The car also showcased a bunch of components guaranteed to gobsmack Datsun geeks. The ultra-thin seats appear to be the Ikeda Bussan-manufactured units found in the ultra-rare Z432R Fairlady Z, famously fitted with an S20 motor from a Skyline GT-R. The leather steering wheel is an unusual Nissan Sports Option model nicknamed the Ura Mach, another Z432R item.
Once a race car, now a show winner: The Bonneville 240Z picked up an Amelia Award in the 1961-’89 race car class at this year’s Amelia Island Concours. Photography credit: David S. Wallens
When Jaffe bought the car, it had only 2931 miles on the odometer, but it needed about a half-century of TLC. Before doing any mechanical work, he spent 60 hours cleaning and polishing the car. From the start, he decided to retain Micka’s distinctive stars-and-stripes livery while adding Racer Brown’s name to the door to pay homage to the car’s history.
Unfortunately, the Bonneville engine had been pulled out of the car–nobody knows when–and replaced with an L24 with production-type, flat-top carbs. Coincidentally, Jaffe had recently commissioned a race-prepped L28 with triple 44mm Mikunis from John Caldwell, the one-time engine wizard at BRE, so he stuck that engine in the car before shipping it to Fuller.
Although Fuller has wrenched on thousands of Zs, he’d never seen anything like Jaffe’s latest prize. Emblematic of the many small but ingenious mods were brake lines that had been rerouted to run outside the transmission tunnel just in case the driveline exploded. But what really astonished him was how well preserved the car was. “It’s a time capsule,” he says. “When I got underneath the dash, it looked like it was on the assembly line in Japan.”
Bill Warner, founder of the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, invited Jaffe to show the car in 2021, where it looked spectacular on the lush lawn outside the Ritz-Carlton–but perhaps not as impressive as it did on the smooth white expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats. But in either setting, the car went home with a trophy.