Here is what I wrote here on this subject a few years ago :
Every Shadows' fan knows that the Shadows received from JMI (Vox) a set of fiesta red guitars around march/april 1961, after JMI became UK distributor for Fender Guitar. Hank and Bruce then received their famous Strats with rosewood fingerboard, which they used until they got the Burns in 1964.
Looking more closely at an old interview of Hank Marvin in a French magazine I found something interesting about the fiesta red colour :
L'interdit venait juste d'être levé et les gens de chez Vox s'étaient assurés l'exclusivité sur l'importation du matériel Fender. Les premiers colis contenaient quelques Precision Bass, quelques Stratocaster et des Telecaster. C'est pourquoi, afin de faire une publicité pour la gamme Fender, Bruce posa avec une Telecaster et Jet avec une Precision Bass. Pendant ce temps on nous faisait spécialement peindre en rouge deux Stratocaster et une Precision Bass pour que nous ayions tous trois des instruments de même couleur. On les reçus quelques jours plus tard. C'est ainsi que je rendis ma première Strato, qui ne m'appartenait pas vraiment, à Cliff Richard.
Translation :
The (import) ban had just been removed, and people at Vox got an exclusive import contract for Fender products. The first packages contained some Precision Bass, some Stratocaster and Telecaster. This is why Bruce was shot with a Telecaster and Jet with a Precision Bass to promote the Fender range. Meanwhile two stratocaster and one Precision Bass were specially painted in fiesta red for us so we would all have a guitar of the same colour. We got them a few days later. So I gave back to Cliff my first Strat which wasn't really mine.
This confirms that Strats which were imported by JMI in UK (probably mostly sunburst) were repainted when needed in fiesta red to match the demand for this colour, and that the Shadows' guitars were part of the repainted ones !
What the story doesn't tell is if the fiesta red colour used in UK was exactly the same as the one used in the Fender factory...
BTW, the interviewer was no one else than guitarist Marcel Dadi, one of the best European finger picking specialist who died in the crash of flight TWA 800 in 1996, when coming back from Nasville where he was just introduced to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Didier