People · Dick Guldstrand · Chapter 3

Penske's First Driver

Daytona International Speedway — February 6, 1966

Today the name Penske means eighteen Indianapolis 500 victories, IndyCar championships, NASCAR titles, and one of the most formidable organisations in motorsport. In February 1966 it meant a thirty-year-old who had just quit driving, one Corvette, and a hope. Roger Penske had been a genuinely quick racer — good enough to be Sports Illustrated's driver of the year — and he had walked away from the cockpit to run a business and a team instead. For his new team's first driver he hired Dick Guldstrand.

The car was the No. 6 Sunoco Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, a fundamentally stock machine with a 427 in the nose. The race was the 24 Hours of Daytona. The opposition was the European endurance establishment, factory-funded and purpose-built, plus Ford's well-financed campaign to win everything on earth. Guldstrand shared the car with George Wintersteen and Ben Moore, and the plan was the plan every privateer has ever had: be quick, don't break, still be running on Sunday.

Team Penske, race one

  • Date: February 6, 1966 — the first race in Team Penske's history
  • Car: the No. 6 Sunoco Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, essentially stock, 427 cu in
  • Drivers: Dick Guldstrand, George Wintersteen, Ben Moore
  • Result: won the GT class — 27 laps clear of the next GT car
  • Improvisation: both headlights destroyed overnight; the crew taped on two flashlights and sent it back out

Twenty-four hours, two flashlights

The Corvette led its class for most of the race. Then, in the dark, it got hit. The damage was moderate by endurance-racing standards — bodywork crumpled at the front, nothing structural — except for one detail that in a twenty-four-hour race is not a detail at all: both front headlights were broken beyond repair. It was the middle of the night. There were hours of darkness left. A race car with no headlights at Daytona at 3 a.m. is not a race car; it is a very fast blindfold.

So the crew found two flashlights and fastened them where the headlamps had been. Not as a gag — as the fix. The Corvette went back out and the drivers, in the words of the team's own history, did not miss a beat. It ran the rest of the night lit by hand torches and took the GT class win by twenty-seven laps.

It is a perfect origin story for two American institutions at once. Team Penske — today a byword for immaculate preparation and unlimited resources — won the first race it ever entered with flashlights taped to the nose. And Dick Guldstrand, the engineer's son, had just demonstrated the thing that would define him: it isn't only about how fast you are. It's about whether the car is still going when the sun comes up.

A year later, a Chevrolet dealership in Southern California would ask him to aim that same philosophy at the biggest endurance race on earth.