People · Dick Guldstrand · Chapter 5

Mr. Corvette

Culver City, California — 1968 onward

In 1968 Dick Guldstrand opened Guldstrand Engineering in Culver City, California, and stopped being a man who raced Corvettes for other people. For the next four decades he built them — race cars and street cars, for customers across North America, South America and Western Europe. He had spent his driving career learning exactly where the Corvette was weak. Now he had a shop, a lathe, and no committee.

This is the part of the story that earns the nickname. Anyone can be fast for a season. Guldstrand spent forty years being the man you called when your Corvette wasn't doing what you wanted it to do, and the answer he gave was always the same one he'd learned in a '56 on the West Coast: the car is good, the car is not finished, and the difference is engineering.

The second career

  • 1968: founds Guldstrand Engineering Inc., Culver City, California
  • The work: designing and building high-performance Corvettes for competition across North America, South America and Western Europe
  • The GS80: his modification package for the 1986 C4, which turned a soft-riding boulevard Corvette into a genuine handler
  • 1999: inducted into the National Corvette Museum Hall of Fame
  • September 2, 2015: dies at his own motorsports shop in Burbank, California, aged 87

The GS80, and fixing the C4

His best-known work is the GS80, the package he developed for the 1986 C4 Corvette. The C4 was a car with enormous potential and a chassis that GM had not quite finished arguing about — and Guldstrand's changes turned it from a relatively anemic performer into something that could genuinely embarrass more expensive machinery. It is the purest possible expression of his whole thesis. Chevrolet built the car. Guldstrand finished it.

In 1999 the National Corvette Museum inducted him into its Hall of Fame. By then “Mr. Corvette” had stopped being a nickname anyone had to explain.

The last day

On September 2, 2015, Dick Guldstrand died at his motorsports shop in Burbank, California. He was eighty-seven years old, and he was at work. There is no better final sentence for him than that one: the engineer's son, the vaudevillian's boy, the three-time champion, Penske's first winner, the 171.5-mph man — still in the shop, still making Corvettes faster, on the last day of his life.

His fingerprints are all over this site. He's in the Le Mans L88s, alongside Bob Bondurant. He's in Zora Arkus-Duntov's long campaign to prove the Corvette on a racetrack. And he's in every C4 that handles better than it left the factory.