Dick Guldstrand

Richard "Dick" Guldstrand (December 1, 1927 - September 2, 2015) was an American entrepreneur and racing car driver, known as "Mr. Corvette”.

Dick Guldstrand did not fulfill his parents' wish to pursue a career as a lawyer. Instead, he trained as an electrical engineer in college. At the beginning of the 1950s, he began with motorsport. He competed in dirt track races for years and converted a Corvette C1 into a racing car. He equipped the Chevrolet with manifold injection and a 4-speed manual gearbox and with it drove many victories in California.

With financial support from a Chevrolet dealer from Hermosa Beach, he switched to the circuit and won national sports car races in the early 1960s with a Corvette Sting Ray provided by the dealer. From 1963 to 1965 he won the South Pacific SCCA Sports Car Championship three times in a row.

In 1966, he won the class for GT cars over 3 liters of displacement at the Daytona 24-hour race and finished twelfth in the overall standings. In 1967, Zora Arkus-Duntov hired him as a partner of Bob Bondurant for a start in the Le Mans 24-hour race. The team had to make do with modest human and technical resources. Since there was no racing truck on site, Guldstrand and Bondurant had to drive the Corvette from Paris Orly Airport over country roads to the track. The race ended prematurely after 167 laps due to an engine failure.

His last season as a professional racing driver was in 1970 when he drove Trans-Am and Can-Am races, for once not in a Corvette but in a Lola T70.

In 1968 Dick Guldstrand opened Guldstrand Engineering in Culver City, a company that was mainly involved in converting Corvette and Camaro models for racing. In 1985, as a test pilot, he was in charge of the development of the Corvette C4 with the L83 engine with Crossfire injection system.

In 1990 he brought his own vehicle, the Guldstrand Grand Sport 90, based on Corvette technology onto the market.

Subject ID: 54309