People · Bob Bondurant · Chapter 2

Riverside, 1962

Riverside International Raceway, California — October 13, 1962

The Los Angeles Times Three-Hour Invitational is the first race the Z06 Corvette ever ran, and Bob Bondurant is in one of them. Three Z06 Sting Rays have been prepared for the A-production race under the personal supervision of Zora Arkus-Duntov — a detail worth pausing on, given that General Motors has officially been out of racing since 1957. The drivers are Bondurant, Dave MacDonald and Jerry Grant.

A fourth Corvette, which had arrived earlier, is entered by Mickey Thompson and driven by Doug Hooper. And in among them is a car nobody in America has raced against before: a lightweight English roadster with a Ford V8 in it, entered by a lanky Texan chicken farmer turned racing driver. Carroll Shelby's Cobra.

Riverside, October 13, 1962

  • The race: the LA Times Three-Hour Invitational — the Z06's competition debut
  • Zora's cars: three Z06 Sting Rays prepped under Arkus-Duntov's supervision, for Bondurant, Dave MacDonald and Jerry Grant
  • The newcomer: Carroll Shelby's Cobra — broken down inside the first hour
  • The winner: Doug Hooper, in Mickey Thompson's Corvette

The car that shouldn't have existed

The Cobra was in that paddock because of a decision made in Detroit. Shelby had wanted to buy Corvettes — without bodies — and build his own car on top of them. Chevrolet refused to sell them to him. So Shelby went to Ford instead, and Ford gave him engines and help, and he put those engines into an English AC Ace and called it a Cobra. Chevrolet's snub had, with perfect efficiency, created the machine that would torment the Corvette for the rest of the decade.

Not that day, though. The Cobra broke down inside the first hour. So did one of the Corvettes; by the end of the second hour two more were out. At the finish it was Doug Hooper's Corvette that won the race — the Cobra's debut ending in a garage while a Chevrolet took the flag.

It was, in hindsight, the most misleading result in American sports-car racing. The Cobra was not slow; it was new. Within two years it would take the fight to Ferrari and win a world championship, and Zora would be driven to build the Grand Sport specifically to kill it — a project GM would strangle after five cars.

And Bondurant? He had just spent the afternoon on the Corvette side of the fight, in a car built under Zora's own supervision. Within two years he would be driving for Shelby.