People · Dick Guldstrand · Prologue

Le Mans, 1967

Circuit de la Sarthe, France — June 1967

The Mulsanne straight is three and a half miles of ordinary French road with the hedges still growing beside it, and for one weekend a year men drive down it as fast as their machinery will physically allow. Tonight a Corvette is doing it at a hundred and seventy-one and a half miles an hour. It is painted red, white and blue. It came from a Chevrolet dealership in Southern California. And the man at the wheel learned to do this on the back roads of Los Angeles County, in a decade when the fastest thing in America was whatever a kid could build in his father's garage.

His name is Dick Guldstrand, he is forty years old, and he is having the night of his life. The car is a Dana Chevrolet L88 — a big-block Corvette ordered, in the most literal sense, off a dealership's order form. Around him are the purpose-built weapons of European motorsport and the factory-funded Fords, machines conceived from a blank sheet to do exactly this and nothing else. The Corvette was conceived to be sold to a person who wanted a Corvette.

It doesn't matter. Down the Mulsanne the Corvette is faster than the GT record by a margin that makes the timing crews check their equipment — roughly ten miles an hour clear of anything in the class before it. In the other seat, taking his turns through the night, is Bob Bondurant, who three years earlier won this class outright for Carroll Shelby in a Cobra. The two Americans lead their class deep into the night while the French crowd — who came to watch Ford and Ferrari settle a grudge — find themselves yelling for a Chevrolet.

It ends the way these stories usually end. Well past half distance, with the class lead in hand, a connecting rod comes through the side of the block, and the loudest car at Le Mans goes quiet. No trophy. No finish. Just a number — 171.5 — that people are still repeating almost sixty years later.

Guldstrand will spend the rest of his life being introduced as the man who did that. It is not the half of it. Before Le Mans he had already won three championships in a Sting Ray and given Roger Penske's brand-new race team its first victory. After Le Mans he would open a shop and spend forty years making Corvettes better than the factory managed, until the nickname stopped being a compliment and became simply what people called him: Mr. Corvette.

To understand how a man ends up at a hundred and seventy-one miles an hour on a French farm road in a car from a Chevrolet dealer, you have to start where every California speed story starts — in a garage, after the war.