Recently I interviewed Richard von Buedingen. These days he lives in Aiken, South Carolina in the US but he’s originally from Oconomowoc in Wisconsin, about 35 miles to the West of Milwaukee. In the early 1960s, he went into partnership with Carl Haas, importing English racing cars, initially Elvas but later on Lotuses. Their company was called Span International, Inc.
Carl was the expert in dealing with the logistics of running an import business, while Richard was the racing driver who showcased the product by winning races so that people wanted to buy it.
By 1961 Dick, as he was known then, had moved around 50 miles west to Madison, Wisconsin by this stage where he was a full-time medical student. That year he cut his teeth racing a Triumph TR3 in the E Production class at circuits like Indianapolis, Meadowdale, Wilmot Hills and Road America.
By mid-way through the year, he had started racing an front-engined Elva Mk 5 sports racer, in the G Modified (GM) class.
His most high-profile result that year was a class victory in the Road America 500 at the wheel of an Elva Mk 5, with Carl Haas as his co-driver. This was an major race which attracted some of the top drivers in the US, including Roger Penske, Jim Hall, Hap Sharp, Walt Hansgen, Augie Pabst and John Fitch.
Buedingen and Haas finished the race in 12th overall, for first in G Modified and behind them another three Elvas finished 2nd, 3rd and 4th in class, too. Buedingen believes that this result sowed the seeds for their strong sales of the first rear-engined Elva, the Mk 6, in 1962.
Towards the end of 1962, a new partner came on board at Span International. James Spencer, better known as Jim. He seemed a perfect match with the company’s burgeoning ambitions, as Buedingen recalls: “Jim was a guy who had inherited a lot of money and he didn’t know what to do with it.”
With the new partner and an injection of funding, came a new agency for Span in 1963, this time for Lotus as Buedingen explains. “We managed to wrest the Lotus business from a couple of guys who weren’t doing very well.”
As was often the case with Lotus in those days, it seems that obtaining a supply of cars to import was the biggest challenge and in the end Span only imported two Lotus 23 sports racers, one to Curt Gonstead in April and another which Jim raced himself, as usual with a view to publicising the company’s wares.
Buedingen: “We imported the car [in July 1963, the one shown in the photo below] and took it out East on a kind of spring vacation. We ran it at Watkins Glen but someone ran into me and damaged the bodywork and we couldn’t run it in the race.
“Then we ran it in the 500 mile race [the Road America 500 at the Elkhart Lake circuit]. We were running in the under 2-litre category, against the new Elva-Porsche. Unfortunately, our mechanic didn’t replace the brakes and brake linings, so I had no brakes for about 10 laps before my pit stop [to hand over to his co-driver, Jim Spencer].
“But I managed to keep up a strong pace. When I came in, I tried to warn him about the brakes but he just patted me on the head and said ‘Bullshit, you couldn’t be going that fast without brakes’. Jim went out and spun the car – because it had no brakes!”
In fact, if you go to 23 seconds on the video below, Spencer’s spin is immortalised on film..
The car was retired after 40 of the 125 laps. And the winner? Ironically the under 2-litre Elva-Porsche of Bill Wuesthoff and Augie Pabst, the marque they had been distributing prior to taking on the Lotus business!
Buedingen did at least one other race with the car at the Wilmot Hills circuit and won (see photo below) but the date is lost in the mists of time.
By this stage, other factors were drawing him away from the business and he found it hard to give it as much time and attention as he needed to. “At that time, I had a full-time job as a medical student. The last couple of races I did, I was just showing up on the weekends, pulling my gloves on and racing. Eventually, I sold my share to Carl Haas.”
But into the mid-60s, a much greater calling was tugging at his heart strings, too: space. “Around this time I had applied, off-handedly, to NASA to join the Scientist-Astronaut program. I was a pilot already, so I thought it made sense.”
The Scientist-Astronaut Program was an initiative by NASA in the early 1960s to select Ph.D. scientists and MDs as active participants for future missions to the moon and beyond.
Then came a shock: “I was one of those guys who was picked! And I wasn’t allowed to race. I had to choose between the moon and racing. The moon and racing, what a choice.” After obligatory flight training with the US Navy, Buedingen spent around two years with the program but eventually it was cancelled and so his shot at going to the moon was gone.
Despite that disappointment, he still maintains a keen interest in NASA’s renewed space exploration activities and has been following the recent launches by SpaceX. “They do remember me and invite me down and I get a nice seat at the launches.”
After Span, Carl Haas went on to build a very successful business distributing Lola racing cars and also became a renowned car owner and entrant, joining forces with actor Paul Newman to run the legendary Newman-Haas Racing team, which ran a plethora of stars in its cars, including former Team Lotus drivers Mario Andretti and Nigel Mansell and “Carl and I remained friends for the rest of our lives.”
Now aged 83, and recovering from a back operation, Buedingen did eventually return to racing later in life and he was competing as recently as 2017 in vintage/historic racing, appropriately at Road America and in a Lotus 23 that he still owns. History has come full circle…
