Emperor of the Woods
Source: Hemmings.com
For just a minute, you thought that John Buffum had misspoken, inadvertently twisted an old bromide, gotten it backwards, or maybe you hadn't heard him right. After all, didn't he just call himself "a small fish in a big pond?" He meant to say it the other way around, didn't he? A syntax malfunction, maybe?
In a word, no. Using clear imagery and irrefutable logic, he explained how the greatest and most successful American rally driver of all time, bar none, beyond any dispute, is all but unknown for his exploits to everyone in his homeland other than the most obsessive, fastidious students of international motorsports. He did so by blending some analogies any American worth his salt ought to understand.
"Think of racing, or any other motorsport in America, as being a big pizza. NASCAR comes in and gobbles up three-quarters of the pie, so there's only a quarter of it left for everything else. In the rest of the world, with that same big pizza, half of it goes to rallying," Buffum mused. "A friend and co-driver of mine is really into the Lance Armstrong thing, because in the Tour de France, the stages they use are also used in a lot of historic rallies. The race is on The Outdoor Channel, but there are so many of these small, semi-pro sports all vying for a certain amount of TV time. They could be showing running, cycling or rallying, but instead, we get tractor pulling or some Texas Hold 'Em tournament. Two cameras and you're done."
Somewhere, deep in his psyche, there's a kernel of Buffum's being that likely predestined him to this obscure, though frenetic, offshoot of automobile racing, a kernel that gave the ability to maintain absolute concentration while rocketing down a narrow dirt path at triple-digit speeds, absorbing his co-driver's shouted directional instructions, mentally keeping track of how many minutes or seconds remain in the stage, slashing through countless dissimilar corners, doing all of it simultaneously in fog, snow or the pitched blackness of nighttime deep in the forest. In a career that spanned close to 25 years, Buffum's mastery of this seldom-recognized discipline won him 11 national rally titles and 115 outright event victories.
An apart-from-the-crowd accomplishment, to be sure. Then again, there have been scant episodes in Buffum's life that would let him melt in among the anonymous masses. He was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1943, just a few months after his father was killed in World War II. When he was five, his mother began taking him to New Hampshire, where he became an equally young and proficient skier. He graduated from the Choate Boys School in Wallingford, whose alumni included John F. Kennedy. In lieu of high school, Buffum's mother enrolled him in Lycee Jaccard, a tiny prep school on the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he captained the hockey team and became an accomplished downhill skier. For one term, his roommate was the son of actor David Niven.
After graduating, Buffum sailed home to New York and enrolled at Middlebury College, in the quiet, leafy Champlain Valley of western Vermont, determined to earn a degree in mathematics. He was socially adept and pledged one of the fraternities on campus. In 1964, one of his fraternity brothers persuaded him to serve as navigator during a local time-speed-distance rally, using an MGA borrowed from another fraternity member.
As Buffum recalls today, "My friend said, 'Do you want to go rallying this weekend?' I said back to him, 'What's a rally?'"
Though he hailed from a family that had little or no interest in cars other than as simple transportation, Buffum readily embraced rallying; perhaps it was the precisely timed navigation of their stages that appealed to some corner of his orderly, numerically conscious mind. He went on to compete in three or four local rallies a year while still an undergraduate at Middlebury, along with dabbling in gymkhanas and hillclimbs. He branched out to events such as the Tri-State 24, a round-the-clock winter rally that he described as "a very brisk TSD event," and the Canadian Winter Rally, a TSD contested over two consecutive nights. Buffum was an obvious quick study; in 1966, he placed 10th in the Press On Regardless rally held in rural Michigan, then the premier event among U.S. rallies, driving a Mini-Cooper. The following year, as a co-driver to Tim Gold, he scored an overall win in the New England Winter Rally, also in a Mini-Cooper.
Joining the military at the height of the Sixties, voluntarily or otherwise, was the defining moment of many Americans during those years. The same was true for Buffum, though for considerably different reasons. After graduating from Middlebury in 1968 through the ROTC, he was commissioned in the Army as a second lieutenant and was sent to West Germany, assigned to an Army Corps of Engineers bridge-building company. In the two years he was stationed there, Buffum became immersed in European-style performance rallying, which wasn't a social event enveloped in timed driving, but instead, ferocious competition between factory-backed teams, with mobs of partisan spectators jammed hip-to-elbow along the stages. Before he left West Germany in 1969 following his tour with the Army, Buffum would compete in about 20 national championship-level rallies in both West Germany and France.
He bought a Porsche 911T, taking delivery directly at Stuttgart, and still has its original bill of sale and FIA homologation papers. In 1969, Buffum and American road racer Steve "Yogi" Behr entered it in the Monte Carlo Rally, then the world's most prestigious rally. The rookies were part of a 224-car field that included some of the greatest names in rally history: Vic Elford, Pat Moss Carlsson, Hannu Mikkola, Timo Makinen. American drivers were virtually unknown on the European rally circuit in those years; moreover, Buffum and Behr had budgeted only three sets of tires and a few extra cans of fuel for the entire event, laughably minimal compared to the arsenal of spares at the disposal of factory entries from Porsche and Ford. Yet when the seven-day, 2,250-mile marathon was over, Buffum and Behr had finished 12th overall behind winner Bjorn Waldegaard, in their first-ever world-class rally, the highest placing by Americans at Monte Carlo since its inception in 1911.
