People · Dick Guldstrand · Chapter 2
Three Titles
The West Coast — the mid-1960s
In 1963 Chevrolet replaced the Corvette with something that looked like it had arrived from another decade. The Sting Ray had a real chassis under it at last — independent rear suspension, a proper frame, a shape by Bill Mitchell's studio that still stops traffic. Guldstrand got hold of one, and then proceeded to win the SCCA Pacific Coast sports car championship in it. Then he did it again. Then he did it a third time.
Three titles in a Sting Ray, on the toughest, deepest club-racing coast in America. In the SCCA of that era the West Coast was where the talent was; the grids were full of men who would go on to be famous, in cars prepared by people who would go on to be legends. Winning it once meant you were quick. Winning it three times meant something else — it meant you were quick, and your car never broke, which in racing is the harder half of the sentence.
Why three titles, and not one
- Speed was the easy part — the Pacific Coast grids were full of it
- Reliability was Guldstrand's edge: he was his own engineer, and his cars finished
- The result: three SCCA Pacific Coast sports car championships in a 1963 Sting Ray
- The consequence: the father of the Corvette started paying attention
The man in Detroit notices
Fifteen hundred miles away in Michigan, a Belgian-born, Russian-raised engineer with a European racing licence and a permanent grudge against his own management was watching the results sheets. Zora Arkus-Duntov believed, with a conviction that would nearly get him fired more than once, that the Corvette had to be proven on racetracks. General Motors had signed an agreement in 1957 that officially took the company out of racing, and Zora had spent every year since finding ways around it — parts, advice, engines, quiet help to the right people.
The right people were men exactly like Dick Guldstrand: privateers winning championships in Corvettes with no factory behind them, doing in public what the factory was forbidden to do. Guldstrand's three titles earned him Zora's lasting respect — the approbation of the one man in Detroit whose opinion actually mattered to a Corvette racer. It was a relationship that would run for the rest of both their lives.
It also made Guldstrand a known quantity. When a wealthy young Pennsylvanian decided to stop driving race cars and start running a team, he needed a driver who was fast, mechanically literate, and reliable enough to hand a brand-new organisation's reputation to on its very first weekend. There were not many names on that list.