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“The car stopped, I was still alive”

26. Jan 2022 
by David Kennedy
3736 views

For the 1980 season, the promising Irishman David Kennedy (27 years old) joined Shadow in the F1 World Championship but it proved a disappointing time with the (very much) underfunded team, as he failed to qualify the DN11 in five races.

The Shadow team (now in partnership with Teddy Yip’s Theodore Racing) clearly didn’t have the means to master and understand the functioning of the skirts that were essential for generating downforce on the race cars. It was an impossible task for the young Irishman (picture above).

At the first race of the season in Argentina, he explained: “If the skirts worked and stayed down you went round the corner, if they stayed up you’d crash. You’d get about 2 laps in qualifying before the skirts failed and the suspension broke.”

Kennedy continues: “As a young driver you just keep your foot down in the high speed corners and hope that it will work. It didn’t and I spun, and I waited to hit the fire trucks that were parked right in the trajectory, and thought I would die. The car stopped, I was still alive. The marshals then decided to move the fire trucks to the other side of the track!”

Picture below: David Kennedy, Shadow DN11, Argentina Grand Prix, Buenos Aires, DNQ.

 

 

Source: LAT Images

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