The following is a true story. Before coming to live permanently in Thailand, I used to come up every year at Xmas for my holidays.
One Xmas I received a telephone call from John English, a good friend of mine and a previous partner in a race team in Australia.
“Mate,” he said, “There’s a new class for this coming year called the Under 2 Liter sports sedans (U2L), and I’ve found the car for you.” “How much?” I replied. “Mate, it’s a Datsun 510 and it’s only $5,000.” “Buy it,” I said and an amazing chapter was about to unfold.
The mighty Datto.
When I got back I spoke to John, and asked him where the car was. “In Sydney,” he replied. “Sydney? What is it doing there?”
It turned out that the seller was in Sydney and John had only seen a photo in the For Sale column of the motorsport rag. So here I was, $5,000 poorer having bought a real pig in the proverbial bag.
The seller deposited the car on my driveway the next weekend, and without a doubt it was the ugliest race car I had ever seen. What’s more, it was built in 1968 and this was 1994. It was no spring chicken.
I leafed through its competition log book to find it only had two owners in the last 26 years and had only been raced six times. There had to be a good story there somewhere. Turned out that the last owner was an airline pilot, whose weekend flying commitments hardly ever allowed him a weekend to race it. Through him I managed to speak to the original owner and builder, who did not have enough money to race it either. So it was 26 years old, having been raced in anger only six times.
We then put it up on a hoist and had a good look. It was like new, with all good race parts being used.
We added disc brakes in the rear and a wing for the back and we had an amazing year. Datto (as we called it) probably had 20 horsepower less than the others in the class, but it delivered every one of its horses to the ground. It cornered everywhere on three wheels and was just great fun to drive.
In that year we won the Queensland U2L series championship and came second in the Australian championship race.
And that was in a car which was $5,000, plus another $1,000 for the brakes and the wing!
Of all the cars I have raced, Datto was my favorite.
