The 510 Legacy

We had run the Datsun roadsters for a season and a half before we ran the 510 and won the championship with that. And so the team kept building—as far as the personnel, it was really a good team. I wasn’t really enthused about the 510 at first because I didn’t think it could possibly win against good competition. But, by the time we ran the first race, we knew we had a potential winner.

I originally got hooked up with Pete Brock because he was my driving instructor at Shelby’s Driving School in 1962, so I knew him from there and, then, we both worked at Shelby’s together. I was, basically, a janitor and he was a stylist and did a lot of things for Shelby. He designed tee shirts and logos and instructed at the driving school. So, years later when he was off on his own, he needed a fabricator, and that’s how I ended up working with him again. His best fabricator had left, and he needed someone to build another Datsun roadster. I was working for a company that made oil pans, at the time—it was almost a sweatshop environment—and then Pete called and asked if I’d be interested in coming to work for him. I said I’d come to work for him if—when the second roadster was finished—I got a tryout in the car. He agreed with that, so I went to work for him. I would have rather have worked for him than the sweatshop anyway, but I bluffed that I needed to have a test drive! As it turned out, I got the ride in the other car and, by the end of the season, I was the main…the only…driver left. The other driver was Frank Monise, and although he was good, he hadn’t raced production cars that much, so he eventually moved on. But as we started to run the 510s, it got a lot more interesting, because we had a car that could win professional races.