People · Bob Bondurant · Chapter 1

Eighteen From Twenty

The West Coast — 1959

Here is the line that gets left out of the Bob Bondurant story, because the Cobra and the school are louder: in 1959, driving a 1957 Corvette wearing the number 51, Bob Bondurant entered twenty SCCA B-production races and won eighteen of them. He took the West Coast Championship. He was twenty-six years old.

Eighteen from twenty is not a good season. It is an act of aggression. Club racing on the West Coast in 1959 was not a soft place to do it, either — the fields were deep, the cars were serious, and the men who ran at the front there tended to turn up later in Formula One and at Le Mans and on the Indianapolis grid. He beat all of them, in a Chevrolet, nearly every single time out.

Thirty from thirty-two

It wasn't a fluke year. Across 1959 to 1963 Bondurant entered thirty-two races and won thirty of them, driving the Shelby Washburn 1959 Corvette and then a 1963 Z06 Sting Ray, both numbered 614. Five seasons. A 94 percent win rate. In Corvettes.

It's worth sitting with that for a moment, because of where this story goes. The popular version of American sports-car history in the 1960s is that Carroll Shelby's Cobra arrived and made the Corvette look slow. Bondurant is the inconvenient witness: before he ever drove a Cobra, he had spent five years proving that a well-driven Corvette was very nearly unbeatable. When Shelby came looking for drivers, he wasn't recruiting someone who needed a better car. He was recruiting the man who had been beating everybody in a Chevrolet.

Which makes what happened at Riverside in October 1962 the hinge of the whole story — because Bondurant was there, in one of the first Z06 Corvettes ever built, on the day the Cobra showed up.