Mat Siltla

My brother Lee (from Bondurant) shared this with me today and I thought it was cool enough that I wanted to share here on my blog.  I hope you guys enjoy this story as much as I did!  I also shared a pretty sick video about Bondurant on the next post you should check out.  I think anyone who loves cars and racing will be thrilled!  Enjoy!

Famed racers Bob Bondurant, Peter Brock and a 1965 Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe, which Brock designed and Bondurant helped drive to historic racing victories and track records, were reunited Friday in Phoenix Arizona for just a little more track time.With Brock at his side, Bondurant stepped once again into the cockpit of Daytona CSX2601 while a dozen photographers focused on the scene. Bondurant cranked up the roaring V-8, and moments later was performing some very hot laps around the twisting road course at his Bob Bondurant School for High-Performance Driving, just south of Phoenix.

“It still works,” a grinning Bondurant said after climbing out of the Cobra. “It still has power, and the handling is fantastic. It was so much fun that I didn’t want to come back in.”The Daytona was one of six streamlined coupes that Carroll Shelby and his cadre of top drivers, including Bondurant, brought to Europe to beat Ferrari. Which they did, for the first time putting an American manufacturer on the podium in European GT racing.

“It was great to take this, an American car, and beat the Ferraris,” Bondurant recalled.The special reunion was put together by the Mecum Auction, which will be offering what it calls “the crown jewel of American racing” at its collector-car auction May 13-15 in Indianapolis, Ind.

The Shelby Daytona, restored to original, could receive the highest bid ever paid at auction for an American car, said auction owner Dana Mecum, who attended the event at the Bondurant driving school. The current record is held be another Cobra, Carroll Shelby’s own supercharged Super Snake, which sold for $5.5 million in 2007 at Barrett-Jackson’s January auction in Scottsdale, Az.“This will definitely set an American record,” Mecum said Friday. “Another Daytona sold privately about three years ago for $9 million. And it didn’t have the racing history of this car.”

The Daytona is authentically restored, said Brock, who produced the radically streamlined design at the behest of Shelby. The coupe body was built on the chassis of the Shelby Cobra sports car to gain speed on the long straightaways of European tracks.“This has always been one of my favorite cars,” Brock said of the No. 26 Daytona. “It’s been restored to the way these cars really looked, pretty much as they were raced back then.”

Bondurant even owned this particular Daytona for a brief time, the veteran racer said. He bought it for just $4,000 in 1968 and sold it for a tidy profit: $10,000, he said with a laugh.

But that was enough money to start up his then-unique driving school shortly thereafter. The renowned driving school has been attended during the past 40 years by thousands of students, ranging from movie stars and professional racers to police officers and teen drivers.

Bondurant famously started his school after suffering severe foot and leg injuries in a practice crash, which sidelined him from racing but launched him into his new career.

Brock told how his now-classic coupe design looked weird and awkward to the racers in its day, with its aerodynamic Kamm tail and aggressive stance. But the first Daytona soon proved its mettle on the track, increasing the Cobras’ top speed by 25 miles per hour and winning its first race, the 1964 Daytona Continental, which prompted Shelby to adopt the name for the new coupe.

Five more were built, including CSX2601. The No. 26 car was the one, driven by Bondurant and French star Jo Schlesser, that clinched the 1965 World Championship for the United States and Shelby American on July 4 at Reims, France.

“Winning that World Championship was the crowning achievement of my career,” Bondurant said. “I think it’s wonderful that the car is being showcased 40 years later.”

Brock said the Daytona holds another distinction achieved with Bondurant at the wheel.“Bondurant drove this car at the Nurburgring, setting a lap record that stood for 15 years,” Brock said, speaking of the famed 14-mile road course in Germany.

After their vivid racing successes, the six Daytonas almost didn’t make it back to the United States, Brock said. Ford had turned its attention to the newly minted GT40, and the Cobras had pretty much lost their value as race cars.

“They were obsolete and couldn’t compete anymore,” he said.

So rather than spend the money shipping them home or leaving them in England, where the tax structure would mean taking a financial hit, Shelby considered dumping them at sea, Brock said. Fortunately for these now vastly valuable and important pieces of racing history, Brock and others were successful in talking Shelby out of his disposal plan and shipping them home. “They came that close to being destroyed,” Brock said.