The PRO Rally circuit, as performance rallying in the United States would eventually be called, didn't exist when Buffum returned from the Army in 1970. While still at Middlebury, he met Vicki Gauntlet, an heiress to the Upjohn fortune, who matriculated at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont. They married between his junior and senior year. After opening a small import car dealership in Burlington, Vermont, he founded his own team, Libra Racing, in 1972, and decided to get a taste of driving on the edge with asphalt under his tires. In a Mini-Cooper and a British Ford Escort, he took part in IMSA and SCCA road racing, winning the SCCA Trans-Am under-2.5 liter championship in 1973. Ultimately, he moved up to a Libra-stabled BMW 3.0 CSL, occasionally pairing with Behr, George Follmer and Brett Lunger. Buffum managed a couple of top 10s in the IMSA Camel GT series; in those days, the hot ticket in big-league North American road racing was the Porsche Carrera RSR.
What rallying he did manage during those years saw him mounting extremely aggressive drives, which often as not ended with the car wadded up, earning him the less-than-complimentary nickname of "Stuffum Buffum." John and Vicki Buffum divorced in 1974, but remained together as friends and rally partners well beyond then. Their breakout year was 1976 when, mostly using a Porsche 911 but occasionally their well-worn Escort, they were barely edged for the SCCA PRO Rally championship, while winning the title in the upstart North American Rally Association. The following year, Buffum began a four-year partnership with British Leyland, running Triumph TR-7s and TR-8s with Doug Shepherd as his new co-driver and navigator. They were the undisputed team to beat in both SCCA PRO Rally and NARA. When British Leyland dropped out of U.S. rallying in 1981, Libra's immediate prospects looked bleak. Then Audi came calling.
Beginning in 1982, Audi supplied Libra Racing with the first of its turbocharged all-wheel-drive Quattros, giving Buffum and Shepherd their strongest car to date. It restored them to parity with Rod Millen, who had been dominating in factory Mazda RX-7s ever since British Leyland's bailout, and started an escalating technological war between both companies that saw Buffum in the seat of the vicious, short-wheelbase Audi Sport Quattro Group B car, and Millen in a turbocharged, all-wheel-drive RX-7. In addition to his North American schedule, Buffum cherry-picked rallies in Europe, where he became the first (and still the only) American to win a European Championship event, taking the 1983 Sachs Rally in West Germany and the 1984 ERC Rally in Cyprus, both with Audi Quattros. Shepherd then left to become a Dodge factory driver, so Buffum-now known simply as "JB," the "Stuffum" days far behind him-hooked up with veteran navigator Tom Grimshaw, and won back-to-back SCCA PRO Rally titles, including an unprecedented, undefeated season in 1987. Ironically, Buffum would retire from active driving that same year.
"Audi had decided to get out (of North American rallying), so it just seemed like a good time for me to get out, too, and I guess it was," he said. "In hindsight, I'd have to say the most memorable or challenging car I ever drove was the short-wheelbase Audi Quattro, the Quattro Sport, the Group B car. I went from a long-wheelbase car with 300 or 400hp to something that was a lot lighter, a foot shorter, and had 100 more horsepower. It was a total point-and-squirt car, at least between the corners. You'd stand on it and that turbo would come in, and it was like having an afterburner. The corners came up in an eyeblink, and the car was so stiff, it was difficult to make your eyes focus before you got to the next corner. It would actually make your eyeballs bounce a little in their sockets."
Most recently Buffum, who remarried in 1980, has been acting as team manager and mentor for his stepson, Paul Choniere, who is keeping the family tradition alive. He holds seven SCCA Pro Rally wins in Buffum-prepped Audi Quattro S-2s, Hyundai Elantras and Hyundai Tiburons. Buffum still drives the occasional rally, especially as a substitute for his stepson, having won three events in that fashion as recently as 1995. Libra Racing has also built more than 100 customer rally cars over the years.
Following his exit from full-time driving, Buffum was named SCCA PRO Rally series manager, and remained as such until the SCCA decided to stop sanctioning rallies. Buffum waxed philosophical about it, saying, "There are 50,000 members in the SCCA, and 45,000 of them don't care about rallying. I think part of it was the potential damage to people that they didn't think was appropriate. It's not a case where SCCA dropped the ball, they just passed it off to a new group, Rally America."
In that capacity, he's helped to organize the Maine Forest Rally in Rumford, Maine, which typically attracts about 60 cars and perhaps 500 spectators. The inaccessibility of most rally routes has been the sport's major handicap in the United States, Buffum explained, saying, "First, you have to get a venue, then you have to get the competitors there, and in terms of drawing spectators, most of these locales are out in the middle of nowhere. As for the stadium off-road or rallycross stuff, that's not real rallying anyway. People rally because they enjoy it, as there's no money in it. They'd rather run fast 100 miles through the woods than go around and around in a circle."
To that end, Buffum is explicit about defining the differences between circuit and rally drivers, and how relatively few of them can make the transition from one genre of competition to the other, the most recent being Colin McRae, who raced a Ferrari 550 Maranello in the 2005 24 Hours of Le Mans. He explained, saying, "I'd have to say the best competitor I ever personally faced was Walter Rohrl, and he went on to race in Trans-Am and IMSA Camel GT, but Stig Blomquist and Hannu Mikkola were also very, very good. Jo Bonnier and Jim Clark were good at rallies. But Vic Elford was the best of all, at the pinnacle of both racing and rallying. He's the man. In 1968, he won the Monte Carlo Rally, and that same year finished seventh in the Monaco Grand Prix. That's an awesome achievement.
"What you have to understand is that, in a nutshell, racing and rallying are really two very different disciplines," he emphasized. "A rally driver will do 1,000 corners, every one different, at different speeds, so his skill lies in adaptation. A race driver will do 10 corners 100 times, so his skill is duplications. Both drivers have to be consistent, but the race driver duplicates."