People · Bob Bondurant · Chapter 5

The School

Orange County International Raceway — February 14, 1968

The idea came from a film. Before the crash, Bondurant had been hired to teach the actor James Garner to drive for John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix — a film that needed its star to look like a racing driver at speed, because Frankenheimer intended to point real cameras at real cars going genuinely fast. Bondurant taught him. Garner turned out to be good. And Bondurant noticed something that would matter more than any race he ever won: driving could be taught. Properly, quickly, to almost anyone, by someone who actually knew how.

Bob Bondurant at his driving school in 2007
Bondurant at his driving school in 2007 — nearly forty years after he opened it with three Datsuns and a hospital-bed sketch. Photo: Flickr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then the McLaren's steering arm broke at Watkins Glen, the car flipped eight times, and the driving career was over. He was thirty-four, with broken ribs and damaged legs, feet and back, and a lot of time to think. What he did with that time was draft a business plan for a high-performance driving school.

Opening day

  • Date: February 14, 1968
  • Place: Orange County International Raceway
  • The entire fleet: three Datsuns, a Lola T70 and a Formula Vee
  • The seed: teaching James Garner to look convincing at speed for Grand Prix
  • The result: generations of American racing drivers came through his school

Three Datsuns and a Lola

On February 14, 1968 — a matter of months after the crash — the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving opened at Orange County International Raceway. The entire operation consisted of three Datsuns, a Lola T70 and a Formula Vee.

From that, an institution. The school trained generations of American racing drivers, along with actors, police officers, and ordinary people who simply wanted to be less likely to die on a freeway. It made the idea of professional driver training normal in a country that had never really had it. Racers who came up decades after Bondurant stopped racing still learned their craft with his name over the door.

Bob Bondurant died on November 12, 2021, in Paradise Valley, Arizona, aged eighty-eight.

He is remembered as a Shelby man, and fairly — he won Le Mans's GT class and a world championship in a Cobra. But he started as a Corvette racer who won eighteen of twenty in a season, he was in one of Zora's Z06s the day the Cobra first turned a wheel, and when he went back to Le Mans in 1967 he did it in a Chevrolet at 171.5 mph, next to the man they called Mr. Corvette. This site claims him as one of ours.