1,000 Greatest Drivers: Colin Bond

Bond. Colin Bond.

I admit I wanted to do Bond today just for the stupid joke, as I will be doing for the IndyCar driver I will write about tomorrow. However, I do feel that Bond is another driver who has never quite gotten his due in part because his best period came in the era before cable television made auto racing more accessible to the people at large, which means that most fans who remembered watching his career who weren’t there at the time will have only seen his decline. I also wanted to cover him in part as a recognition of rally racing. While he isn’t the only driver to win titles in both rally cars and touring cars (there are actually several others), he is possibly the best rally driver ever who never made either a World Rally Championship or European Rally Championship start, which means he will not be eligible for my rally drivers’ model in whatever decade I complete that. Therefore, I don’t need to wait to finish my rally model to talk about his career. I couldn’t really find room to squeeze this in my profile of him especially since he didn’t actually win the rally, but he did compete in the 1973 Heatway International Motor Rally in New Zealand against an international field that included future World Rally Champion Hannu Mikkola. Although Bond only finished fourth because he made several mistakes, he made up significant time in treacherous icy conditions and deeply impressed Mikkola, who stated that he would have been at least a top five rally driver against the deepest competition in Europe if he ever chose to compete there, which he didn’t. Sorry if you ended up receiving this three times because I decided to edit twice.