The Datsun 240Z that rewrote the Bonneville record book
By Guest Writer
Nov 27, 2025 |
Story by Preston Lerner
The car sat buried in the far reaches of a dingy Nissan storage facility in Nashville like a forgotten trinket destined for a yard sale or, even worse, the trash.
By 240Z standards, it was an odd bird, with a long, rounded beak and a striking but somewhat strange stars-and-stripes paint job. The vintage hotrod-style Moon disc hubcaps were another weird touch. But it all made sense when you saw the F/GT lettering on the front fender.
In 1972, Racer Brown–the famous hotrod cam grinder–broke the class record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in this very Z by reaching 152.134 mph. Four years later, a small team of Nissan USA volunteers led by field engineer Bob Stockman used the same chassis with a different engine to set a new standard: 166.037 mph.
The car then languished in warehouses and, for a spell, at the Lane Motor Museum, for the better part of a half-century until last year, when Atlanta-based Z-car obsessive Randy Jaffe bought it from Nissan. In the midst of the pandemic, he sent the car cross-country to Z Car Garage in San Jose, where shop owner Rob Fuller–another crazed Datsun/Nissan devotee–undertook a sympathetic restoration.
“It’s a piece of Nissan history,” Jaffe says. “I want to put it out there for people to enjoy.”
Jaffe is one of those guys who can recite Z-car lore until your eyes roll back in your head, so he was familiar with the quasi-factory Bonneville effort in 1976. But after acquiring the car, he noticed some orange paint in hard-to-mask areas. After investigating the chassis history, he discovered–much to his amazement–that his car had also been run on the salt by Brown.
