People · Profile No. 6

Bob Bondurant

Most people know the second half: the driving school, the famous students, the name on the building. But before Carroll Shelby ever called him, Bob Bondurant was a Corvette racer who won eighteen of twenty races in a single season. He beat Cobras in Corvettes, then beat the world in a Cobra, then went back to a Corvette at Le Mans — and then a steering arm broke at 150 mph and turned him into a teacher instead.

The chapters

• Prologue Watkins Glen, 1967 A McLaren, 150 mph, and a steering arm that decides to let go — the accident that ended one career and accidentally started a far more important one.
• Chapter 1 Eighteen From Twenty A 1957 Corvette, an SCCA season that reads like a misprint, and the West Coast Championship.
• Chapter 2 Riverside, 1962 Bondurant lines up in one of Zora's brand-new Z06 Sting Rays. In the next row sits a car nobody has seen before: Carroll Shelby's Cobra.
• Chapter 3 Shelby's Cobra If you can't beat them: Le Mans 1964 with Dan Gurney, and the year America took a world championship off Ferrari.
• Chapter 4 Le Mans in a Corvette 1967: back in a Chevrolet, sharing the Dana L88 with Dick Guldstrand, at 171.5 mph down the Mulsanne.
• Chapter 5 The School Broken in a hospital bed, he sketches an idea he'd stumbled into while teaching an actor to look convincing. It outlived every race he ever won.

Further reading

The National Corvette Museum and the SCCA both keep good records of his Corvette years, which tend to get lost behind the Shelby chapters and the school.

His Le Mans co-driver's story is here too — Dick Guldstrand — and the car they shared has its own page in the Le Mans L88s.