Bondurant was born in Evanston, Illinois, and began racing Indian motorcycles on dirt ovals as a teenager. In 1956, he transitioned to sports car racing, winning the West Coast "B" production Championship in a Chevrolet Corvette, securing eighteen wins out of twenty races. Between 1961 and 1963, driving for Shelly Washburn, he won thirty out of thirty-two races in Corvettes.
In 1963, Bondurant joined Carroll Shelby’s Ford Cobra team, winning his first race at Continental Divide Raceway in Colorado. He followed this with an overall win at the L.A. Times Grand Prix GT race at Riverside in October 1963. The 1964 FIA season saw Bondurant racing 289 FIA Cobras in Europe at events including the Targa Florio, Spa, and Nurburgring. He drove a works Ferrari Formula 1 car during the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen in 1965, and a Lotus 33 at the following Mexican race.
Bondurant contributed to John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Grand Prix, serving as a technical consultant and training James Garner to drive Formula cars for the film’s race sequences. During the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix, Bondurant, alongside Graham Hill, helped rescue Jackie Stewart from a burning car, an incident that spurred Stewart’s advocacy for motor racing safety. He also drove BRMs in five Grands Prix for Team Chamaco Collect, achieving a fourth-place finish at Monaco. He finished the Formula One season driving an Eagle for Dan Gurney’s Anglo American Racers.
In 1967, Bondurant competed in the CanAm series and at Le Mans in a Corvette L88 Coupe, leading the GT class before a wrist pin failure ended his race. Later that month, at Watkins Glen, a broken steering arm caused a crash at 150 mph, resulting in serious injuries to his ribs, leg, foot, and back. Doctors initially believed he would never walk again, but he recovered through determination.
Inspired by his experience training James Garner, Bondurant established the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving in 1968, initially at Orange County International Raceway. Nissan, under the Datsun name in the U.S., sponsored the school from its inception. In 1969, Bondurant and Tony Murphy won the passenger car class at the Baja 500 driving an SC/Rambler for James Garner’s “American International Racers” team, sponsored by American Motors Corporation (AMC).
Bondurant made four NASCAR starts at Riverside International Raceway, with an eighteenth-place finish in 1981 as his best result. Following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, he relocated the driving school to Phoenix, Arizona, establishing ties with General Motors and Goodyear Tires. He instructed actors including James Garner, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Robert Wagner, Tim Allen, Tom Cruise, and Nicolas Cage.
Bondurant was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2003 and the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame in 2014. A statement following his death in Paradise Valley, Arizona, on November 12, 2021, at the age of 88, noted that he was "the only American to bring home the World Championship trophy back to the U.S. while racing for Carroll Shelby." He is survived by his wife, Pat.
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