After semi-retiring from pro racing, Bob Bondurant opened a respected driving school, teaching everything from street safety to road racing. Today's Nice Nice Price or Crack Pipe Crown Vic sports Bondurant School lineage, but does its price make the grade?
Bob Bondurant won the GT class at Le Mans for Carroll Shelby's Cobra team in 1963, and plied his trade across other series' throughout the sixties. His Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving allows Bondurant's racing techniques and discipline to be disseminated to anybody seeking to either improve their street capabilities, or looking to be competitive on the track. And in the case of either of those goals, the school needs learning aids, or as we like to call them, turpentine cat-fast cars.
One of those very cars is the subject of today's consideration, and that is a specially prepared 1999 Ford Crown Vic Interceptor. Bondurant's school uses a number of different cars, but the Crown Vic's capacious interior allows an instructor to demonstrate technique to as many as three students at a time, and this black knight has four-point harnesses installed for them all. There's also a full cage and window nets in the doors, making this last of the body on frame Fords close to ready for SCCA A/S racing.
All that safety equipment would be kind of a joke if the car didn't have the balls to back up its sporting pretensions, and this Crown Vic's DOHC 4.6-litre Mustang Cobra V8 and T45 stick shift bring 350 balls of fury to the party. The ad for the car is painful to read, being sadly in ALL-CAPS, but the seller does provide a lot of history about this car and its 17 siblings. All 18 were commissioned by Ford for the Bondurant School, and the cars were built by Roush. He claims there's been a butt-load of work done to make the Cobra drivetrain fit in the big four door, along with a fire suppression system, a racing fuel cell and a battery in an explosion-proof box in the trunk. The instrument cluster has also been snaked from a Mustang, as has a custom front bumper cap that mirrors the slithery pony's nose. Way out back, and probably in a different time zone this car is so big, there's a trunk-capping spoiler, although the black paint does its best to mask that or any of the car's detail.
Since grabbing 7 of these, the seller says he brought the nicest of the bunch back to close to street-ability. That included reattaching the parking brake, putting in floormats and a stereo, and putting in new headlight lenses replacing the clouded originals. The car also has received a new two and a half inch exhaust and Flowmasters underneath, while the corners are now supported by Bullitt-like alloy rims and Eagle F1s. The claim of 8,600 miles (discounting the typo that says 8,600 HUNDRED) should be taken with a grain of salt as enough of those miles were done sideways to warrant wipers on the door glass to clear the bug splatters.
Those 8,600 miles were also done on the closed Arizona track where Bob's school turns every day spastically incompetent drivers into. . . well, probably still spastically incompetent drivers, but ones who are at least able brag to their friends about track exploits. It should be noted that for this car to survive its Cobra bite, certain parts needed to be amputated, including those aphrodisiacs of the EPA, the catalytic converters. The seller claims to have a clear Arizona title, and it does sport some smirk-inducing CBRAVIC license plates. But the lack of factory emission controls will make it tough to transfer that title anywhere else, and the darker than the inside of a well-digger's ass window tint will make even Copper State cops make this Cobra a victim of a fix-it ticket.
So all's not perfect with this BFOC (Big Ford on Campus) and it's up to you to determine if that includes the price. The seller wants $22,995 for this student body, as well as all the goods underneath it. A standard P71 from this year will set you back a tenth of that, albeit with a lot more miles under its belt and without all the go-faster bits. Do you think this car's history and performance outweigh its history (remember, driving sideways) and potentially nightmare-inducing registration challenges, as well as that fin-shy of twenty three grand asking price?
You decide!
eBay or go here if the ad disappears. H/T to Formerly Preferred Customer for schooling us on the ad!
Help me out with NPOCP. Click here to send a me a tip, and remember to include your commenter handle.