People · Profile No. 5
Dick Guldstrand
They called him “Mr. Corvette,” and for once the nickname was just an accurate job description. He raced them, he broke them, he fixed them, he set a class record at Le Mans in one, and then he spent the next forty years in a California shop making other people's Corvettes faster. Almost every part of this site touches his life somewhere.
The Vitals
- Born 1927, Los Angeles — son of an engineer and a former vaudeville entertainer, raised in the hot-rod boom
- Died September 2, 2015, at his own motorsports shop in Burbank, California, age 87
- Champion Three SCCA Pacific Coast sports car titles in a 1963 Sting Ray — which won him Zora Arkus-Duntov's lasting respect
- First Penske Racing's first driver: he won the GT class at the 1966 Daytona 24, the team's very first race
- Le Mans 1967, with Bob Bondurant, in the Dana Chevrolet L88 — a GT record at 171.5 mph down the Mulsanne
- Built Guldstrand Engineering, Culver City, 1968 — race and street Corvettes for four decades, including the GS80 C4
- Honored National Corvette Museum Hall of Fame, 1999
The chapters
- Prologue Le Mans, 1967
- Chapter 1 Hot Rod Country
- Chapter 2 Three Titles
- Chapter 3 Penske's First Driver
- Chapter 4 Dana and the L88
- Chapter 5 Mr. Corvette
Got a photo of Dick Guldstrand?
- We haven't found a freely licensed photograph of Guldstrand yet — a frustrating gap for a man this important to the Corvette story. If you have one, or know of a properly licensed image, tell us here.
Further reading
The National Corvette Museum's Hall of Fame page and Corvette Racing's “Legends of Le Mans” both cover his career, and CorvetteForum threads carry decades of first-hand Guldstrand stories from people who knew him.
His Le Mans co-driver has his own story here — read Bob Bondurant's next — and the car they drove has its own page in the Le Mans L88s. The man whose respect he earned in a Sting Ray is Zora Arkus-Duntov.