Photos: Porsche
It’s 1979. Two companies don’t know it yet, but they’re about to spend the next decade fighting to survive.
One is a four-year-old startup running on the Apple II. The rainbow logo is current. The Bandley Drive campus is new. The IPO is still a ways away, and so is the Lisa, the Mac, the IBM PC’s arrival, and the day in 1985 when Steve Jobs gets pushed out of the company he started. None of that has happened yet. The founders are still hands-on enough to drop their own cars off at a service shop themselves.
The other is a sports car company in Stuttgart with a new flagship grand tourer called the 928 that it's been quietly suggesting will replace the aging 911. The factory racing program is selective and leans on privateers like Dick Barbour and Bob Garretson to carry the IMSA and World Championship load. It's the golden era. A guy with a good shop and the right people can buy a bare tub from the factory and beat the works cars. The first money-losing year in company history is months away. Years on Peter Schutz will famously walk in, draw a line on an engineering chart with a marker, and save the 911. Nobody knows that yet either.
Both stories meet in a service bay in Mountain View, California.
The version of this story that’s been repeated for the last decade goes something like this. Steve Jobs was a Porsche fan. He took his 356 to a service shop in Mountain View. One thing led to another and Apple ended up on a race car. It’s not exactly wrong. But it’s not exactly right either, and it’s missing the actual story.
Bob Garretson is still around, and he sat down for an interview on the Overcrest Podcast to chat about Le Mans, Porsche, and the Apple car itself. He ran Garretson Enterprises, prepped and raced 935s for Dick Barbour for years, and drove the car himself. He's the only person alive who can tell you what actually happened, and his version is more honest than the one that's been told.
At four in the morning at Le Mans in 1978, Bob's Porsche 935 was upside down in midair above the Mulsanne and his glasses were sliding down his nose. He couldn't lift his arm to stop them. He'd been racing the same guy all night, trading positions, and he'd gotten a better drive out of Tertre Rouge and gone past him. Then he hit the kink too hot on tires a few laps too old and knew he was going around. The car hit the guardrail going backwards, bounced off, flipped end over end, and landed on all four wheels in the middle of the track. There was no windshield, and the door wouldn't open. The corner workers came running and bent the aluminum window frame down with their hands so he could climb out. Brian Redmond stopped his own race car on the Mulsanne to ask if he was okay. Then an ambulance came.It was a corrugated Citroen van with a padded box in the middle and no stretcher. Two French teenagers laid across him to keep him from falling off as it bounced over the dirt roads to the track hospital. They found his glasses on the side of the racetrack the next morning.
Bob graduated from Berkeley in 1960 and went to work as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. He had four kids at home and not enough money. The HP parking lot, he started to notice, had seven 356s in it on any given day, and when he got to talking to the guys who owned them, nobody seemed to have a real answer about where to get them worked on. A guy named Bruce Anderson started stopping by after work to wash parts. They outgrew the garage, rented a building, then two, before finally built a purpose-built shop in Mountain View with seven lifts, a dyno room and a machine shop. By 1979, Garretson Enterprises was the place engineers in the Valley took their Porsches. Including three customers from a small computer company just a few miles down the road in Cupertino.
Steve Wozniak’s 928 was the car coming in for service. Bob remembers Wozniak as the active Porsche customer of the two founders. Steve Jobs had a 356 but, in Bob’s words, “never drove it or anything like that.” The 356 wasn’t what people remember. The 928 wasn’t the deal either.
The deal came from the third Apple customer in the shop. The one nobody remembers.
He was an art director. He had a 911 that came in regularly. He was, in Bob's words, "the guy that designed all the brochures and ads and stuff like that." He was the visual identity of Apple. He was also the person Bob credits with closing the sponsorship.
Apple's identity work in 1979 was being done out of Regis McKenna in Palo Alto. The art director on the Apple account there was Rob Janoff, who'd designed the rainbow logo two years earlier. The description Bob gives lines up almost perfectly. The 911. The brochures and the ads. The guy who could walk into Cupertino with a finished livery and get the founders to sign off. Whether the man in Bob's shop was Janoff or someone else at the agency, we don't know. He hasn't answered the question. Neither have any of the public records.
