To the hard-core enthusiast, Bob Bondurant is legendary-one whose greatness is linked inextricably with some of the most historic American moments on racetracks around the world.
Bondurant was one of the few men fortunate, skilled and bold enough to race on the world championship level-at a time when the Europeans who dominated it didn't take American racers seriously.
Many of the races were run on very long courses comprised entirely of public roads, which few Americans had experienced before.
Bondurant was a professional and getting the job done meant going to the courses ahead of time and learning them. In the process, he didn't just learn the courses, he got to know them even better than many of the Europeans who had raced on them many times before.
As time went on, he shared this experience with his teammates and was called on to teach non-racers how to drive fast. He helped prepare actor James Garner for his role in the 1965 movie classic "Grand Prix," perhaps the best racing movie ever. Bondurant found he enjoyed teaching and proved to be exceptionally good at it.
If you look at the careers of the Americans who drove Cobras in Europe, you'll find that most of them retired from driving, while still very competitive. Racing still takes some of its greatest home early; in the 1960s, it was truly a blood sport. Many Europeans seemed to accept this as the cost of doing business, but there was something in the Americans that made it difficult to continue taking the risk forever.
Phil Hill and Dan Gurney both came to realize it. Carroll Shelby has attributed much of his grudge against Enzo Ferrari to the death of a driver who was his friend. The specter of death was the central theme of "Grand Prix." Bondurant's turn came in 1967, when he met an embankment at about 150 mph. In a wheelchair with two broken legs, he decided that was close enough.
When Carroll Shelby retired from racing due to a heart condition in 1960, he moved from Texas to California and started a driving school in Riverside, Calif. Soon thereafter, he hired Pete Brock to help him run the school as well as his Goodyear race tire distributorship. By 1967, Shelby's school remained one of only two active racing schools in the United States and though his other endeavors had grown to the point where he could barely hang onto them, the driving school was not considered a resounding success.
In spite of this, Bondurant drafted a plan to open his own driving school. When his initial request for school cars was rejected by Porsche, Bondurant approached Datsun. The small company was in need of the publicity and the cars represented a smaller monetary investment. Plus, they had just gotten serious about performance with the 2000cc overhead cam engine in their roadster. Mayfield Marshall, Datsun's marketing director at the time, took Bondurant's proposal to Yutaka Katayama, Datsun's president and got approval. On Valentine's Day in 1968, the first of more than 80,000 students to learn car control at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving did so in two brand new Datsun roadsters (one 1600 and one 2000), a 510 and a Formula Vee.
As aspiring racers learned their craft at the now-defunct Orange County International Raceway in Irvine, Calif., the durability and performance of the cars was proven and Datsun ads began featuring the white roadster with a single blue stripe down the center. All the school cars were painted 1969 Ford Boss 302 Orange in 1969 - about as bright orange as a car could be -and is still a hallmark of Bondurant cars 32 years later.
By Dan Barnes
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