When a crew of Nissan employees took the Z to Bonneville in 1976, the car wore a more patriotic paint scheme–one that remains today. Randy Jaffe, in the light-blue shirt, had the car freshened by Rob Fuller’s Z Car Garage. Photography Credit: Courtesy Nissan (old programs), David S. Wallens

Besides moonlighting as the technical editor at Hot Rod, Brown developed engine parts for the Datsun Competition Department catalog (and wrote detailed articles about the L-series single-overhead-cam engines found in 510s and 240Zs).

In 1972, he persuaded Nissan USA to give him a 240Z to take to Bonneville. Naturally, he tweaked the engine–the inline-six known internally as the L24–to his specifications. He also installed a roll bar, repainted the white body orange, and slapped on a front splitter and rear spoiler sourced from BRE. Other than that, the car looked remarkably stock, down to the crude four-lug steel wheels.

Brown’s speed record didn’t generate much excitement inside or outside the company, so when he returned the 240Z to Nissan, it was buried in a warehouse in Gardena, California. Fast-forward two years: A bunch of Nissan engineers and mechanics were sitting around at lunch, yakking about Bonneville, when they had a “Hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” moment.

National Service Manager Bob Whitehead presented a plan to upper management, which agreed to spend $5000 on a program to set a record on the salt. But not in a Z. “The B210 was just coming out, and the powers that be wanted some publicity for the car,” says Milan Micka, who performed the suspension and body work on the humdrum hatchback.

More than a dozen employees volunteered to work on the after-hours project. They drew lots to see who would drive the car at Bonneville. Mechanic Mike Jones won the right to take the wheel, and he duly set an I Production record at 121.8 mph. (Although this might not sound very impressive, the record has advanced by less than 1.5 mph since then.)

As so often happens with racers who venture to Bonneville, the team was infected with salt fever. For 1975, Nissan provided another $5000 to chase another record with a 2+2 version of the 280Z, which was being introduced to North America that year. To prove that the car qualified for the four-seat production class, Nissan had to get the blessing of the Southern California Timing Association. So the car was taken to an inspection site–a local muffler shop in Southern California–where SCTA officials decided, after much head-scratching, to have the largest tech inspector climb inside.

“They said, ‘If Big Willie can fit in the back seat, then it’s a production car,’” Tom O’Connor recalls with a laugh.

O’Connor built the engine for the Bonneville effort–engines, actually. The plan was to go for the G Production record with an L24 and then the F Production mark with a new 2.8-liter L28 engine. O’Connor tweaked both with a smorgasbord of Datsun Competition go-fast parts that had already been battle-tested in road racing, like Venolia pistons and Carrillo rods. He also reworked the cylinder head to run a 13.5:1 compression ratio and opted for a trio of huge 50mm, side-draft, two-barrel Solex/Mikuni carburetors.

Back in the day, according to the Southern California Timing Association rules governing land-speed racing at Bonneville, a car first had to exceed the existing record in a qualifying run. It then had to sit in impound overnight before making two more passes in opposite directions within an hour the next morning. The official speed was an average of these two runs.







The orange paint sprayed by Racer Brown for that 1972 run at Bonneville can still be found in the Datsun’s jambs and crevices. The rare Z432R Fairlady bucket seats remain as well. The car’s history was preserved rather than replaced. Photography Credits: Rob Fuller (show photo), David S. Wallens

Micka’s three passes went off without a hitch. As soon as he set a new G Production mark at 164.3 mph in the morning, the crew thrashed to swap in the larger engine for O’Connor to make a successful qualifying attempt that afternoon. The following morning, he set an F Production record of 164.6 mph, and the team was towing the car home on an open trailer before nightfall.

Both Micka and O’Connor agree that there was no drama either before or during their runs. Their only regret was that they’d been forced to run on the short course. “We were turning the motors to 7600 or 7700 rpm, but we still had a few hundred rpm left at the end of the measured mile,” O’Connor says. “We could have gone 10 or 15 mph faster on the long course.”

With three records in the bag, interest in Bonneville waned, and the race team dwindled to about half a dozen diehards. But they got the band back together for one last hurrah in 1976. Funded with another $5000 from management, they saved time and money by taking the L28 that had set the record the previous year and installing it in the 240 Brown had run in 1972. The car was slicked up with a long so-called G-nose and Moon wheel covers. Micka designed the paint scheme and added suspension components developed for road-racing Zs.

Stockman, who’d ramrodded the Bonneville program from the start, was given the honor of driving the car. He qualified easily on the first Sunday of Speed Week. “As I recall, there was an E-type Jaguar and a 300 SL Mercedes in F/GT, and those guys were pissed off that the Z went so fast,” says Frank Honsowetz, who worked as a junior mechanic on all three Datsun Bonneville cars and later became a manager of Nissan Motorsports.

The only glitches were rain and a glut of other entrants. Stockman wasn’t able to set a record until the following Wednesday, when he entered the SCTA book with an official speed of 166.037, nearly 13 mph faster than the existing mark set by a Gullwing Mercedes. Nine years would pass before the 240Z was eclipsed–barely–by a Ferrari 308.A special issue of a Nissan employee newsletter was published to commemorate the success of the Z. “It actually does look like the beginning of a Bonneville racing dynasty for Datsun,” the writer crows. As it turned out, Nissan never returned to the salt with a full-on factory effort, though many Datsuns and Nissans (and Infinitis) have been raced there by privateers.