What we do know is that whoever it was, he was the one who actually pushed the deal through. He got the founders to commit. He designed the livery and the color scheme. The rainbow that everyone remembers is his.
Bob brought up the idea one afternoon when both Steves happened to be picking up their cars at the same time. He floated it to them together. They were noncommittal. “They look at each other,” Bob says, “well, I don’t know.”
The art director was the one who actually pushed it through. He got the founders to commit. He designed the livery and the color scheme. The rainbow that everyone remembers is his. So is the placement of the Apple Computer name across the side skirts. So is the decision to put one of the most recognizable corporate identities of the late twentieth century onto a race car. It worked, and it looked good. Apple had just finished its first new big campus on Bandley Drive. When the car came back with the rainbow on it, they parked it at the entrance.
The 935 wearing that livery was chassis 0030, and Bob built it. He’d ordered a bare tub from Porsche. The factory had already done the 934-derived modifications, the oil lines routed through what used to be the heater ducts, the bracing in the structure. Everything else got done at Garretson Enterprises. The fuel cell. The suspension. The gearbox. The bodywork. It’s why the placard on the car says Made in Mountain View. The car was built in the same town, in the same year, where Steve Wozniak was dropping off his 928 for service.
The crew was volunteers. PCA members from around the Bay Area showed up Tuesday and Thursday nights from six to eleven, and Saturdays from eight to four. Other teams had paid mechanics. Bob had Martin Raffauf, who worked at IBM during the week and rebuilt the driveshafts every race weekend because that was the job he wanted. Bob's brother was an engineer in Southern California, and he redesigned the bearings in the KKK turbos, replacing the ball bearings that kept failing under endurance heat with plain bearings that didn't. The team built a custom oversized intercooler and hid it under the bodywork so nobody at the next IMSA round could see what they had.
None of this is possible in real endurance racing now. You can't buy a bare tub from Porsche, build it in your shop, and beat the works cars. The works cars have data engineers flown in from Stuttgart for every round. They have hybrid systems and aerodynamic packages that take seven-figure budgets to develop and run. The factory teams now are factories. The privateer teams now are factories with smaller logos. The kind of operation Bob ran, where a guy from IBM rebuilt your driveshafts on Saturday and a guy in Southern California redesigned your turbo bearings out of frustration, doesn't exist in top-level sports car racing anymore. It can't. The sport got too expensive and too professionalized and the door got closed.
In 1980 it was still open. Bob walked through it. So did the rest of them. Privateers like Barbour. Engine builders like Sherry Woods at Andial. Machinists like General Precision. They were a network of people who cared more about the work than the money, who would show up Tuesday and Thursday for years on end because someone had to be there to rebuild the driveshafts. It took grit and sacrifice and a lot of evenings nobody got paid for. But it could be done. And it got done in a shop in Mountain View.
The Apple Computer livery raced that one season. Garretson, Bobby Rahal, and Allan Moffat shared the car. It DNF'd at Le Mans in 1980 with a seized piston. It ran Sebring. It finished third at Road America. Seven races. No wins.
It didn’t matter. The car turned heads. That had been the point all along.
Apple stopped sponsoring race cars after 1980. Jobs left in 1985 and came back in 1997. The rainbow logo went away in 1998. The 928 didn’t replace the 911. Porsche kept making 911s and almost went bankrupt and didn’t and kept making them anyway. Both companies survived their toughest decade.
Chassis 0030 went through more owners and more liveries. Before the rainbow it had worn Hawaiian Tropic colors at Le Mans 1979 with Paul Newman in the lineup, finishing second after a stuck wheel nut forced a full trailing arm change. After the rainbow it ran in Cooke-Woods blue, and as Sleep Cheap, and a handful of other schemes across roughly seventy races and twenty-six different drivers. It eventually ended up in Adam Carolla’s collection, parked alongside the rest of the cars Newman raced.
The popular version of that story credits a famous founder. The real version credits a service shop, a co-founder who actually drove his Porsche, and an art director nobody remembers.
