Bondurant RIP

[PhillipsLT5]

Bob Bondurant eyed the Australian-built Pontiac GTOs doing donuts as part of his new drifting school. By that afternoon, on every car, the belts were showing on the formerly brand-new sets of P225/50R-17 Goodyear Eagles. Did I mention, Bondurant allowed, with his customary big capped-tooth grin, that Goodyear is very interested in drifting

Bondurant, then 71, was master of the obvious, a man who seldom let a business opportunity slip away, and in 2004, drifting was very briefly a business opportunity for Goodyear and Bondurant and Pontiac. But things changed. Late in life, they changed a lot for him.

Bob Bondurant, the worlds best-known driving instructor, died November 12 in an assisted living facility. He leaves his wife, Pat, and multiple ex-wives and countless ex-girlfriends, most of them blonde.

As the founder and namesake of the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, Bondurant was already a legend by 1967, when the steering arm broke on the Can-Am McLaren he was racing at Watkins Glen and he flipped eight times, injuring most everything between, and including, his feet and his head. He was told hed never walk again, but he walked, he raced, and while recuperating, sketched out a project that he said God personally suggested he should try: A driving school, founded in 1968.

What Bondurant didnt leave was one of the half-dozen original Shelby Daytona coupes that he owned. I needed money to start the school, he said, so I advertised the car for sale. Still wearing casts on both legs, he drove the car to the Los Angeles airport to meet its new owner. Selling price: $4000. Then,Bondurant said, last years race cars werent worth very much. That car has appreciated since then by about $2,996,000.

It was a wonderful car to drive, recalled Bondurant. The aerodynamics made it much better than the Cobra roadster on the long tracks.

Bondurant should know: He and Dan Gurney, who was two years older than Bondurant, won the GT class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Daytona in 1964. That victory gave Shelby the horsepower to get what he needed from Ford for the famed 1966 overall victory at Le Mans in Shelbys GT40. They even made a movie about it.

Sadly, the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving is no more. Its bones were bought out of bankruptcy by several raconteurs, including F1s Jensen Button, who changed the name after a lawsuit required it. Its now the Radford Racing School, a name that means nothing to anyone not familiar with the coachbuilder that was founded in London in 1948, a name the owners are trying to bring back with a coachbuilt-like Lotus Type 62-2. The original Radford built cars for celebrities such as Paul McCartney and Britt Ekland (look her up), who with her husband Peter Sellers drove her Radford Mini out of a massive wedding cake as a publicity stunt for Radford. (It apparently didnt work very well.) The original Radford went bankrupt in 1966.

So what happened to Bondurants school, To hear wife Pat tell it, and she talks about it a lot, her son tried to take over the apparently failing school after a variety of complaints about Pat, some more serious than her insistence on keeping a life-sized cardboard cutout of Donald Trump in the classroom.

Her son is Jason Bondurant, who was long since an adult when he was adopted by Bob, and changed his last name to Bondurant, possibly so there would be someone named Bondurant, who identified as Bobs son, working at the school after Bob suffered a stroke and eventually aged out of daily visits to the school. It was long his habit to drop into every class he could.

Pat Bondurant, appearing on The Behavioral Corner podcast last June, described the 2018 conflict between her and Jason. I mean, my own son took down me and Bob at the school attempting a hostile takeover. He failed at it, but he did drop us to one knee. So we had to sell the assets. My son, my kid, did that. And it was bad. It was horrible to have to go through that. And of course, Bob was thinking, This is my adopted son. You know, hes not going to do this to me.

So as a result of you asking how do people handle trauma, which was the topic of the podcast, my own world champion 10-time Hall of Fame husband, his reaction to the stress of the son he adopted taking away his school, he would black out. We would be walking across the parking lot. And bam, down he would go. And of course, his head would hit the ground like a watermelon.

And Im in the back of an ambulance with him or finding him on the bathroom floor. And hell tell you every time, [he said] I started thinking about what those horrible lawyers did to us, and how they helped Jason do this to me. And that was how he handled trauma. So he is a very faith-based man, a lot of people dont know that about him as a driver, because he did have a reputation of being an international playboy.

Boy, did he. Pat, in an interview with a Phoenix-area magazine this month, described herself as what has long been considered Bobs type: I am a tall, long-legged blue-eyed blonde. So Im sure that helped a little bit on getting hired. But my drafting skills were impeccable. The context there: She learned drafting in high school and quickly found work with NASA, designing parts of the Space Shuttle, when it did not conflict with her modeling career.

Pat has said repeatedly that titans of business are offering to build a new Bondurant school, and she is sifting through offers. Whether that will continue after Bobs death is unclear, but the website Bondurantracingschool.com is still up, still soliciting offers for backers.

Regardless of his late-term legacy, his racing career and a school that for so long dominated the competition, turning out graduates like Christian Bale, James Garner, Paul Newman, Chase Elliott, Brad Keselowski, Nicolas Cage and about 500,000 of us less famous, none of this matters.

Lets remember him like this: Bondurant liked giving thrill rides on the track, but he seemed happiest giving real-thrill rides in his beloved Aerospatiale Gazelle SA342 helicopter, often until his passenger was as green as Bondurants David Clark headset. A lot of people who flew with Bondurant once declined a second invitation.

Also, you learned not to sit in the rearmost row of the big Ford Econoline van when Bob was driving as he showed you his race track; the brackets for that seat never seemed to be tightened down all the way, causing it to slide left and right as Bondurant practiced sliding the rear end around long before it was a thing. Your head kept hitting the side window. Like a watermelon. Bondurant looked in the rearview mirror and grinned and pledged to get those brackets fixed.

For decades, it is not an understatement to say that Bob Bondurant was the most accessible motorsports superhero we were allowed in the same room with: The man mastered everything from Formula 1 to the FIA Manufacturers World Championship to the Baja 500 to well, drifting.

Its just a different name for what we were doing, because weve been powersliding for years. When I raced the Cobras, the only way to go fast was in a four-wheel drift.

Bondurant, who did everything, went everywhere, knew everybody, always went fast.

He was 88.