[Banning]

For a New Year's Treat, here is the interview with Bobby Carradine.


Bobby Carradine Interview 2-4-06

Bobby: We came back from Daytona, a buddy and me. We timed it so we could be back in LA Wednesday night. We were so beat we simply didn’t have the energy to unload the racecar. Can you image a full competition Daytona making a run, how *****in that would have been?

Dan: Did you have any success on the track?

Bobby: Yeah, you don’t know my resume? There is a really good article by Laura Colly from On Track it is the perfect piece of information to get my racing history. You guys could just read that. It is the perfect place to get information. I went to Bondaran in ’76. I started racing Ford’s in ’77. The whole time I’m running on Mulholland. My brother bought a Ferrari Daytona, so we could race Daytona. Of the three drivers, I was quickest at night, because of all of my racing Mulholland at night experiences. You just get fast at night.

Dan: So that prepared you for racing.

Bobby: Yeah!

Dan: Did you disintegrate a brick mailbox?

Bobby: I forgot about the brick mailbox. That was the burgundy ‘69 Vette. You know the ¼ inch------on the Trans leaf spring? There are these rods that are perpendicular to the ground, to that spring that it holds to. To get it exactly the way we wanted to, there is a little piece of past the bolt. When I was loading the car really hard in the corners, I did a right-hander or lefthander I don’t even remember. If you were really making a good run you were really loading the car. That tire would blow. I could never really figure out why I was blowing a tire occasionally. I finally figured it out but not before I took out the mailbox. That’s how that happened. I blew the tire and took out the mailbox.

Dan: Do you remember when you were chased by a cop in your Turner?

Bobby: Yeah it was a Saturday night. I saw a cop sitting up on Bowmont. I turned to my friend as I was racing down passed Grandstands. I said ‘have you ever raced a cop before?’ He said, ‘no.’ I pulled right in front of the cop car, and I looked right at the guy and dropped the clutch, and laid a patch in the Turner of all things. I lights came on and off we went. I left him in the dust.

Dan: So you weren’t smoking grass in the weeds?

Bobby: Not to the best of my knowledge I always raced straight up there.

Dan: We were just trying to confirm that.

Bobby: I don’t remember that, but I’m not saying that it didn’t happen.

Chris: Didn’t you yell **** You to the cop?

Bobby: That is incorrect. The cop was parked up on Bowmont facing Mulholland and I pulled up right in front of him. Not headlight to headlight. I came to a dead stop and sidestepped the clutch, laid a patch and took off.

Dan: Can you tell us a little about the atmosphere up there at Grandstands?

Bobby: We would come up there on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I was up there almost every night anyways. Wednesdays and Saturdays were official nights. We just would hang out. We would see a guy coming either east or west. We would see if it was worth even bothering to start the car. We would just shoot the ****. Then we would see somebody really coming hard. We would mount up and get ready. As soon as the guy went passed Grandstands we would go after him. The protocol was if you caught up to the guy at Coldwater or Beverly Glen you would turn around and the pursuing car would now be in the lead. If you’d lose the guy coming back you were clearly faster. Not only did you catch him, but when you turned around a lost him going the other way you were quicker. That was pretty much the drill man.

Chris: What years did you race?

Bobby: 1971 to 1983 all the time. I was pretty much all the time whenever possible.

Dan: Do you have a two line quote we could use on the back of our book?

Bobby: Went I went to the Bondaran School they had a name that they used when I saved my ass on Mulholland. It is a technical tern trail brake. Sometimes when you get in too hot you have to carry your brake into the corner. When the car is rotating and you are braking the only way from losing it is to pick up the throttle. That is an actual racing technique that I learned on Mulholland.

Dan: Do you think your experiences on Mulholland led you into racing?

Bobby: Absolutely! Big time, I had hundreds of hours on Mulholland. I was always developing the car to work better. One of my goals was to clear 100 MPH in the Sweeper. I was finally able to do it after Guldstrand put in the new neoprene bushing in the front suspension. The suspension in the ’69 Vette is not that good. It can use a lot of help. We were able to finally reach 100 MPH in the Sweeper.

Dan: Did you get chased by the cops?

Bobby: Yeah! One story I was thinking about last night was I was coming up Coldwater from Beverly Hills, and way up in the distance I saw a police car up there. I shut off my lights after he went around a curve and he couldn’t see. I was following the cop with my lights off. I was trying not to get too close. I was just messing around with him. I let him get far enough ahead so I could turn my light on again. I was getting where Coldwater meets Mulholland and I went to turn right or eastbound on Mulholland and he was backed up in a driveway on the corner of Coldwater and Mulholland. He just lit me up and I just stood on it and we hauled ass all the way to Grandstands to Laurel Terrace. I don’t know what possessed me to do this but I waited at Laurel Terrace for the cop. There was an island at Laurel Terrace and Mulholland. I was on one side of the island the cop was on the other. I was on this little turnout and we were just looking at each other. It was a standoff. He committed which way he was going to go, and I just dropped it, sidestepped the clutch and did a 180 degree turn and went back.

Dan: What kind of car were you in?

Bobby: That was my ’69 Vette. Most of my success on Mulholland was in my ’69 Vette.

Dan: Can you tell us about a couple of car crashes you had up there?

Bobby: The one we talked about with the mailbox. The car of course was very cherry at that point. It really messed up the backend of it. The real significant wreck was when I almost went off the hill. I was in my ’60 Corvette. I was eastbound from Coldwater on Mulholland. There was one turn that you couldn’t really see either way. It was a blind corner. I never committed to blind corners on Mulholland. It was one of my things where I really didn’t do that. It was one of those nights where everything was running really *****en and I was going to really show the guys at Grandstands a run that night. I committed to the inside line on that blind corner and sure as **** there was a Thunderbird rolling down the hill with his light off. I guess he was rolling down the hill to get gas. That was a real ‘oh my.’ I was able to swerve around the guy, but I was already in a two wheel drift. I was committed to a full line, and it simply took ten feet of road away from me. I took me ten feet off the outside of that curve. From some miracle, the Corvette hit the telephone pole exactly at the center of gravity from front to back. It bounced off the pole and landed back up on the hill. I went back the next day and took a look at the site where it happened. The telephone pole is down a good ten feet at the beginning of a cliff. The point where the Corvette struck the telephone pole is maybe six to eight feet in the air. I was off! I bounced off the telephone pole and landed back on Mulholland. I jammed it in reverse and started taking off. Everybody is just pouring over Mulholland out of Grandstand to see who went off. I was driving away and that Vette looked like a clown mobile because it was going ‘clunk, clunk, clunk!’ I drove it back to my pad on Mulholland and I got my girl to drive me to the hospital to get my nose stitched up. At that time I didn’t wear seatbelts and I cut my nose of the rearview mirror.

Dan: Do you remember one night where you raced George Metsos and he beat you?

Bobby: Did he beat me because I crashed? He beat me beat me? Huh! It could have happened. The part of Mulholland that really sticks in my mind in the ’69 Vette era, I was really dead serious at that point. I got the car in ’75 or ’76. I had it until 1983.