Jim Busby Opens His Garage for Legendary Gathering

Jim Busby grew up as a Southern California hot rodder, racing his home-built Ford roadster illegally on the empty stretch of Huntington Drive between Pasadena and Arcadia. That ignominious beginning would eventually lead him to Le Mans. Shows what you can do if you put your mind to it.

Busby was one of the great names in IMSA racing in the 1980s, winning at Daytona, Sebring, and the aforementioned Le Sarthe, among many other tracks. After his driving career ended, he stayed in the racing game as a builder and team owner. He raced, in this order: hot rods, dragsters, Porsche 934/5s, and 962s, and streamliners at Bonneville. Almost everything (after the hot rods) came out of his little shop in Laguna Beach, Calif.

It was at that little shop that he held a gathering yesterday for some friends. We should all have friends like this: Derek and Justin Bell, Bobby Rahal, Don “The Snake” Prudhomme, Rick Knoop, Alwin Springer, and a few more on the engine- and car-building side of things. All of them came to celebrate the man and the remarkable little shop.

This shop was the place where they built the first carbon-fiber Porsche 962, the nose of which hangs on the shop wall, its carbon fiber showing through in a couple places where one racing incident or another had worn the paint down. It’s the place where a 10-year-old painter wannabe named Troy started a business that would grow into Troy Lee Designs. It’s the shop where Busby is still rebuilding a double-engine dragster like the one he built, tuned, and drove back in the early days of the quarter mile.

Only a few months before, the shop was a bit of a mess, with none of the racing posters or framed photos on the wall. It was cleaned up at the behest of Busby’s Balboa Island neighbor Bruce Meyer, co-founder of the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Concours on Rodeo, and innumerable other car events and gatherings all over California and beyond, and who keeps creating very convincing reasons to get everyone together in such marvelous ways as this.

“Every car that you see on posters has won races for us—Porsches primarily—was built in this building,” Busby said. “The car (a Porsche 962) that Derek (Bell), Bob Wollek, and John Andretti drove out of this shop to win the ‘89 24 Hours of Le Mans was built on that transit score floor in the next room. That was the fab shop. Every car that you are seeing—including that one right there (a Porsche 934/5), which I put on the pole at Sebring in ’77 and Peter Gregg and I led that race until the very end when a wheel fell off—was built right there. So what Bruce (Meyer) talked me into doing is getting all the posters, which I had stored up over the years and photographs and everything and putting this together.”

And what more reason does anyone need to get together than that?

(Look for the opening of a new Porsche exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum this weekend, featuring many of the cars and memorabilia of the kind found in Busby’s shop.)