People · Bob Bondurant · Prologue

Watkins Glen, 1967

Watkins Glen, New York — 1967

A race car communicates with its driver through his hands. Everything he needs to know — how much grip is left, what the front is doing, whether the corner is going to work — arrives through the steering wheel as weight and texture, a constant conversation conducted at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. So the worst thing that can happen to a driver is not that the conversation says something frightening. It is that the conversation simply stops.

Bob Bondurant is thirty-four years old and near the top of his profession. He has won the GT class at Le Mans. He has driven for Shelby, for Ferrari, for Eagle. He has a world championship season behind him. He is approaching the Loop-Chute section at Watkins Glen in a McLaren at roughly 150 mph when the steering arm breaks.

The wheel goes light in his hands. There is nothing on the other end of it. What follows is the part that racing drivers describe with a flatness that never quite conceals what it was: the car leaves the road and flips eight times. When it stops, Bondurant has broken ribs, and serious injuries to his legs, his feet, and his back.

What the crash cost, and what it started

  • The failure: a broken steering arm at ~150 mph, approaching the Loop-Chute
  • The accident: the McLaren flipped eight times
  • The injuries: ribs, legs, feet and back — the end of his front-line driving career
  • The idea: while recovering, he drafted a high-performance driving school — open within months

That is the end of the first Bob Bondurant — the one who raced Corvettes and Cobras against the best in the world. He is thirty-four, and the thing he has been since he was a young man in Southern California is over.

Lying there putting himself back together, he thinks about a job he'd taken not long before, almost as a favour: teaching the actor James Garner how to drive convincingly for a film called Grand Prix. It had struck him at the time how much a person could be taught, and how quickly, if somebody who actually knew how just sat beside them and explained it. Nobody was doing that for ordinary drivers. Nobody was doing it for racers either, really — you learned by surviving.

On February 14, 1968, with three Datsuns, a Lola T70 and a Formula Vee, the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving opened its doors. It would go on to teach generations of American racing drivers, and it would outlast, in influence, every race he ever won.

But this site is about Corvettes, and Bondurant's Corvette story starts nine years earlier — with a season so lopsided it looks like a typing error.