People · Bob Bondurant · Chapter 4

Le Mans in a Corvette

Circuit de la Sarthe, France — June 1967

Three years after winning the GT class at Le Mans in the car built to destroy Corvettes, Bob Bondurant came back to Le Mans in a Corvette. Not a factory car — there was no such thing, because General Motors was still officially not racing. A car from a Chevrolet dealership in Southern California, ordered off a form.

The entrant was Dana Chevrolet, whose high-performance center was run by Dick Guldstrand — three-time SCCA Pacific Coast champion, and the man who had given Roger Penske's new team its first win at Daytona the year before. Guldstrand would share the driving. The car was an L88: aluminum heads, 12.5:1 compression, a 427 that needed racing fuel and was rated at 430 horsepower specifically so that nobody would guess it made well over five hundred. Twenty were built in 1967.

171.5

What the Dana Corvette did down the Mulsanne straight is the reason anyone still talks about it. 171.5 mph — a GT class record by something like ten miles an hour. A production Chevrolet, sold to the public, quicker in a straight line than every purpose-built GT car at Le Mans.

The two Americans led their class deep into the night, and the French crowd — there to watch Ford and Ferrari settle their feud — got behind the loud Chevrolet from California. Then, well past half distance and with the class lead in hand, the 427 threw a rod through the block. It was over.

For Bondurant it closed a loop that had opened at Riverside in 1962. He had raced Corvettes against the first Cobra. He had then driven Cobras to a world championship. And now he had come back to a Corvette and gone faster down the Mulsanne than anything in his class. He'd been on both sides of America's great sports-car argument, and won something on each.

Later that same year, at Watkins Glen, the steering arm broke.