OWNER PROFILE: DATSUN 240Z

A 50-year love affair

- BILL BENNETT

I’ve always loved the Datsun 240Z. Ever since the first time I saw one back in 1970 as I was laying on my bunk reading Road & Track aboard the U.S.S. Okinawa, an aircraft carrier doing rectangular patterns in the South China Sea off the coast of North Viet Nam. Mail call had come and my monthly subscription to R&T was the first thing to get opened. It had a full-page ad showing a Z sitting on a dry lake bed (El Mirage?) with the sun setting behind it. Wow was it pretty; a twoseater that reminded me of a cross between a Jag XKE and a stretched MGB-GT with just a little 250 GTO thrown into the mixture.

I looked at it and said to myself, “If this beauty is half as mechanically competent as it is beautiful, I’ve got to have one!” Subsequent issues of R&T and Car and Driver would confirm that it was—and then some. I mailed my dad $200 and asked him to put $100 deposits at each of the two Datsun dealers in San Diego County. I finally took delivery of my 240Z four months after returning to Southern California from WestPac (Western Pacific – Viet Nam).