[Banning]

Dan: Do you want to mention the film you are directing?

Bobby: Yeah, it’s called the “Black Dogs,” and it is a teenage rock and roll movie. It takes place in Martha’s Vineyard. Our lead guitar player is a kid named Matt Curin, who according to Eric Clapton is the next Clapton. He is the star of our film. I’m going to shoot that this summer.

Bobby: One of the things that I used to do was find unsuspecting new Porsche owners and draw them into a race. At Deadmans I would draw these guys out, and I would lead they would get to that Deadmans and they would just loop it. A Porsche is rear-engine and if you don’t know how to drive it you are going to lose it. We would just laugh. A good friend of mine David would say, ‘it’s a good thing that nobody ever got hurt up there, because you were laughing so hard that we couldn’t help them.’ That was one of our things that we would bate new Porsches into that curve.

Bobby: You want to hear the funny thing? After the Corvette Porsche rivalry and I was a diehard Corvette guy. I wound up driving a cop car, a GT30. It was a UPS car. I had to do the test in the rain. The best thing was that I was within one-tenth of a second of the best time ever at Bisack. They were really impressed and they signed me up to do Ackenheim in the GT. I thought that I had to get some stick time before I went over there. So I rented a Porsche from a guy in Willow Springs. I blew a tire a turn 9. At the apex on turn 9, at Willow Springs there is a bump. I was loading the car at two seconds quicker than the car had ever gone. Hit that bump, blew the left rear tire and t-boned that car into the end of the Willow Springs retaining wall. It broke both my legs. That ended my European racing career. The moral of the story is; here I am a Corvette guy and I hated Porsches my entire life and I wound up driving for Porsche. How’s that?

Dan: End quote.

Bobby: My racing on Mulholland, lead me to my dream of being a professional racing driver.

Bobby: I was on the 101 Freeway southbound in Ventura. I was doing about a buck and a half in my Vette. I took my eyes off the road for a second. The Vette has an open trunk area, and I had some clothes that were blowing around. I went to retain the clothes at 150 MPH. I dropped a wheel of the left side of the freeway made a 180 degree turn and backed it through the freeway fence along the 101 Freeway. I took out five hundred feet of freeway fence. I just sat down and waited to get arrested. I went back to the accident site the next day after I got out of jail. I looked at the skid marks that I had left as I backed across the freeway. The trajectory of the skid marks were exactly, dead nuts, aimed for the entrance of the cemetery. If there was no freeway fence then I would have gone directly into the entrance of the cemetery backwards at a buck and a half. I just looked up to the heavens and said, ‘okay I get it, no more street racing.’




Thanks to all who has contributed to this thread, it proves without a doubt how famous and important Mulholland Drive is to Los Angeles, The World, and our Car Culture.