by Terry Shea as republished from Hemmings Daily Blog
Legendary SoCal hot rodder, racer and all-around Corvette maestro Dick Guldstrand passed away on September 2 at age 87.
A few years back, we featured Dick in our Hot Rod Hero column for Hemmings Muscle Machines. In fact, I had the opportunity to speak with Dick on the day he was celebrating his 84th birthday.
There is nothing quite like the candor of a retired racer, particularly one who has never truly left the arena. Ever the gentleman, Dick’s refreshing honesty contrasted with most of today’s corporate-backed racers—and I got the feeling it was always that way with the man.
From Model Ts to multi-cam Corvettes, the SoCal native lived a full life of going fast and making lots of noise doing it.
Here is the text of that original column, titled “Mr. Corvette:”
Photo courtesy General Motors.
Dick Guldstrand has led a charmed life. Born and raised in Southern California, at 16, he was racing a hopped-up Model T at El Mirage and Muroc. Just a year later, he set a speed record in a Model A, clocking in at just over 130 MPH. As Dick reports, “In California, you were either a candy-ass or a hot rodder.”
With an uncanny ability to be an absolute gentleman while still regaling you with his peppery language, the 84-year-old Guldstrand long ago earned the moniker of “Mr. Corvette,” building fast cars and earning championships at a time when racing was not officially supported by GM.
Dick’s parents wanted him to go to law school, but his heart just wasn’t in it; he started working in aerospace, a burgeoning industry in California in the late 1950s. As the politics of the rocket business became too much, he found himself thinking more and more about his 1956 Corvette, a daily driver on which he taped up the headlamps on weekends as his club racer.
In 1961, still racing the ’56, Dick caught the attention of H.E. Baher, a Chevrolet dealer who sponsored his weekend racing while Dick sold cars during the week. With Baher’s backing, Dick won three consecutive SCCA Pacific Coast titles in a 1963 Sting Ray coupe. Without Corvette engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov surreptitiously violating Chevy’s racing ban by funneling parts to Dick, those titles might have been a lot harder to come by. “Duntov, I was kind of his alter ego,” Dick says. “He could do things through me and a few of the other guys. It kept him going in racing because he was a racer.”
At the end of 1965, Roger Penske hung up his helmet for the last time and moved to hire his first driver. Arkus-Duntov suggested Guldstrand. Not just a driver, but a suspension guru, too, Dick helped Penske and his small crew prepare a prototype 1966 ‘Vette with an L88 engine for the first 24-hour race at Daytona. On the banking at night, Dick’s teammate George Wintersteen slammed into the back of a slower car. With the front end damaged, the car was black-flagged for not having working lamps.
But that wasn’t the end of their race. As Dick tells it, “Penske and the crew find these big flashlights and tape them to the front fenders and say, ‘Okay, Guldie, go ahead.’ Well, hell, I drove right off into the dirt. It’s pitch black. I come back in and he says, ‘Well, are you a candy-ass or a race driver?’ So we turned the flashlights back on, and I found I could stay behind the Ferrari prototypes. I set a GT class record at 3 a.m. behind one of the Ferraris.” When the checkered flag dropped, the Penske team was the GT class winner.
With his star still rising, Dick was hired by Dana Chevrolet, a Los Angeles-area dealer that was run by a former Shelby executive. There, Dick developed a 1967 L88 Corvette that they sent to Le Mans, with Don Yenko, Bob Bondurant and Dick himself behind the wheel. After satisfying the prickly French scrutineers, Dick and his cohorts were running away from the field, including setting a GT record of 171 MPH on the Mulsanne straight. A failed wrist pin just before dawn kept them from winning, but the French crowd cheered the American privateer team.
In the late 1960s, Dick set up shop in Culver City, California, next door to Traco, the engine builders; they were longtime friends and collaborators of his. In the 1980s, Dick turned the anemic C4 Corvette into a real performer with the GS80. Working with Traco, they created a 380-hp small-block that also produced a staggering 450-lb.ft. of torque, establishing a supercar that can still hold its own against a C6 Corvette. At the same time, Dick worked directly with Chevrolet engineers as they got heavily involved in showroom stock racing. About a dozen years ago, Dick moved the operation to Burbank and changed its name to Guldstrand Motorsports.
When asked if he prefers to be behind the wheel or under the hood, Dick is diplomatic. “The excitement of wining a race in your own car, I’ve never had equaled. The pleasure in doing the work and building the car and then racing it is just second-to-none.” But even as a contract driver, a hired gun, Dick got his hands dirty. “I couldn’t ever leave them alone. Anybody that had me in their car, they had their hands full. A lot of people who hired me did it because of that, like Penske, like Chevrolet.”
That charmed life found Dick off the racecourse, as well. When Goodyear called in 1969 and said, “We’ve got a Can-Am car for you to drive. Willie’s coming over with the contract,” Dick figured he was going to see some burly guy. “Well, the most gorgeous, incredible, beautiful blonde dolly you’ve ever seen in your life walks in and says, ‘I’m Willie.’ Well, I just never got over it. I married her and we’ve been married almost 40 years now.”
