redesigning, the team spent the season playing catch-up.

This is Jackie Oliver's Shadow.

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And here is the Carlos Pace sister car.

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The Vasek Polak Porsche 917/10, driven by Milt Minter, which started 6th, but retired on the opening lap. That's Milt facing the camera, with his signature rectangular glasses and goatee. He was typical of many race drivers in the US at the time, extremely versatile, and could jump from racing a Can-Am Porsche one weekend, to a Firebird in the Trans-Am the next, or whatever else was available.

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Mark Donohue eases himself into his Porsche. He would have still been in a lot of discomfort here. This was only his second race back after his horrific shunt while testing his Porsche at Road Atlanta where the car went up and over. But he was addicted to racing, I guess it took the pain away. Or at least, took his mind off it for a while.

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Denny chats with his mechanics.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve Holmes

Denny chats with his mechanics.

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That is a photo!

This is the final photo in this chapter of Can-Am photos by Jerry Bendl.

This is a great shot, showing the two variations on a single theme. The car in front is the Vasek Polak Porsche 917/10, driven by Milt Minter. The car at the rear is the Penske Porsche 917/10K, driven by George Follmer. The car at the front is what the car at the rear more or less started out as, before Penske became involved, and Mark Donohue spent a lot of time in Germany with the Porsche engineers, completely re-engineering the car. The 917/10K is the twin-turbo model, the 917/10 is normally aspirated. Getting the turbos to deliver smooth power was a huge challenge.

But it wasn't only underneath the skin that changes were made, note the much longer rear wing on the 917/10K, and the drastically different profile to the nose. Testing, chopping, changing, found that a very blunt nose that curved out aggressively into a sharp tip provided the best downforce. At the time, everyone, including McLaren, had a very long gradual nose angle to cut through the air better. But the 917/10K nose proved to be the most effective.

According to Mark Donohue's book The Unfair Advantage, Vasek Polak, a very successful US Porsche dealer, put a lot of pressure on Porsche in Germany to be supplied the same equipment as the Penske team, but Roger Penske had made sure it was written into their contract nobody else in the Can-Am would be able to get their hands on a 917/10K until the following year. Of course, by the time everyone else could buy a 917/10K, the Penske team and Porsche had created the 917/30.

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My thanks again to Jerry Bendl and Bryan Colechin for making these stunning photos to be posted here.