Porsches and Horses All on the Same Day

Porsches and Horses All on the Same Day

By Leonard Shapiro

Final Sunday spectators at the Upperville Colt & Horse Show watched world class equestrians compete, got a glimpse of visiting Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and also could hob-nob with road racing royalty if they walked around a display of gorgeously restored vintage automobiles near the main ring.

American racing legend Bob Garretson with his freshly restored yellow 1972 Porsche 911.

Photo by Tiffany of Dillonkeenphotography

American racing legend Bob Garretson with his freshly restored yellow 1972 Porsche 911.

Bob Garretson, a long-time Californian now living in Warrenton, spent that day at the show along with his shiny yellow 1972 Porsche 911. He’s 89, and still loves driving that car, though at far slower speeds than the 200 mph he often reached while competing at iconic tracks like Sebring, Daytona and LeMans back in the 1970s and early ‘80s.

“I’ve been interested in cars all my life,” Garretson said. “My brother and my dad were both car nuts, too, and by the time I started to drive, drag racing was big. One day, I went to a road race and I realized these guys were driving at high speeds for twenty minutes, and it was only twenty seconds in drag racing. That was a lot more appealing to me.”

Garretson helped pay his way through the University of California-Berkeley by rebuilding V8 engines. He eventually settled in the Bay Area and worked in the computer business about the time Silicon Valley began to boom. He also opened a Porsche repair shop in Cupertino, California where Apple founder Steve Jobs was a client and became one of Garretson’s sponsors.

Garretson also raced Porsches, and one day in 1978, it almost cost him his life. At the 24 Hours of LeMans, after driving for two hours and only three laps from a pit stop, he misjudged a turn and hit a guard rail.

According to his biography on the loveforporsche.com website, “When the car crashed, it rolled end-to-end and side-to-side. The wreckage…was spread over a quarter of a mile and left some of the body parts stuck in the nearby trees. The car was totaled, but Bob Garretson escaped only with some cuts and bruises.”

In 1981, he won the 24-hour race at Daytona and ended that season by winning the first World Sportscar Championship based on high finishes in several other major races.

Garretson, who teamed with driving legends like Johnny Rutherford, Bobby Rahal and Rick Means over the years, retired from competitive racing in the early 1980s because “it just wasn’t fun anymore,” he said. He started a thriving computer chip business, lived in England for a dozen years and, with his wife Ruth, moved to Warrenton in 2017 to be close to their adult children and grandkids.

“I’ve had a great time with it,” he said of his love affair with cars. “My whole life.”