BRE Hino Contessa 1300 Coupe

 

Found on Datsun.org an interview with Peter Brock of BRE Datsun  fame on racing the long gone and mostly forgotten Hino Contessa.

PB: "The first BRE project after I left Shelby's was the 998cc four door Hino Contessa sedan I built for an American named Bob Dunham who was living in Japan and who wanted to do a season of racing in the US. At that time the SCCA did not have any sedan racing , but a bunch of locals in the Southern California area wanted to race their Minis, Cortinas, VWs, Volvos, etc and formed an organization called the "Good Guy Sedan Racers". We prevailed upon the rival California Sports Car Club to sanction some races. They agreed provided that we could put together a decent field of cars, and that's how sedan racing began in the US. It was a motley assortment of tin tops but it was cheap and fun.

"Bob Dunham was an actor in Japanese movies and also did a bit of auto journalism as a correspondent to the foreign press. Dunham had been consulting with several Japanese auto companies about entering the US market, and he convinced the Hino people that Americans were into racing and that they should establish a sporting image for their car in America by racing it there. He contacted me at Shelby's through a mutual friend and asked If I could build the car for him. We worked out a deal where I agreed to build the car if he'd give it to me after one season of racing , when he returned to Japan. I built the car with a fabricator friend of mine from Shelby's named Jeff Schoolfield.

"The basic Hino was a Japanese Renault Dauphine built under license from the French. It had it's own body but the rest was pretty close to the Dauphine - swing axle rear end and all. Pretty awful! Despite this we made a trick little racer and Bob did well enough to interest the factory to continue with the program . I raced the car the next season in So. Cal. and finished consistently, but was never able to beat the Mini Coopers. Remember this was well before Nissan or Toyota ever thought about entering US racing , so we were really pioneering the Japanese import market in the US.

"Some time later the Hino people invited me to Japan to test their new 1300cc "Contessa" coupe, which I did. We worked out a deal where I would race the car in the US and if it proved successful."

Pete Brock's first success at the wheel of the 1300cc Japanese Hino Coupe was at the Mission Bell 100 held before the 1966 Times-Mirror event in front of a 100,000 strong crowd at Riverside Raceway. Pete and Bob Dunham placed the BRE Hinos 1st and 2nd and created quite a stir, and got the attention of the major Japanese manufacturers.

The Contessa seen above was the subject of an article on Hergerty's and appears to have been offered on the open market a couple (at least) of times. Credit to the original photographer.