People · Dick Guldstrand · Chapter 4

Dana and the L88

South Gate, California, and Le Mans, France — 1967

By 1967 Guldstrand was managing the Dana Chevrolet High-Performance Center in Southern California. Dana was a dealership, but it was a dealership in the particular American tradition where the sales floor is a front for a race shop — a place where a customer could buy a car that had been built to go and win with. Peyton Cramer ran it. And in 1967 they decided to do something that no dealership had any business doing: enter the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Their weapon was the new L88 — and the L88 was Zora Arkus-Duntov's quiet masterpiece of institutional misdirection. General Motors had been officially out of racing for a decade. So Zora had done the only thing left to him: he put the race car on the order sheet. RPO L88 bought you an aluminum-headed, 12.5-compression 427 that needed racing fuel to run, with the radio and heater deleted so that no ordinary customer would want one. It was rated at 430 horsepower, a number chosen specifically to be less impressive than the engine below it. In reality it made well over five hundred. Only twenty were built in 1967.

Two Americans and a very loud Chevrolet

Guldstrand's co-driver was Bob Bondurant, which was its own kind of poetry: Bondurant had won this class at Le Mans in 1964 for Carroll Shelby, in a Cobra, the car built specifically to beat Corvettes. Now the two of them were sharing one.

What happened next is the thing people still talk about. Down the Mulsanne the Dana Corvette recorded 171.5 mph — a GT class record, and not by a little. It led its class deep into the night. And then, well past half distance, the 427 threw a connecting rod through the side of the block and it was over. No finish, no trophy, and a legend that has comfortably outlived every car that beat them that weekend.

Guldstrand always said the reception was the part he never forgot — the French crowd, who had come to watch Ford and Ferrari fight, adopting the loud American car and its two American drivers. A dealership from South Gate, California had gone to the most famous race in the world with a car off the order form and been quicker in a straight line than anything in its class.

He came home from France forty years old, famous, and out of a job description. What he did next mattered more than any of it.